Safety, accountability and managers who don’t know better

by Todd Conklin

Management of safety is pretty simple:

You can blame and punish safety problems away or you can learn and improve.

The bigger more complicated safety management issue seems to be that you can’t do both – both discipline away problems and improve safety performance – at the same time.

I spend much of my time talking to organisational leaders who want to talk in great detail about discipline and accountability. The leaders often begin this conversation by saying something like this, “this safety stuff is fine and good, but at what point does personal accountability kick in?”

Those words are code words for “If people were just better or smarter or more obedient they would not have accidents on my job site.”

Either way, it is wrong headed and damaging to creating a safe and stable workplace. What is even more frightening is the fact that old thinking actually moves the organisation backwards in to worse reporting, worse prevention, and ultimately more accidents.

Why We Must Talk About Managements Responses

Let’s start with the assumption that managers want what is best for the organisation. Managers don’t want to hurt people. Mangers want the organisation to be stable, productive, and absolutely safe. Given that assumption, what could a manger do that could possibly make safety worse – harder to manage, harder to prevent events, more accidents and injuries.

There are a couple of lessons laying hidden in manager’s behaviours that will help us better understand and discuss the need to punish accidents out of an organisation.

1. Managers have not had the opportunity to learn that the old ways of understanding behavior and systems have changed – a lot – in the last 15 years.
2. Safety is present in the practice of work. Hazards ebb and flow from our systems all the time.

Help Mangers Understand New Ways of Thinking

If we don’t have these conversations with managers – if we don’t teach them new ways to approach problem solving and safety management – where will these managers get this new knowledge? The universe teaches me this lesson over and over again. When I see managers going back towards “old school” behaviour, my first response is to teach.

If your boss wants to punish safety into effectiveness – you should teach them why that idea is counterproductive and harmful. Create an opportunity for a conversation about the importance of the choice between punishment and improvement. After some discussion they will believe it.

You are a teacher – a change agent – and culture guide and don’t forget it.

Safety Exist in Practice

We must stop thinking that if we would plan better, write a better procedure, do a better job of hazard identification; we would have avoided the bad thing that happened in our organisation.

It is a strange set of truths: Safety does not live in planning. Yet planning is vital to safety. We have to realize that safety exist in practice. Workers are constantly being met with problems in the field in which they must create solutions.   That relationship around discovering a problem and uncovering a solution for that problem is where safety happens all day long, every day.

Pretending that planning has super-human power feels right and good, its just not as powerful and post-job learning. Planning and pre-job preparation is one part of a good safety management system. It is not the best part. It is not the most important part. It is one good part of a how a safe organisation does work.

It is a choice

The key is to realise that you must chose between discipline and learning. You cannot have both at the same time. If you chose to discipline the worker, you are choosing not to learn from the event. If you chose to learn from the event, you have given away the opportunity to discipline the worker for screwing up.

Which one of these two choices makes for a better long-term strategy for your organisation?

Dr Todd Conklin is senior advisor for the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is speaking at the IOSH conference on Wednesday 17 June at 9.30.

Todd publishes a regular podcast on pre-accident investigations.