For a conversation to be effective, the people involved need to alternatively talk and listen. Unfortunately, some leaders are prone to lecturing, with very little listening. This ineffective communication style isn't isolated to senior leaders who ascribe to the command-and-control approach to management. It can be seen at all levels of organizations.
The prevalent communication style of managers and supervisors is a barometer of the safety culture. Occasional, one-way safety conversations are telltale signs of a culture of compliance. Frequent, interactive safety conversations are indicative of a culture of commitment.
In “Control or Caring? What Is your Motive for a Safety Conversation?” I indicated the motive for having a conversation significantly influences the safety culture. If the reason you have any safety conversation is to exert control, the approach will be to criticize and seek compliance through correction. If the reason you have any safety conversation is because you care, the approach will be to coach and seek commitment through collaboration.
One communication model suggests that an effective organizational conversation has four attributes: intimacy (building trust and listening), interactivity (promoting discussion), inclusion (collaborating on solutions) and intentionality (sharing a common purpose). I’d like to propose a five-step guide for an effective safety conversation that incorporates these four attributes of an effective conversation while stimulating a conversation that enables coaching and collaboration.
This framework can be applied whether the conversation is reactive (after an incident) or proactive (identifying influences on risk or conditions that may cause errors).
Frame the Conversation
When you initiate a safety conversation with an employee, the first few moments set the stage for what follows. Your intent will be clear to the listener by your body language, your words and your tone.
If your words indicate that you need control, then you are not having a conversation. Instead, you are signaling your intent to deliver a message, such as “We’ve got a problem” or “You know the safety rules.” In this case, the employee immediately feels defensive. He likely will share only the minimum amount of information.
On the other hand, if you frame the conversation with care and concern, the discussion is much more likely to be interactive. You do this by asking questions in a non-threatening way:
- “Can you help me?
- “What is the major risk?”
- “What mistakes could be made?”
You are making it clear that you need the employee’s help and you are encouraging him to participate in a genuine dialogue.
Listen for Influences
The only way you can learn about hidden process or organization issues is to ask the right questions in the right way and then listen to the answers. Most of us believe that we are good listeners, but research shows that we seldom hear what people are saying in the way it was intended to be heard. Active listening is hard work!
An effective safety conversation includes listening for the responses to all questions. You are seeking to learn about any potential influences on risk. People don't take risks without a reason. As someone once said: “People do what they do because it made sense to them at the time that they did it.”
Your challenge is to find out why it made sense to the employee to take an unnecessary risk. Often times, the reason is that he or she was influenced in some way.
Terry Mathis and Shawn Galloway, in their article “Understanding Influences on Risks: A Four-Part Model,” provide a good outline for identifying the major influences on risk: perceptions, habits, obstacles and barriers. If the conversation takes place after an incident or near miss, listen for indications that one of these factors was in play if an employee took an unnecessary risk. In a proactive conversation, inquire how someone might be influenced to take a risk when performing a specific task.
Discover Error Traps
For a supervisor who wants to maintain or exert control, rules and policies are edicts. If an incident occurs, the first thing he wants to know is the procedure, rule or policy that was not followed. If someone gets hurt, it almost always means that one of these was violated. In a compliance world, many people believe that if you just follow the rules, you won’t be seriously injured.
If caring drives the conversation, a supervisor knows that another critical part of listening is to discover potential error traps. These are conditions or circumstances that make it more likely to make a mistake. A few examples include time pressure, distraction, vague guidance, multiple tasks, complacency and peer pressure.
These error traps may emerge as part of the conversation, or a supervisor may find additional ones when he takes a holistic view of the situation. Either way, acknowledging these error-prone conditions is the first step in finding ways to mitigate their effects.
Identify the Behavior
Dr. James Reason described a “just culture” in his book “Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents” in the 1990’s. Others, including David Marx in his book “Whack-a-Mole. The Price We Pay For Expecting Perfection,” later clarified the concept. One definition is “a culture where failure/error is addressed in a manner that promotes learning and improvement while satisfying the need for accountability.” Using this model, Marx listed three possible behaviors that might contribute to an undesirable outcome:
- Human error
- At-risk behavior
- Recklessness
A supervisor whose motive is control often assumes that the primary reason for a safety incident is that an employee made a mistake or made a poor choice. With this mindset, it is not a surprise when the supervisor attempts to correct the behavior through some kind of admonishment.
In contrast, a supervisor who believes in a just culture realizes that more than 90 percent of the time people are set up to fail (by error traps) or are influenced to take a risk (by a perception, habit, obstacle or barrier). This supervisor realizes that truly reckless behavior rarely happens.
His focus in a safety conversation is to actively listen for influences and error traps. The employee’s behavior is identified as reckless only when there is a choice to consciously disregard a substantial and unjustifiable risk. Reckless behaviors exist in the industrial world, but they happen only occasionally.
Take Action
A supervisor who expects to maintain control takes actions that are directed toward compliance. These are typically some form of re-training, warning, counseling, or discipline.
In a culture of compliance, supervisors assume that people should perform work using standard procedures and abide by the safety rules. If they do not, then they need to be held accountable.
It is a mistake to simply warn, counsel or discipline someone for not using a procedure or following a safety rule without understanding the reason for this decision. There could be hidden organization or process issues that influenced the employee. Sydney Dekker in “The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error” identified numerous reasons for what he termed procedural drift (a mismatch between standard procedures or rules and actual practice that increases over time):
- Rules or procedures may be over-designed and do not match up with the way work is really done.
- There may be conflicting priorities that make it confusing about which procedure is most important.
- Procedures may be vague, poorly written or outdated.
In a culture of commitment, a safety conversation concludes on a very different note. Because the conversation proceeds in a spirit of learning and co-discovery, the actions are built on collaboration.
When a mistake is identified, the supervisor seeks to understand and mitigate any error traps. In some cases, this could include a collaboration on mistake-proofing solutions. These are simple process design changes that make it easy to do the right thing and difficult to do the wrong thing.
If an employee drifts into an at-risk behavior, the types of influences on risk determine the best course of action. Coaching often is effective for perceptions or habits. Like addressing error traps, a collaborative effort is a common approach to removing obstacles or barriers. Counseling or discipline is warranted for truly reckless behavior.
A Critical Influence Strategy
Using this five-step guide, anyone can conduct an effective safety conversation. It is designed to be used when your primary objective is to promote learning and improvement.
This guide is centered on the “why" of caring. When you start with this motive, the conversation that follows is more open. The real pay-off in having a candid dialogue is in discovering the hidden weaknesses in the process and in the organization by building trust. It sets the stage for collaboration to improve the work processes and to eliminate sources of failures or errors.
Supervisors and managers need to be skilled in facilitating effective safety conversations. Having a daily proactive safety dialogue like the one outlined here is a cornerstone in building a culture of commitment. This conversation should be an integral part of your safety strategy.
About the author:
David A. Galloway is founder and president of Continuous MILE Consulting LLC. After graduating from Penn State, Galloway started his career in the paper industry. Over the next 35 years, he gained experience and held leadership roles in process engineering, operations, research, product development, quality, logistics and strategy. As a certified master black belt, certified master facilitator and lean six sigma deployment director, Galloway provides expertise that enables businesses to achieve better processes, safer operations, and stronger innovation. He can be reached at [email protected] and he blogs at ContinuousMile.com.
