Why-Based Safety: The Critical Role of Leadership
By WhyNot Partnering
We believe the safest workplaces are those that harness the best in people while making it difficult or impossible to do the worst thing.
One of the best examples of this is the rumble strip, those bumps on the side of the road that alerts a driver when they are wandering off the carriageway. This is a structure designed to keep behaviour inside of a certain limit while giving the driver as much freedom as possible to drive safely. We think this is a pretty good example of how to design safety in all kinds of business situations.
Letting people be the solution to safety means there is a management system that defines the boundaries of safe performance (the rumble strips), with leadership providing the direction, focus and encouragement in bringing out the best in people. This allows people to provide their natural resourcefulness, innovation and learnings to the everyday challenges of safe production.
We call this balance between freedom and constraint a Holding Environment. Leadership is responsible for creating the conditions in which people can perform at the top of their game. Our definition of a holding environment is drawn from the work by Ronald Heifetz, Professor at Harvard Kennedy School and from studies in human development.
Here are a few characteristics of holding environments worth noting:
- There is an explicit intention to create personal and collective learning. Although many of the situations’ people face at work don’t always require new learnings but some situations do. In order to learn, goals must be clear and support provided when needed.
- There is a balance of trust and challenge. For people to be engaged, there has to be a basic level of trust and falling below this threshold, people become disinterested. From the foundation of basic trust, leadership challenges people to elevate their game and strive for better performance. You cannot elevate performance from a position of no trust.
- Leadership sets the learning agenda and a shared future. We believe people are motivated and inspired when they are connected with their Higher Purpose.
- The training curriculum includes soft skills that help people make better decisions in unstructured settings. When safety procedures are clear and fit the work situation, problems rarely exist. When there is a disconnect, people need to be able to adjust, to communicate with others and to embed the learning for the next group. These soft skills are some of the hardest to learn. To truly elevate safety and performance together, people need to develop new skills and capabilities in communication and coordination of actions.
- Feedback and Coaching. There are very productive ways to provide feedback on performance and management systems, they are rarely used. In the best examples, everything is open to inspection and improvement. This includes the beliefs, assumptions and mental models that correspond with these behaviours.
The Holding Environment is a structure that allows and supports people to be the solution to safety while at the same time creates boundaries, goals and learning objectives (rumble strips). It allows for the diverse ways people think to come together in a practical way.
At WhyNot Partnering, we believe that people are the solution and we have developed a set of tools and methodologies to support companies who are ready to take the next step in their approach to safety.
This begins with a clear purpose, a sense of why we are here and is followed by a process to unleash people across the entire organisation.
