From Safety Grunts To Leaders

Leadership is not forced or thrust upon anyone. It’s voluntary. That’s why there are few safety leaders and many followers.

from safety grunt to leader by kevin burns safety speaker

Personal Development! It’s all you need to go from grunt to leader. Of course, you have to actually buy-in to what you learn and you have to want to be better, and you have to discipline yourself to improve every day. But it can be done. People do it it all the time.

While it might be easy enough (with applied work) to lift yourself up from grunt to leader in the real world, the safety world isn’t equipped for it. Compliance, following rules and filling out paperwork are treated very scientifically and meticulously. It’s all business. Add a top-down model of management and you have a system that doesn’t look particularly attractive to buy-in to. While the focus in on processes and procedures and rules, there is little of the “person” in personal safety.

Infomercials And Life Insurance Can Teach Safety Something

The marketing of safety has been aimed at loss, not at gain. That is to say, that safety has been concentrating on wrapping its message around the potential of loss on the tangibles side: loss of life, loss of a limb, loss of work and loss of business. But leadership is focused on what you gain on the intangibles side: more freedom, more riches and abundance, a longer life and more opportunities to spread your wings. Even though it’s impossible to determine exactly how much “abundance” is, it’s attractive.

That’s how infomercials sell: “but wait, there’s more!” Even life insurance spends more time focused on what your family will gain and less time on the fact that they will lose a family member.

Safety Marketing Is Focused On The Wrong Thing

The marketing message in safety has to change. Stop the use of gruesome Internet photos of injury. Stop the videos of children crying because daddy died at work. Stop trying to manipulate your people by scaring. If that tactic did work with any sort of sustainability, every worker would be required to watch a gruesome video right out of high school and safety would never have to be discussed again. You would be cured of committing any potential safety infraction for a lifetime.

Where You Can Start To Build Leaders

Start vetting your job candidates for safety by ensuring that a qualified safety professional is in the room at interview time. Start encouraging your people to come up with their own solutions to the safety issues in your workplace. Start making safety a celebration. Start treating safety meetings like you would treat management meetings. Start moving safety meetings into the conference and meeting halls. Start placing an expectation that your people will learn something from safety meetings. Start encouraging your group of responsible adults to participate in the safety meeting. Start raising the bar in safety. Hold it to a higher standard and expect your people and yourself to perform up to it.

Because there is no gain attached to safety, people have a hard time buying into it. You know what the potential losses are. But what are the gains of choosing safety? That is the question that you have to answer - that every employee has to answer - for themselves. It will be the rallying point, the tipping point for every safety program when the employees can determine “what’s in it for them?” That’s when safety stops being a thing they are forced to do and starts to become a thing that they want to do.

Do This One Thing At Your Next Safety Meeting

Leadership is simply personal development practiced every single day - without miss. Leadership is not forced or thrust upon anyone. It’s voluntary. That’s why there are few leaders and many followers. In safety, not everyone gets hurt. In fact, most don’t - over an entire lifetime. So why is safety pandering to the minority? Why does safety focus on meeting minimum standards instead of focusing on the majority of workers who want to be safe? Responsible adults want to be in control of their own lives. They simply need the tools to do so.

At your next safety meeting, get through the paperwork and inspections and incident reports quickly. Then, get to the one question that every single person in the room needs to answer: what is my personal gain for choosing safety? What’s in it for me?

Take a lot of notes. Record every response. Get it all on paper. These answers will become the basis of your new safety culture initiative. If you want to get your people to move from being safety grunts to safety leaders, you must get their input. And you leave no one out.

Safety managers could use a little tune-me-up now and then too. Download my free e-Book, 10 Crucial Questions For Safety Managers below. 

10 Crucial Questions for Safety Managers

(c) Can Stock Photo

Topics: safety leadership, safety meeting, safety buy-in, safety marketing