Show Notes
HP Principle #3 - Individual behaviors are influenced by culture and leadership.
That reminds me of a John Maxwell quote, “Leadership is influence, nothing more”.
So much of this is about gaining awareness of how the behaviors of leadership influence the behaviors of the workers. That influence can be intentional or unintentional. Either way, what workers do on your project is directly influenced by what leaders do. And I’m not just talking about wearing PPE. I’m talking about perceptions of equity in accountability, having a growth minded attitude, creating an environment of open communication, and why people are or aren’t engaged.
Since HP is concerned with becoming a learning culture, a critical component of leadership is continually growing your ability to influence others to add value to them.
The power of influence can be used for very selfish reasons. True leadership is using the power of influence to add value to others, not yourself. What’s good for the team is good for the leaders. They both benefit. However, in a world where me-me-me is something we see a lot of, this can be challenging.
John Maxwell says there is a leadership deficit in our world today. He says that our entire world is seeing more bad examples of leadership traits, from churches, to politicians, to companies, than examples of great leadership. We need to show the world what great leadership looks like. Unfortunately, there are less examples of great leadership than there are of poor leadership.
As I mentioned earlier, this is often the hardest HP principle to implement. This one is an inside job. We need to change people from the inside out. We need to work on the organizational culture from the top down, not the bottom up.
Although the leadership principle can bear the most fruit, it is also the hardest to implement. Leadership is involved with emotional change, not technical change. That’s what makes it so hard. The leadership principle is concerned with changing people on the inside.
This is a hard path to go down, but the best things you experience in life are never the easy ones. It’s the hard stuff that produces the most satisfaction in the life experience. To help people become better people is not easy. But it’s also the most rewarding.
From one view it’s a total paradox. But should it really be any other way? Greatness comes from struggle. Through that lens, it should definitely be this way.
So, let’s look at some different ways that leadership influences behavior and how to improve upon it.
Modeling Safe Behaviors
I think the easiest one to start with is modeling the safety behaviors you want your people to display. It’s easy to talk about because I believe all of us have seen examples of this.
If the supervisor performs energized work without LOTO or following NFPA requirements, then that sends a powerful message to the workers. The rule doesn’t apply to supervision.
You can apply that to not using fall protection, not wearing PPE and the myriad of things I think all of us safety people have seen at some time in our career. I believe all of us know how important it is to do what we say others should do. At this point, lead by example and practice what you preach, have become a little cliché. However, actually doing these things is not always practiced in our world. Still, it’s imperative that we do what we want others to do.
We are all human, including managers and supervisors. But when we are in a leadership position, more is required of us. It’s hard for all of us to always do the right thing. This reminds me of another quote from John Maxwell, “The hardest person to lead is myself”.
We need to show ourselves grace, because all of us are human and all of us are failable. At the same time, we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Beyond following rules, leaders must model the emotional intelligence we want our workforce to display.
Communication
One example is communication. I often see in our culture assessment work managers desiring employees to communicate more about what they know. Managers often express a perception that employees just won’t speak up, or share, or bring things to their attention. If you want people to communicate more, you must learn how to influence those people to want to talk to you.
My friend Shelli McCoy, who was on a previous podcast, studies how the vibrations we give off can attract others to us. I was talking to her about the type of people I attract tend to be struggling with something. She mentioned how I give off vibrations that make people think I genuinely care about their struggles and genuinely want to help them. This is an example of knowing how behavior influences the behavior of others.
Words can mean a lot but so much of communication is body language, or vibrations as my friend Shelli says. Our facial expressions, our posture, the way we hold out our hands, how we ask, how we respond, our tone of voice; all of these things influence the willingness of employees to share information.
Are we talking about these things? Are we developing these skills? Are we measuring their effectiveness and holding people accountable for these traits? These leadership skills matter in the context of adopting Human Performance principles.
Buy-In
Another one I hear often is a perceived lack of buy-in. It might present itself as lack of buy-in from the worker level or middle management. The real question is why are they not buying in, and how am I selling it?
