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Take Safety to the Next Level: Re-thinking How to Lead and Manage Safety
Caterpillar Safety Services can help
If you’re a leader responsible for jobsite safety, you probably spend a fair amount of time managing conventional safety systems that center around designing policies, standard work and processes for your people to follow — and then focusing on ways to ensure that they do.
While there’s no question that those systems have a positive impact on safety, they have one major shortcoming: they’re typically based on the way you think your people should work under ideal circumstances, versus how they actually work in a complex environment with competing pressures.
In other words, they need to be followed perfectly by people, and people aren’t perfect. Expecting perfection from your workers is not realistic, and traditional methods of managing safety don’t take into account the factors that can disrupt your safety system.
So, what do we do about it? We have to change our perspective — to think differently about the way we lead when it comes to workplace safety. Rather than implementing safety systems that require our people to change the way they work, we need to create solutions that put our people at the center.
We can start by recognizing these five important principles of human and organizational performance (HOP):
- People make mistakes. Putting a worker in a position where their only form of defense against injury or fatality is performing work perfectly 100 percent of the time creates an operator-dependent system. When we manage the probability of having an incident, we are better able to build safety systems with adequate controls that allow people to stay safe, even when they make a mistake.
- Blame doesn’t work. It’s instinct to blame someone or something after an incident, but blame is a useless strategy and detrimental to team morale. We need to change the vantage point from focusing on the employee’s mistakes to understanding the organizational weaknesses that come together to result in an incident.
- Behavior is driven by context. People do as they do because it makes sense to them at the time. It is the context in which work occurs that mainly determines our behaviors and actions. Focus on the context in the system and environment and not just the person.
- Learning is key to improving. Those closest to the work have the best knowledge of how work can be done safely. When leaders create an environment that fosters speaking up, we can learn and improve from both mistakes and successful normal work.
- Your response matters. A leader’s response carries the potential to either attract or repel followers, and, when mistakes happen, the response can either strengthen or weaken teams. Drawing from frontline leaders, empathy and emotional intelligence are taught as skills that need to be in the leadership toolbox.
These HOP principles are a framework for talking about safety and creating a resilient safety culture by shifting an organization’s mindset to understand how people think, relate to one another in the workplace, communicate, set expectations and respond to each other.
When we pay attention to how work is done, even when everything is going well and seemingly safely, we shift to a human and organizational performance mindset. This mindset does not manage the incident itself but helps organizations build more error-tolerant safety systems that allow people to stay safe — even when they make a mistake.
These principles are at the heart of a new virtual training program presented by Caterpillar Safety Services called “MindShift for Leaders.” The five-session program introduces an alternative to conventional methods of managing safety and helps organizations build a more resilient safety culture.
The program is designed to:
- Assist organizations with building resilience and adequate controls into their safety systems, so mistakes don’t result in serious injury
- Help leaders create an environment where employees feel empowered to speak up
- Create a mindset that respects human factors at work and builds a caring culture where errors don’t result in blame.
Contact the Caterpillar Safety Services team for more information on “MindShift for Leaders” and other programs designed to help organizations create and support a resilient safety culture.
Charles Dean II
Senior Consultant
Charles Dean is a Senior Leadership and Culture Consultant for Caterpillar Safety Services. He works with Caterpillar facilities, Cat® dealers and external customers to create resilient safety cultures by guiding process improvement initiatives and facilitating leadership development. In his previous role in Global Dealer Learning, Charles taught sales and leadership courses in support of Cat® dealers worldwide. Charles is a second-generation Caterpillar employee (he bleeds yellow!), and he makes his home in Peoria, Ill., when he isn’t traveling the globe improving lives and bringing out the best in people. Follow Charles on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-dean/
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