I've been thinking...Understanding

"A desk is a dangerous place to watch the world" a quote from a John Le Carré book, "The Honourable Schoolboy" and referenced by Steven Shorrock in his editorial in Hindsight 28. In the editorial Shorrock describes a significant change process and his inability to understand the readiness of people in the organisation simply from reading reports on project progress. He took the advice of Le Carré and went and hung out with those doing the work.

The concept of understanding the work applies across a range of roles within a business from operational management, those responsible for safety, organisational leaders and those who govern. Understanding more about "work as done" enhances organisational intelligence and improves decision making ability, "informed leadership" if you like.

Of course the due diligence obligations on Officers defined in HSWA requires those holding such roles as having an understanding of the risk profile of the business and how those risks are managed. There should also be an understanding of how to best measure performance and understand how to interpret the data you are receiving. Having this understanding of your risk profile will provide clarity on your resourcing requirements around risk management, another due diligence obligation.

Many businesses create a regular reports, pitched at operational management, leadership or a governance level, which details their historical performance using lead and lag indicators and describing various other metrics. This is a legitimate quantitative method of understanding the business. But it only tells some of the story.

Gaining an understanding through spending time with those doing the work is a qualitative approach which enables the exploration of workers attitudes, feelings, opinions and experiences. Cultural Intelligence predicts a person capability in being successful in multi cultural interactions. Culture, in this context, is not just about ethnicity, it covers a range of aspects from the standard diversity based differences we know of, nationality, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation etc etc, to organisational differences such as position in a hierarchy, department, geographical location, type of work undertaken and many other examples.

Sometimes managers and leaders don't know how to engage effectively with workers in a way that creates a connection. This could mean they haven't taken a considered approach to the process of engaging, do they plan ahead for the interaction, how aware are they of what's going on in the moment, do they reflect on the engagement after it has happened in order to learn about what went right or what could have been done better.

Workers sometimes shy away from engaging with managers and leaders, sometimes this is because they have a high power distance cultural value. Many workers perspective is that leaders either turn up when something has gone wrong or if they are showing off their latest asset to stakeholders. Workers I have spoken to across a range of businesses and industries confirm, they don't know who the leaders of their business are and have never or rarely spoken to them. The other thing they express is the value they get when a leader comes to their workplace and shows interest in what they are doing.

I have been thinking about how as an organisational leader you can get to know more about you're business.

• While getting out into the business is about understanding what's going on, its also about showing workers that they have been heard, connecting with them, having engaging conversations and creating value for the business, the leader and the workers involved. As has been said many times workers are not a problem to be solved, they are the source of solutions. So hear the workers, don't just watch them.
• Consider the strategies you use as a manager or leader to understand from your workers what's it like to be them. What challenges do you think you might encounter, be aware of things that are similar or different to those things in your normal environment, check your assumptions after the engagement, what behaviours surprised you.
• Understand what visible and demonstrable leadership looks like for your organisation, throw away your safety engagement checklist and talk to your workers about what its like to be them doing the job they do.

Ngākau Mōhio (Understanding) - Tēnā te ngaru whati tēnā te ngaru puku. (There is a wave that breaks, there is a wave that swells)

What are your thoughts?