Behavioural approach to safety leadership

One of the key trends around behavioural safety across many industries, at the moment, is the recognition that leaders need to lead. Not a novel concept, but for many organisations the major challenge has been on ‘how’ to do this. The term ‘safety leadership behaviour framework’ is becoming part of the spoken culture in many organisations to describe the creation and implementation of the developed leadership behaviours.

All too often in organisations there have been the obligatory strategy sessions on what needs to be done to create a ‘zero harm’ culture. These strategy sessions have created a great deal of activity without the tools or clarification on exactly how the leader needs to behave to achieve them.

While creating a true safety culture, many of the most successful organisations have recognised that they need to be more explicit in the leadership and management behaviours that they expect at all levels of business. Following this recognition, they then determine the required behaviours that are strongly linked to lead indicators and put in place monitoring and review processes designed to ‘keep themselves and others honest’. This enables them to integrate these behaviours into the ‘way things are done around here’. However, telling people how they should behave is not new. Many HR professionals have been trying to implement such processes and measures for the past five decades or more. What is new is that senior leaders in organisations are now asking for a behaviourally based safety leadership framework, not as a panacea but as a way of helping them develop and harness the leadership talent they have in the organisation. Their aim is to have their leaders use the skills required to implement the desired safety leadership behaviours and thus create a more robust, sustainable and safe organisation.

Safety leadership behaviour framework - what’s new?

Many organisations have had similar aims in the past with their ‘Golden Rules’, ‘Non-Negotiables’ or ‘Codes of Conduct’. In many cases, these have been imposed on the organisation without consultation or engagement and can be presented as punitive ie, “break a golden rule and you are out of the door” with no real desire to identify the triggers that caused the breaking of the rule/at risk behaviour.

In the transition towards greater engagement and consultation, senior leaders are now working to identify key leadership effectiveness indicators through joint determination, agreement and commitment to the supporting behaviours needed to effectively and sustainably create a zero harm organisational culture.

In some organisations, the development of the behavioural framework is occurring in such a way that different leadership levels have their own sets of behaviours that are aligned with roles, levels of accountability and authority. In others, this emanates to the employees and contractors so that everyone in the organisation is clear as to what behavioural expectations are required. In some cases, demonstration of these behaviours is now being integrated into performance and or remuneration agreements.

What are these safety leadership behaviours?

Common elements under which specific behaviours are identified include areas such as risk management, communication and consultation, and setting and maintaining standards.

Some behaviours cross all hierarchical levels. For example, there may be a required behaviour expectation of a person at any level who observes an ‘at risk behaviour or condition’. For frontline employees, this might be to “speak up or address the person/situation immediately”. For the frontline leader it might be to “address the situation immediately through a safety conversation that identifies the cause of the situation and gain agreement on how it will be resolved”. A middle or senior leader may “address the situation immediately and review the systems that allowed the situation to occur with the supervisor of the area”.

Benefits of a strong safety leadership behaviour framework

The key strength of such behavioural frameworks is that if created through consultation, people in the organisation will understand why they are being asked to behave in a particular way, identify the potential harmful consequences if they do not embrace them and know how to better look after themselves and their mates in the workplace. The words describing the behaviours may fade but the intent behind them becomes ‘the way we do things around here’. Such a process may take longer than simply creating these behaviours in isolation. It requires a belief that people will be able to identify the critical behaviours needed to ensure that the workplace will be safe.

Leaders are recognising that a strong safety leadership behaviour framework is recognition that engaging the workforce to be safe through addressing unique cultural norms requires a level of leadership that has previously been inferred not specified. Creating this framework gives leaders at all levels the clarity, confidence and competence to demonstrate leadership in a way that strengthens and supports a sustainable zero harm workplace culture.

*Louise Quinn is Managing Partner of behavioural safety consulting company Safety Dimensions (a division of Learning Dimensions Network). In her role at Safety Dimensions, Quinn has positively influenced and impacted how safety is perceived, managed and measured across a number of industries.