Kevin Burns Blog

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.

In safety, there are no trade secrets. That’s because the rules are the same in each industry. No one company gets an advantage over another because of safety regulations. No company is handed a better, less restrictive set of rules to operate by. The playing field is level. The rules are the same across each industry.

So why do some companies find it so easy to get their employees to follow safety protocols and other companies struggle? Why are some supervisors able to more easily rally their crews around safety and other supervisors can’t seem to get their people to even wear their safety glasses?

The answer is buy-in.

My first paid job was as a 12-year-old salesman on a Dickie Dee ice cream bicycle. I worked on commission with no hourly wage. In 1973, popsicles cost a nickel and ice cream drumsticks were a quarter. The ice cream bike was a single speed, 3-wheeler that weighed 600 pounds fully loaded, and my route was a hilly, blue-collar town in Renfrew, Ontario.

Like most families in Renfrew, mine didn’t have much money. My dad was an office manager at a tire shop and my mom was an elementary school teacher. I was working to save up for a 10-speed bike that cost $125.

I quickly learned what time workers at the local factories took their breaks. Most of them had no air conditioning, so a frozen treat always hit the spot.

I noticed the camaraderie those factory workers shared. It wasn’t uncommon for one guy to step up and say, “We’ve got five guys here, so it’s five cones on me.” It seemed to me that whatever they were doing, they were in it together.

The following year I worked part time in a golf course pro shop. My boss, the golf pro, was an intense manager who was insistent on routines, procedures, and presentation. Everything had to be done just so, no surprises.

Then as a young teenager, I worked at our small town’s first radio station. I emptied trash cans and helped out wherever I could. I learned that the best announcers were the ones who connected with their audiences on a personal level.

The job started me on an 18-year career in broadcasting doing jobs from sales rep to on-air announcer (11 years as a morning-man) to supervisory and management positions.

Through all of those early jobs, I found that one thing trumped everything else— and that one thing was relationships.