Kevin Burns Blog

Technical skills might promote you to a supervisor, safety or management position. But, it is your soft-skills that will keep you there.

Let's explore more of the Traits of Safety Leadership as we did in Part 1 (Traits 1-3) and Part 2 (Traits 4-6). This is Part 3 (Traits 7-9).

Safety leadership has little to do with position or title.

Safety leadership has little to do with position or title. One needs not be in a management or in a supervisory position to be a leader. In fact, some of the best leaders are ordinary employees. They just happen tzo possess certain traits that cause others to ask their advice or input. They tend to stand a little taller than some of their fellow employees. And it’s not because they are more experienced or have greater tenure. Mostly, leadership is about the person you are and the way you carry yourself.

In this series of safety leadership posts, we are exploring personal traits. Leadership goes beyond experience and technical expertise. To become a leader requires more than years on the job or seniority in a company. Leadership is a lifelong commitment to self-improvement. Leadership is about being outward-focused; concerned about the well-being of others.

As was outlined in the first post, this is not the definitive and exhaustive list of leadership traits. There will be many. And with each post, I will offer up three traits so that you will hopefully take the time to do an honest self-assessment on each of the traits. So with that being said, let’s explore the next three traits of safety leadership:

Do you have the traits of a safety leader? Use this post as a self-assessment tool.

Over the past couple of years, I have written much about safety leadership but not in the sense of a management or supervisory position. The safety leadership that I subscribe to is a personal one.

Leadership requires no title or position. In fact, some of the best workplace leaders are just ordinary employees who happen to possess certain traits that causes others to look up to them and to seek their advice. They are the people who tend to make the first move and ask the first questions. They do not let their ego or uncertainty stand in the way of doing the job right. They ask the questions to be certain of what is expected of them and they ensure they have right information to make good decisions, especially where their own safety is concerned.

Leaders are not managers necessarily although some management people may possess great leadership skills. Other managers, supervisors or safety people may be void of the traits of leadership but still have the authority of their positions. Having authority, a title or a position does not make you a leader. It makes you a manager. Not the same.

There is a vast difference between people seeking out your opinion based on your authority and those who might seek your counsel because of your ability to be focused on helping others to achieve better.

Do you have the traits of a safety leader? Why not use this series of posts on safety leadership as a self-assessment tool to determine how well you score? We feature just a few traits each post to allow you to determine how well you're doing. This post is not the definitive and exhaustive list of traits of safety leaders. There are many more than those listed here. Here are the first three traits of safety leaders:

Are you aware that a front-line supervisor has more influence on safety performance than senior management?

Are you aware that a front-line supervisor has more influence on safety performance than senior management? Here’s why. The front-line supervisor, as the name would imply, lives at the front-line. The front-line supervisor has more frequent contact with employees. Armed with decent supervisory skills, caring and conscientiousness, a supervisor has more influence in front-line activities than a senior manager.

It’s important for companies to choose the right person for supervisory positions. They need to be the right mix of personal skills and technical ability. Choosing that person, sadly, happens the wrong way far too often. The tendency is to pick the most senior person on a crew and give them a supervisory role. But even a company like Google found out that employees want more from their supervisors.

Google’s Project Oxygen surveyed all 38,000 Google employees to determine what the employees wanted from their supervisors. Out of the eight top traits, technical expertise finished dead last. Google employees wanted their supervisors to have things like good coaching skills, to be approachable, to have a focus on always improving, to be a good communicator and someone who empowers the team. Google employees are not as tightly regimented in their workday as front-line laborers. So you can imagine how having those skills in tightly-run, high-risk environment would be needed even more.

For the supervisor, it’s imperative that they understand that authority and influence are two very different things. Anyone can be the boss and throw their authority weight around. That takes no skill. Influence, though, takes skill and the right mindset.

Here are three areas where you as a front-line safety supervisor can develop better influence:

Two years is a long time to be trying to get it right as a supervisor. Especially when it comes to safety.

Does your workplace take the most senior employee in a crew and promote that person into a supervisory position? And then leave them to hang without skills, training and basic supervisory tools? Has that happened to you?

Employees are more likely to commit to something that benefits them.

