When the information doesn't sink in Do you ever find yourself wondering what more you have to say to get your crews to consistently do safety right? Well, the answer might be easier than you think. Say less.
Focus on building an elite team to beat complacency. Let’s talk about a surefire way to make you far more effective as a leader and to reduce the chance of complacency sneaking in. Focus down. When you focus down, you concern yourself with only your team’s needs. Focus down is not a derogatory term meant to imply your team are beneath you. Focus down means “head down” and focus on the people who need you. Leaders who focus down concern themselves with only their team and making sure their team gets the leader’s full attention. Does it matter to your front-line crew that the long-time manager in Accounting doesn't seem terribly motivated for safety? Or that the new VP of Marketing doesn't seem to share your passion for safety? No, it doesn't. Because to concern yourself with the people outside of your purview, your areas of responsibility, means you are not focused on your team. You are allowing yourself to be distracted.
You may cover the check-boxes but you need to ensure employees are going to give safety their attention and focus. Is yours a check-box safety culture? Or a check-in safety culture? What’s the difference? A check-box safety culture is just what the name implies. You go through the checklists and check off the items that you have completed.
Have you fallen into the trap of making statements instead of asking questions? Selling safety to crews can seem overwhelming. Getting your people to see and understand what you see and understand can be frustrating, especially when you don’t achieve the success you think you should have.
You need to connect with employees in driving the things that are important to them. You feel like you’re saying the right things in safety. Some days your safety performance is great. Other days, you wonder if your team was listening at all. And it frustrates you that just when you seem to be making steps forward, a dumb little incident shows up. This is where you can change it up. You need a safety message that resonates, at the right time, saying the right thing so that every employee is working toward common goals in safety. And the goals are not numbers. Stop pitching numbers to your people. Numbers don’t inspire better performance.
You need the right message, at the right time, to the right people so that every employee is working toward common goals in safety. You’re planning a safety stand-down, safety event, safety day, whatever you want to call it. I’ll stick with stand-down. So, you’ve set aside your dates, got a budget from your senior managers and you’re busy making plans for what you are going to do for your stand-down. Now, before you plan any further, I want to pass along some advice that will make your stand-down be much more effective.
You have got to set aside time each day for your own tools and skills development. Let’s start by saying that I have dedicated plenty of space to identifying the “traits of safety leaders” in past Blog posts. And as important as the traits of safety leaders are, the tools they use to develop those traits is even more important. Good safety leaders are respected. And safety leaders understand the simple premise that “staff don’t work for you, you work for them.” The point of leadership is to help other grow. So when we see inexperienced or even wrong-thinking supervisors flexing their authority muscles at employees, you wonder how long a disliked and disrespected supervisor or safety person is going to last? Employees want to have a reason to respect the supervisor and the safety person. And, even though that supervisor might now have a lot of experience, employees will respect a supervisor who admits that they are working on it.
What employees want from the job can change your culture. In my last post (When Employees Don't Give You Safety Performance), I presented an overview of what employees want from their supervisors and immediate managers. This time around, we are going to take a look at what employees want from their jobs. Because if they don’t get what they want from their job, why would you expect them to give their best effort, especially in safety?
If they’re not giving you safety, it’s because you’re not giving them what they want. To paraphrase a quote, the secret to getting what you want is to help enough other people get what they want. Zig Ziglar said that. He wasn’t wrong. Help enough other people get a win for themselves and they are more likely to help you get your win.
Focus on the plan to improve the things you're not already doing. Not the goal. Once upon a time, in the mid-90’s, I was working in a sales job. At the start of each month, our sales manager would assemble all the sales reps in a room and ask each of us for our specific sales goal for the month. He wasn't asking us what our plan was to make more sales. He was asking for a number.
