Ahead of her presentation at IOSH 2015, Dr Nadine Mellor explores the concept of mindful leadership and what it means for managers.
The concept of mindful leadership for safety is drawn from research on mindfulness and high reliability organisations (HROs). Mindfulness is commonly and simply defined as present moment awareness. It can be awareness of inner states such as one’s own thoughts, emotions, feelings or awareness of the external environment.
The notion of the present moment is important as it implies that the focus of attention is not in the future or the past but on what is happening in the here and now, observing in a detached and objective manner the emerging information or intuition that is experienced.
Mindfulness helps develop stable attention and clarity of mind. It is an easy concept but also a challenging practice especially for leaders who have little time to pause and reflect, juggling with many things at the same time and at high speed. Yet it is increasingly proven that mindfulness skills can help to focus attention, decrease stress, regain a sense of balance and help make better decisions.
The question is how mindfulness skills can be defined and measured in the specific context of leadership and safety. The Health and Safety Laboratory’s (HSL) interest in mindful leadership for safety started with Dr Chrysanthi Lekka’s comprehensive research review in 2011. Conducted on behalf of HSE, it was carried out on HROs where the concept of mindfulness underpins their success.
HROs are organisations that deal with high hazards and complex environments and have been error-free for a sustained period of time. They are able to maintain a high level of reliability and safety performance. Nuclear power stations, fire services, and air traffic controllers are often cited examples.
HROs cultivate collective mindfulness (or collective awareness), which in essence is an informed and reporting culture that leaders create through specific behaviours. They are alert to the possibility of failure, have a sense of ‘chronic unease’ about whether they have operations under control; are reluctant to simplify explanations to avoid misinterpreting the likelihood or severity of adverse events; are sensitive to operations by being engaged in frontline operations; are committed to resilience to ensure that the organisation can bounce back in the face of adversity; and call on expertise over rank when appropriate to ensure correct decisions are being taken. Mindful safety leaders create a climate of trust by empowering individuals to ‘speak up’ and ensuring that ‘bad news’ reaches them.
Some of these mindful leadership characteristics feature in existing and well-established leadership competency frameworks such as transformational or transactional leadership.
A transformational leadership style has to do with inspiring, giving a direction or vision, intellectually stimulating people, empowering them and challenging their views. A transactional style is more about monitoring performance, giving feedback on positive or unsafe behaviours.
Both are essential as the transformational style leads to a higher level of worker participation in safety while the transactional one leads to a higher level of worker compliance. However, mindful leadership behaviours have a greater emphasis on self-awareness, attention-directed skills, social awareness, openness to new information and willingness to view situations from multiple perspectives.
In addition to training, HSL is developing a tool to measure mindful leadership characteristics to help leaders recognise them and guide others in order to enhance safety performance.
Dr Nadine Mellor will be speaking at 11.20 on Tuesday, 16 June.
Dr Nadine Mellor is principal occupational psychologist at the Health and Safety Laboratory
References
The Safety Conversation with SHP (previously the Safety and Health Podcast) aims to bring you the latest news, insights and legislation updates in the form of interviews, discussions and panel debates from leading figures within the profession.
Find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts, subscribe and join the conversation today!
All very well however, without overcoming the gap between personal and professional ideologies at odd’s with one another and, of course, work stress/fatigue undermining the individual managers and workers cognitive capacity to sustain real-time objectiveness under pressure and daily demands of work/life we still have a long way to go without addressing the levels of work related “Fatigue”……
References:
HSE Research Report RR846.
Wrong number – try RR648