Sometimes I see where a percentage of management is bought in to HP and a percentage is not. People don’t buy-in to what they are told is valuable, they buy-in to what they believe is valuable.
One of the best methods to increase buy-in is to be authentic with your own buy-in. You can’t convince someone to believe in something. People make their own choice whether or not they believe. However, your ability to influence buy-in is much greater when you believe it. People are much more likely to believe in something because the leader believes it to be true, not because they are told to believe it.
How leaders communicate the benefits of HP matters. If they come across as authentic, showing that they truly believe that HP will create a cultural shift that benefits the frontline worker, then the workforce is more likely to buy-in to this philosophy. If the leader is communicating some new safety stuff that we have to do to satisfy company requirements, there will be a lot less buy-in.
Not everyone in management will buy-in to HP immediately. But the buy-in we see at the frontline is directly related to this. Some of our leadership team will need more attention and time than others. Some will buy-in during the introductory class. Some may never buy in. What is imperative, is to be fully aware that leadership influences buy-in. Any gaps in that influence must be addressed through education, coaching and accountability.
Some of our most successful clients started the HP path by educating upper management first. Although many of them faced struggles and resistance with that approach, looking back they often mention how it was one of the most valuable things they did. When leadership is bought in, buy in from middle management and the frontline is so much easier.
Engagement
Another one I hear a lot is, “employees just aren’t engaged”. This leads us to question, how are we engaging them?
HP is concerned with becoming a learning culture. If we want people to be more engaged, we can influence this by becoming more intentional with engaging our people. You get a twofer out of this. People are more engaged when you engage more with them. But you also gain awareness to hazards, drift, and get better at predicting error when you engage with workers. If you want people to be more engaged, engage them more. Lead that effort. Don’t tell me, show me.
In a study by Sidney Yoshida, his iceberg of ignorance shows that managers are typically aware of 9% of the hazards the workforce faces. Frontline workers are aware of 100% of the hazards. When we engage our workers, we influence them to be more engaged. We also become stronger at predicting the error likely situations they face. Why wouldn’t we want to do this?
Leaders believe that everyone knows something that they don’t know. Everyone has the ability to teach me something. In the context of predicting error, I don’t want to come from a place behaving as if I know it all. I want to communicate from a learning attitude, that my people can teach me to better predict error.
My favorite is, “Tell me one thing I should know about safety on this job, that I need to work on”. Tally up what you hear about and put your effort toward the issue that was mentioned the most.
The insecure act as if they know it all. A know-it-all attitude is typically a disguise for insecurity.
Leaders display humility. A humble attitude gives off the vibrations that influence people to want to engage with you. True leaders have the humility to admit that everyone knows something that they don’t know. This attitude is combined with a genuine desire to learn from their people. When this attitude is genuine, your people will engage with you. But you can’t fake this. Most communication is subconscious body language. This humility, this learning attitude, must come from the heart.
Nepotism
Another leadership issue we see in our culture assessment work is nepotism. Although accountability is the engine that drives safety, it must be fair and consistent. A lot of HP is about ensuring discipline is fair, that it is only given for truly culpable behaviors. However, it must also be consistent.
Often discipline can be perceived as inconsistent when certain people get away with breaking a rule and others don’t. When a new employee receives harsher discipline than the supervisor’s brother in-law, it sends a powerful message. “Rules matter based on who you are” is a statement I have heard in many culture assessments.
No matter who you are, family relations, or position on the org chart; we must all be held to the same standard. Because of this, many organizations not only use a culpability flow chart to determine if discipline is warranted, they also have a team of people determine the outcome. One person given the role of judge, jury and executioner is bound to have some flaws.
It’s a lot quicker to give one individual the power to issue consequences for unsafe behavior. But if they don’t have the internal value system of ensuring discipline is fair and consistent, it can easily destroy your safety improvement efforts.
These concepts could also be applied to how individuals are promoted. If employees perceive promotions only occur for those that are “in the club”, then we clearly have some nepotism issues to address.
