Safety Leadership: Leading change: How to make initiatives stick

Editor’s Note: Achieving and sustaining an injury-free workplace demands strong leadership. In this monthly column, experts from global consulting firm DEKRA share their point of view on what leaders need to know to guide their organizations to safety excellence.

Over the years, we’ve partnered on countless change initiatives. We’ve seen good ideas never get off the ground and small, incremental changes result in significant improvements in culture and outcomes. Initiatives targeting serious injury and fatality prevention or Human and Organizational Performance are good examples.

Among the key principles of HOP: (1) People are prone to mistakes, (2) blaming them will serve no useful purpose in preventing mistakes and (3) a systems focus is critical to ongoing performance improvement.

SIF events are better avoided through a focus on systems that prevent serious injuries, rather than a focus on safety generally. (For example, stapling a finger at a desk hurts, but there’s little connectivity between that and a SIF event).

It’s hard not to support the purpose of HOP or SIF prevention initiatives, so it should reason they get easy buy-in and organizations are highly successful at implementing them. Right?

Well, no. As with other initiatives, the problem has little to do with the merits of the initiative or even the steps, and much to do with intentional leadership.

Safety leaders can help their leadership teams drive initiatives by focusing on balancing three types of actions: strategic, tactical and symbolic.

Strategic actions are related to looking ahead – a six-month or longer window. Examples:

• Driving more protection from the top end of the Hierarchy of Controls when life or limb is at risk.
• Increasing employee engagement through functional learning teams.
• Creating a monitoring function of an initiative that identifies, measures and adjusts process controls.

Tactical actions are the “right now” or specific, planned actions that will accomplish the strategy. Examples:

• Leaders track implementation milestones, report on them routinely and decide on course-correcting actions.
• Leaders track performance metrics. (Is the initiative impacting the intended outcome as planned?)
• Leaders participate in hazard inspections in the field.

Symbolic actions keep safety visible and motivate people to engage. They’re both planned and reactionary. Examples:

• Leader writes a recognition letter that goes into an employee’s file for active learning team participation.
• Leaders create an engaging monthly video communicating positive changes in culture and specific ways the organization is progressing, such as engaging in safety activities, willingness to speak up and systems that have changed because of the initiative.
• Leaders err on the “side of the initiative.” For example, they have an idea and the learning team has an idea. Either will propel things forward. The leaders use the learning team’s idea.
• Leaders support the learning team with appropriate public and private messaging of real-world lessons learned and the value of the chance to learn them.

Safety leaders who focus on these three critical actions and help their leadership teams focus on them in the right balance will see better short- and long-term results from their initiatives.

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