Leadership: it’s all about creating followers

Steve Howells, head of HSSE at Thames Tideway Tunnel, discusses how leadership should be about health and safety leaders displaying behaviours that create followers.

Transformational HSSE performance is driven by Transformational Leadership. At Thames Tideway Tunnel, Leadership is one of our ‘7 Aims’; our health and safety leaders set the visible, demonstrable standards of our critical safe behaviours, each and every day; and be clear: our health and safety leaders aren’t necessarily always ‘in charge’.

At Thames Tideway Tunnel, our leadership is focused on the creation of an environment where we coach, mentor and motivate our teams to strive for minimal risk exposure.

Health and safety leadership is about creating followers; our leaders exert a positive influence on their followers to achieve transformational HSSE performance; the challenge with this is that ‘following’ is a totally voluntary activity.

Health and safety leaders at Thames Tideway Tunnel display behaviours that create followers, and supports the removal of obstacles to make it more likely for an environment that is safe, healthy and secure to become the ‘way we do things around here’. These behaviours allow:

• Our workforce to identify the right solution for each task
• Our workforce to develop the appropriate instructions and planning of each task, including the assessment of risk
• The right amount of time to be allocated for the task
• The right tools and materials to be selected for the task
• The individual performing the task to have the competency required to do it safely and healthily
• Creation of an environment that supports the desired behaviour of the individual through leadership and peer support and feedback

To support the selection and development of safety leaders, we are proposing the following activities and initiatives at Thames Tideway Tunnel:

• Leadership educated to I.L.M. Level 3 – both theoretical and practical leadership, portable from job to job, project to project which will eventually create a critical mass of competent health and safety leaders across our industry
• Create a project full of ‘safety coaches and mentors’ – educated through a formal programme, recognising ‘safety coaches’ as critical roles within the teams
• Creation of a true ‘just culture’ – strong support for all people, but especially front line leaders; also recognising that behaviours that fall outside the required standards also come with consequences
• Robust, experiential induction and early safety engagement – EaSE – so serious are we about the value of early engagement and collaboration with our teams, and the importance of a thorough induction, we have built our own induction centre (EPIC- Employer Project Induction Centre) in London
• Safety coaches’ and leaderships role is to identify and model desired behaviours – ‘walking the talk’ will ensure we hold ourselves accountable first, then set, and monitor very clear objectives for our teams
• Clear and concise health and safety communications (delivered to the right people at the right time using the right media) to allow us to truly understand our role in delivering a Transformational HSSE performance – giving very clear ‘permission’ for people to always behave healthily and safely
• Track and measure performance against objectives through well-designed, simple and effective leading and lagging indicators
• Create an environment for sustainable active safety – recognising that our project is a long one, we need our Transformational HSSE programme to be sustainable, refreshing it regularly through health and safety stand-downs every 12 weeks.

The misconception is that health and safety leadership and coaching refers only to those senior managers. It should be evident that at Thames Tideway Tunnel any individual can be a health and safety leader if they so choose to be.

I cannot emphasise enough how crucial it is for us at Thames Tideway Tunnel to have health and safety leaders (at every job site, within every department and every work team, across ALL levels of hierarchy) to allow us to create a strong health and safety environment that leads to everyone coming to work, and going home again, healthily and safely.

Steve, a Chartered Member of the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health and British Institute of Facilities Management, is Head of HSSE at Thames Tideway Tunnel. Reporting to Andy Mitchell, the CEO, he is responsible for developing a Transformational HSSE strategy, and supporting and assuring on its implementation by the main Works Contractors, on the design and delivery of the landmark Thames Tideway Tunnel project. Steve has previously held the roles of Head of HSE at Heathrow and Stansted Airports, as well as Caterpillar (Perkins Engines). He is also immediate Past Chair of the IOSH Aviation and Aerospace Group. Steve’s particular interest surrounds the understanding of Human Factors and Behaviours in the Workplace, and is a keen student of Behavioural Management Techniques. 

Steve will be speaking at the IOSH conference on 17 June at 12.10pm.

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