In an HP culture, systems are in place to ensure discipline is fair and consistent.
Teamwork
Another one is teamwork. When a member of our team fails, a supervisor may want to blame the worker. If we lack self-awareness of our limbic brain’s ability to judge, we may chalk it all up to a flawed worker. We don’t learn anything. A leader meditates on how they failed the worker. When our team is successful, a manager may take the credit. A leader gives all the credit to the team.
John Maxwell says (and I’m paraphrasing here) that when the team has poor results, he says “I failed you”. When the team does a good job, he says, “we did a good job”. When the team does a great job, he says, “you did a great job”.
That’s leadership. Taking credit for failure more than success.
Not everyone is emotionally ready for this. Judging behavior is not only normal in our workplace, it’s normal in American culture. It’s normal inside the brain of those who don’t study these concepts. It’s easy to look around the world and find people judging behavior. It’s rare to find people working hard to understand behaviors they don’t agree with.
Leaders do the mental work to minimize their ego, their insecurities, stand up and admit their flaws, their shortcomings, take ownership of bad days, and show deep gratitude to other people for what they contribute to the organization.
Unnatural
It’s important to mention that these skills are not natural. They are obtained. Although it is cliché to say that some people are born leaders, the truth is that leaders are made. Without a strong effort toward developing leadership skills, attempts at addressing all the other HP principles will fail.
Behavior is influenced by leadership. Whether it’s opening lines of communication, learning to avoid events, deepening our understanding of work in the field, managing cultural change; all these things are influenced by leadership.
Culture
Culture also influences individual behavior. Culture is created by leadership. At the same time, it is beneficial to draw awareness to how culture influences behavior. But remember, cultural influences on behavior are created by leadership influences on culture.
I’ve explained this concept on other podcasts, but as a refresh, social proof is a power influence on individual behavior. Whenever someone is unsure of the proper behavior, they tend to do what everyone else around them is doing. The right behavior is how everyone else behaves. That’s social proof.
People tend to have an unspoken understanding of what is allowable behavior and what is not. If everyone else breaks the rule from time to time, then it’s not really a rule, it’s a suggestion. If you see different subs communicating what you can’t get away with to each other, the culture is what’s influencing this.
Social proof is a strong influence on individual behavior. You can either harness that power or it will unintentionally influence individuals on its own. Either way, it will influence people. Are we intentional with how we manage and harness that power? Or are we unaware of it?
Some people think everyone should just do the right thing. Leaders understand that the culture of an organization influences what people do. Leadership and culture are deeply intertwined. Leaders create more leaders to harness the power of culture and social proof. A culture of leaders with learning attitudes, great communication skills, highly engaged and displaying buy-in influences supervisors and workers to do the same.
To harness the power of social proof we must start at the top and work our way down. Many managers desire an employee driven safety culture. But true culture change is a top-down effort with a vision to become bottom up.
To improve our culture, we must start with an intentional effort to develop leadership traits at the very top of the organization. When upper management is genuinely bought in, then we work on middle management. From there, the fruit will show up at the frontline.
It’s easy to say but rarely what happens in the real world. I am often tasked with teaching leadership traits to middle management. A common statement I hear in these classes is, “Management should be in this class”. The value of the class is often diminished because the perception is that the class is for middle management and not the top of the food chain. Without upper management support and genuine buy-in, why would middle management buy-in?
It’s normal for this to occur but also imperative that we communicate the return on investment of leadership development is always greater when we start at the top. It flows downward. It never has the cultural shift we desire if we skip the highest level of decision makers.
All of these HP principals work together. If you haven’t noticed already, there is a lot of overlap between these principles. But if there was one thing that deserves the most attention on this HP path, it’s the leadership component.
Leadership development must be an official system within an organization. These traits should be taught often, continually developed in the field through observation and coaching, and be part of an accountability program that effects pay increases and promotions.
Leadership drives culture and influences individual behavior. No matter how great the science of HP, without a focus on leadership, the implementation aspect will fail.