Truth or Myth: Management Involvement is a Key Success Factor in Safety Performance

Management involvement is defined as one to one interactions with employees on safety performance. Thank you to the participants of The Safety View conversation with Jim Loud and Phil Harris, moderated by Tamara Parris; and to the Paradigm HOP Group panelists Stewart Brundell, Richard Knowles, Chip Stanley and Tony Scott. These are perspectives from safety staff, operational leaders, consultants and my reflections.

Introduction

In 1994 I began to hear from employees that lack of management visibility causes mistrust. When asked why, the answer was that they could not trust that management cared about safety if they never came out to talk to them and showed that they understood the challenges. How could they set goals or make decisions about resources when they didn’t know what was going on?

Since then, management involvement, commitment and walk-throughs have become a staple in recommendations to improve safety. There is some movement in that direction but it remains a challenge convince managers and supervisors to interact with employees on a consistent basis. So, I began this inquiry with the assumption that management going to the worksite and having conversations with employees was a good thing.

The questions posed to the first group, people who work in safety, were: Why it is important? What would it look like? What are the barriers that are keeping managers from talking to employees? As you will see, we begin addressing this question and then the conversation moved on to systems, silos and management versus leadership. My efforts to bring the conversation back to management speaking with employees failed.

The question to operational leaders was, “what is going well in operations?” Theresa Swinton, our Paradigm host, was on board with not bringing in the word “safety.” To our surprise they said that during the Covid-19 pandemic, management site visits, meetings and training were kept to a minimum. This resulted in improved safety and productivity. They called it “less interference at the point of contact.” Their consensus seemed to be that when managers stay away, performance improves.

That is a high-level summary of two conversations that could lead us to a better understanding of managements relational role with employees.

Advocates of management involvement with employees

Jim Loud, who has 40 years of experience primarily in nuclear safety, opened with “safety is management’s responsibility not the safety function’s.” Phil Harris, with equal experience in nuclear safety, is focused on how managers create psychological safety and how multicultural influences affect safety performance.

Harris told the story of one leader who established trust with the workforce by picking up trash in a large black bag during a plant outage. As he walked, he met people and asked questions about the work they were doing. Soon he knew peoples’ names and built relationships with them. It turned out to be the tightest and most incident free outage in the history of the plant. Was there a connection between his visibility and the incident free outage?

Visibility isn’t management involvement

Visibility isn’t enough. That manager used a task to display humility and availability. Your approachability matters. When you make yourself accessible and are willing to talk about the things that matter to the workers you can establish a relationship. That relationship enables trust, which enables communication. Then the information needed to prevent accidents can flow and be acted upon. Can we produce cause and effect data? No, but the story resonated with others who had successful experiences with managers who interacted with employees. I wonder if stories aren’t more convincing in day-to-day life than data?

Jim Loud has seen some managers be very effective for a while then step back. In his case if he wasn’t prompting the managers to keep interacting with the employees the momentum would end. Why might that be? A barrier to managers engaging in consistent interaction with employees is the fear of losing face and identity. For example, the manager may not have the technical knowledge to advise an employee. Others may see walking on the floor as a loss of status.

Provan, Woods, Dekker, & Rae,[1]  make an observation that may also pose a barrier. “An activity that raises more questions than it answers generates more new work than it ticks off. Each open item is a personal threat to line management and the organisation, since it will be seen by outsiders as a shortfall in safety management.” Jim Marinus quipped, “When the safety person walks in the room, the manager just sees more work coming their way.”

It’s the system not the manager involvement

Without stating directly that management interaction with employees wasn’t the answer, the conversation veered to systems, complexity, and design. Tom Osario said safety was about creating systems that enable people to effectively change. Michael Ruane brought in the role of resilience in Complex Adaptive Systems. Given our growing knowledge in systems and complexity theory, does it make sense to work at the individual level such as asking managers to have conversations with the people doing the work?

The example of the Toyota system came up to show how a system is more effective than a leader focused approach. Michael Ruane who works with the system described how people doing the work drive safety, production and quality. Anyone can pull a cord and stop the production line without repercussions, and it does get stopped several times a day. The chord is part of a sensing and communication network. It works because the system requires you to pull the cord and requires management to respond. Ruane added, “Operating such a system requires more people to provide slack. Labor isn’t a cost; it is a necessary expenditure for business success. Toyota sees that and invests in people.”

Organization design and silos

Dysfunctional silos are often cited as the cause of system breakdowns. Someone that worked on the analysis of the Deep Water Horizon explosion remarked that poor communications between silos contributed to that incident.

Others didn’t think silos are the problem. Greg Spencer commented that silos are inevitable. It made me wonder if silos are like drift from procedure, a part of human nature that we must accept and harness. Many agreed the real obstacle to improvement is the disempowerment of the people who know and do the work. They are the ones who understand the safety issues.