We’ve officially entered into spring. It’s also, coincidentally, hiring season. I am working with a number of companies currently who are preparing to staff-up for their spring-summer work. There are about to be a lot of new faces on job sites and workplaces in the coming few months. My clients have all made commitments to ensure that safety is in the forefront for the spring-summer season of work.

However, without the employee commitment to safety, any new safety initiative falls flat. The majority of safety incidents happen at the front line. The largest numbers of workers are at the front line. The most amount of activity is at the front line. And so it is at the front line where the focus on safety needs to take place. It is at the front line where safety leadership is needed most.

Now, let’s be clear. Leadership is not another word for management, even though managers hijack the word and use it interchangeably with their own title. The truth is, you don’t need to have a management title to be a leader. In fact, some of the best job-site leaders have no title at all.

Every employee is quite capable of demonstrating some form of safety leadership. It’s as simple as caring about the well-being of others. Take the few extra moments to assess the hazards. Make the effort to fill out paper forms legibly or watching for and warning fellow employees about dangers or improper use of PPE. It could be as simple as paying full attention during safety briefings. Or, not allowing side-talk or distraction to interfere with getting the right information. These are some of the things that will have to happen at the front line to get better participation and results in safety. But that’s not the only place you need to focus.

Here are three more areas where you can get to work to build employee commitment to safety:

You can’t use negative tools to create a positive safety culture.

Would you show your love and caring to your child or spouse through the use of guilt, manipulation and scare tactics? Do you think that by using guilt, fear and manipulation, your loved one could get a really good sense of how much they are cared for and valued?

A few years back, while attending a safety meeting, the safety manager closed the meeting with a video of a workplace injury. At the end of the twenty minutes, an employee asked why they were shown that video? The employee pointed out that the story was twenty years old, the regulations had changed, and their own corporate safety manual wouldn’t allow any of the behaviors. He voiced his displeasure at being forced to sit through something that insulted their ability, their teamwork and their commitment to safety.

Safety must stop downloading anonymous Internet photos of injury, guilt and fear-inducing videos, and “don’t do what he did” stories of workplace injury. Scaring people straight may work for troubled teens when they visit prisons. But fear and guilt are no way to honor mature adult employees with families.

Instead of focusing on what your people might lose, focus on what they’ll gain. Present safety in a positive way.

One of my clients recently brought up the DSL Strategy in my book,PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety (page 115 if you’re following along). It’s in Chapter 6, “Creating Employee Buy-in.” We talked a bit about it in more detail because the DSL Strategy is intended to be used in place of “shock and awe” campaigns of gruesome photos, gut-wrenching videos and stories of “don’t do what he did.”

The people we seem to respect the most are the ones, the leaders, who are not afraid to wear their hearts on their sleeves.

Last week on the national TV news, there was a feature about a ten year-old autistic boy who had a love of Star Wars Kraft Dinner macaroni and cheese. The problem was that the Star Wars promotion was running out of stock. A plea went out from the boys parents on social media to help find more boxes of the the Star Wars mac and cheese. William Shatner, Captain Kirk from Star Trek, connected with the manufacturers to have many year’s supply sent to the boy. It was a heartwarming story.

Safety marketing is what creates value and motivates people to action.

In the summer of 1974, a tractor in a rocky field was cutting the soil and dropping 200-foot long lines of copper wire in the ground. When completed, there were five miles of 200-foot sections spreading out like a spider web. At the center of the wire web was a radio broadcast tower. The copper wire strands connected to the base of the tower grounded and dissipated energy from potential lightning strikes. This was my Dad’s radio broadcast tower in our hometown.

I learned a lot of things about both marketing and communications in that first year the radio station went on the air, especially the difference between marketing and communications. The simplified version is this: if you’re listening to the news, the weather or a talk-show on the radio, that’s communications. If you’re listening to a commercial, a contest or an on-location broadcast, that’s marketing.

Communications inform. Marketing moves you to an action. And this is where most safety programs make their biggest mistake. They assume that informing (communications) is enough. But it isn’t.

PowerPoint slides, inspection reports and incident reviews are information (communications). Statistics, lagging indicators and white papers are information (communications). But none of them move people to take an action. It is information; nice to have and good to know. And although this information may influence your decision (or not) to take an action, in and of itself it does not move people.