Kevin Burns Blog

Are your frontline supervisors silently struggling with leadership challenges? Discover how to transform technically proficient experts into inspiring leaders! We reveal the hidden hurdles supervisors face and offer practical solutions to empower them. Learn how the right support can boost team performance, enhance safety, and drive organizational success. 

Frontline supervisors play a crucial role in fostering a strong safety culture by creating a participative environment, building trust, and personalizing safety for their team members. By involving employees in safety decisions, creating psychological safety, and connecting safety to personal values, supervisors can transform their team's approach to safety from mere compliance to active engagement and ownership.

I want to discuss a concept, not just straight out of the movies, but deeply rooted in supervisor roles. It's about how to better understand your role in the grand narrative of your team.

There's a fundamental shift that occurs the moment a front-facing employee becomes the crew's supervisor. And the quicker you understand the shift, the faster you will get the buy-in of your team.

Before you assume that your team is slipping into safety complacency, you need to determine whether complacency is really the problem. It may not be.

Your team was doing great in safety and then suddenly, it wasn’t. You’ve been watching the incident numbers inch up over a few months and you are concerned that something bigger is going to happen. You know you need to deal with it before it gets worse. But you don’t know where to start.

And you’re not even sure what the plan is or whether you even have the time needed to fix it. Complacency is the biggest concern of safety professionals and senior managers.

Since the onslaught of COVID-19, safety meetings have changed. Well, we hope they have. Most organizations have been connecting with their distanced employees through electronic means. And that includes safety meetings.

Most safety professionals would freely admit that safety meetings were done badly before COVID. Taking a bad meeting and putting it online is not the answer.

In a supervisory coaching session this week, one of the participants remarked about the cold February temperatures rolling across their region of the country. By the end of the conversation, he suggested that they simply bundle up and go out to do their work. And they take warm-up breaks more often.

Employers, managers and supervisors who do not set clear expectations for their teams are already at a disadvantage. Without a set of clear expectations, you can expect your people to fumble around trying to figure out what’s important to their employers. When people are fumbling to figure out what is important, safety is going to falter.

Why is it that one company can struggle with safety performance while another company, in the same industry, easily excels at safety performance? The answer is in what happens on the ground – with front-line supervisory.