Management vs Leadership

This sparked a discussion on management versus leadership. “The manager is responsible for a system. The leader is responsible for balancing the systems” (Tom Osario). What does it take to balance systems? Most of those skills are relational because you must communicate across subcultural boundaries. Some of the skills mentioned were attentive listening, humble inquiry and an authentic interest in people. So, it seems that leaders if not managers are important to promote communication across boundaries. In so doing their conversations do you play an important role in organizational performance.

Operational perspective on management involvement with employees

The group attending the Safety View did not address whether management visibility increases trust or performance. As it turns out, a few days later I facilitated a session with the Paradigm HOP team for operational leaders. We asked what is going well in operations? The first thing that came up was how safety and production had improved since COVID-19. Why? The absence of management interference at the worksite.

Apparently, the interaction between management and workers was distracting and interrupting the work. As the conversation progressed it came out that most of those interactions were bureaucratic or correcting people on the job. They weren’t geared towards being helpful.

Yet, as the conversation progressed and the leaders reflected on the things they had gone well, they all said that they spent a significant amount of time in the field speaking with employees. Was that a contradiction? No because they were meaningful conversations with employees. It was an authentic exchange of views on how the work is going, Richard Knowles calls it a collaboration built on trust that improves business results substantially. The lesson I heard: If people don’t leave an interaction feeling valued, heard or helped, the manager’s presence detracted rather than added value.

Personal Reflections

The initial purpose of the first conversation was to discuss how to physically engage management in the safety process. It is the nature of conversations to take on a life of their own, thus it expanded to the importance of systems and design. The Toyota system is often seen as such a system. For the most part it seems to operate regardless of who is at the helm. However we need to recall that it was created over many years in Japan. It could be that the constant changes in the western world interfere with the development of such a culture.

I am troubled by the statement that the Toyota “system” requires people to do things a certain way, and that’s why they do it. That is questionable because even within Toyota there are a few plants where employees don’t perform as expected. The system is an intangible concept. It is people—relationships—that reinforce or ignore the “system.” It is people talking to each other and taking action that create boundaries of acceptable behavior.

Management involvement at the local level

In my experience a leader is an important element of good safety performance at the local level. Perhaps it is still seen as an individual contribution because we haven’t figured out how to generate a system that connects larger organizations in the same way that a team connects around a leader.

Maybe a reason for managers to walk the floor is to connect people with the larger system. They can spot breakdowns in communication and become a bridge across silos. They might also identify drift in its early stages. The engineer leader need not have deep knowledge in every technical area. They need not fear losing face if they go into the field to learn, rather than because they have all the answers.

The idea that management-employee conversations make a positive impact on organizational performance may seem overly simplified. There is a part of me that wonders if this view is a belief that technology, systems, reason and logic make relationships optional. I used to think that the individualistic culture of the US was the barrier to acknowledging that the quality of relationships is an important contributor to success of an organization. However, Hugo Ribeiro, who is from a collective culture, commented that interpersonal trust outside of the family in Brazil is low. It made it difficult to leverage relationships. Once again trust is a central issue.

So how can we help managers and professionals move into a leadership role practicing humble inquiry and listening? The way work is structured now, managers don’t have time for reflection or to engage in learning. Would it work to mandate that supervisors and managers spend a certain amount of time in the field or plant site talking with employees?

An experiment at a global company required that managers and supervisors have a certain number of one-on-one conversations with their direct reports. The experiment failed because neither the employees nor the supervisors/ managers wanted to talk to each other. There is a saying that you can force people to read a book but you can’t force them to learn. It follows that you can mandate that managers and supervisors have talk with direct reports, but you can’t mandate communication.

Managers and professionals have to seek relationship building skills on their own

My final reflection is that managers, professionals and supervisors won’t have these conversations until they have the socio-emotional skills. They will have to seek them on their own. Adapting to the future of work will include the skills needed to build relationships between managers and and employees at all levels of the organization. Two resources are The Relationship Factor in Safety Leadership and the Art of Work Master Class on Enabling People through Relationships.

Conclusion

Trust emerges in almost every conversation about safety improvement. Its importance is widely embraced at every level of the organization. It continues to be a challenge because we need to raise the level of social emotional skills for everyone. In addition trust has eroded worldwide because of the growing gap between the haves and the have nots. When that sense of financial security is missing, there is even more reason for managers to hone their social skills. Trust is a social virtue and the foundation of financial success.[2]

[1] Provan, D, Woods, D., Dekker, S, Rae, A. (2020). Safety II professionals:  how resilience engineering can transform safety practice. ScienceDirect. V. 195. Accessed March 7, 2021 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0951832018309864

[2] Fukuyama, F. (1994). Trust: the social virtues and creation of prosperity. US: Free Press