Why 'felt' leadership is integral to safety in a business
The Australian Centre for Workplace Leadership has identified that approximately 75% of employees believed Australian workplaces needed an increase in better leaders and management[1].
Additionally, according to Ernst & Young, productivity across Australia’s industries has dropped to 7.6 out of 10 (previously 7.7 earlier in 2014)[2]. Workers have attributed the slump to poor management and lack of motivation/incentives.
Businesses that lack true leadership often fail to instil a safety culture, which usually impacts on the businesses’ sustainability potential. If a company with a poor safety record is not “shut down” by the authorities, then they will either struggle to attract and retain staff, or customers will not buy from the company; safety being the cornerstone of sustainability.
The greatest challenge in creating a sustainable business is instilling what DuPont calls ‘Felt Leadership’, a unique way of being with employees and a model for leading them.
Such leaders focus on influencing their people to commit to thinking and behaving in ways that are consistent with what is important for the business and their personal safety. These leaders lead by example because they feel and believe in what they do.
Felt leadership is a critical element in achieving a zero incident workplace. Felt leadership engages workers so they come to work with the mindset of proactively preventing incidents rather than a mindset of just being safe.
In order to take the first step towards a workplace with zero incidents, leaders must believe in safety leadership as a privilege rather than just another responsibility. The goal is to create a level of intrinsic motivation and operational discipline where people choose to follow the rules because they want to rather than because they have to.
Felt leadership is the building block in constructing trust and real-world relationships among employees, customers, shareholders and communities. Felt leadership involves leadership that is:
- easily observable,
- makes a positive impression on those who see it,
- demonstrates personal commitment,
- pervades the organisation, and
- affects and involves all levels of employees and contractors.
While this may sound effective in theory, how do you actually change an organisation’s ingrained attitudes and behaviours in practice?
Felt leadership depends on senior leaders regularly interacting and engaging with employees by means of observations, wide-ranging conversations about processes and safety, and addressing everyday challenges of the business. It is important for leaders to regularly participate in leading safety activities that are easily observable to promote injury prevention.
Felt leaders successfully engage their people by being purposely visible in the workplace and being relentless with their time with employees. Good felt leaders make a positive impression on those they contact and maintain a strong self-safety focus at all times and demonstrate their personal commitment to incident-free workplaces.
It is important that leaders ensure their employees and contractors of all levels are engaged around the safety values of the organisation. An example could be an organisation that has recently had an incident and, in response, has decided to change one of its processes. An organisation lacking a strong safety culture might think it is adequate to take employees through the new process at a meeting and have them sign off on the new process.
An organisation that has robust safety values would inform employees and contractors that they are changing a procedure as a result of a safety incident and would take their employees through the new procedure face to face, either in small groups or one on one, rather than written communication alone. They would then measure employees’ understanding of the change and buy in for the change.
Leadership which demonstrates, through actions, that safety, health and wellbeing of all employees are core values makes a cultural transformation possible. Resulting from this, the transformation will pervade the organisation and will be sustainable as it becomes part of the DNA of the company.
It’s important for organisations to recognise that change resulting from felt leadership is a journey rather than a short-term transformation, often taking three to five years to take effect. In the long term, felt leadership will deliver a workforce that is engaged, empowered and committed to the organisation’s values.
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