We Need More Safety Leaders working in the Edges

 2019+ Are you prepared to go out to the edges and explore the possibilities.

Quote: "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most responsive to change." (Charles Darwin)

Are we at a tipping point for health and safety as many big data discussions at board level need to be more focused on acting as a whole rather than discrete and separate departments or functions?

Data can and will be a catalyst for accelerating the breaking down of communication silos that may have historically been a barrier to this kind of collaboration.

For health and safety, this may also have the added benefit of acting as a significant step in changing the perception of health and safety from being a niche department to becoming a core part of corporate strategy and corporate culture.

Breaking down information silos

We are now seeing artificial intelligence, machine learning and other big data technologies playing a part in daily decision making in other industries are we at a tipping point for health and safety as many big data discussions at board level need to be more focused on acting as a whole rather than discrete and separate functions.

Data can and will be a catalyst for accelerating the breaking down of communication silos that may have historically been a barrier to this kind of collaboration.

For health and safety, this may also have the added benefit of acting as a significant step in changing the perception of health and safety from being a niche department to becoming a core part of corporate strategy and corporate culture.

Developing, learning and following procedures often mean’s we are too busy being busy.

A major challenge is how we can manage technology, rather than it manage us as this has major implications for how we approach work – including how we deal with issues like health & safety, we need to take advantage of all that ‘the Cloud’ and social media has to offer, organisations (and their managers) have to let go; they need to empower employees – to choose the best places to work, the best times to work, the best tools to use.

What is the level of people’s expectations?

To change people’s experience around safety we need to emphasise what they have done right and encourage their

commitment beyond self--‐interest by reinforcing desired actions is not the norm.

Painting a picture about where the company is going and helping people see their role in that future and expressing confidence in others’ ability to achieve goals transforms their safety experience and connects them to the larger mission and it encourages the employees to talk about safety opportunities they missed.

This is a chance to practice the transformational element “engaging”: coaching people to be successful. When workers allow the job to continue despite general oversight, it means the culture isn’t strong enough to support safety communication between employees.

Invite the employees to change their own experience around safety. Ask for their commitment to talk to one another when they are working at risk. Encourage them to find new ways to accomplish tasks safely. This is the “challenging” element of transformational leadership.

Imagine that everyone in your company could see into the future and that everyone across the company had the same vision and translated it to their day--‐to--‐day job: Knowing how to reinvent your business may keep you in business

Test and Learn: Developing A Culture Of Experimentation

“Looking outside your own industry for inspiration is as useful as it’s ever been, but can thinking laterally be enough to apply an unfamiliar idea to your own situation.” An environment and culture that is characterised by the trust are critical the link between strategy and execution. For the two to be aligned, a strategy must be clearly articulated and comprehensively understood.

Assess process safety culture.

The Board or senior management often have little or no visibility of the process safety culture at operating levels and few have effective ways to use process safety instruments to measure culture and can be measured in ways that have been shown to correlate with process safety outcomes, undertaking such measurement and acting on results is an exception.

Leadership: Change is Hard When Words Don’t Match Actions --‐ Align intention with action.

The intentions of “Top Floor.” often are not reflected by what happens “on the shop floor.” too often they believe that their intentions are clear & everyone will understand how to resolve priorities that appear to conflict, or that simply issuing policy statements will impact performance.

20th Century Skill Sets Don’t Always Work in the 21st Century

We live and work in a rapidly changing environment and we cannot rely on what may have worked in the past. Today's world is different. The stakes are high and the challenges and issues we all face are changing at a rapid speed."

But some things don't change

Some basic skills leaders have always needed. The only difference is that now these skills are even more crucial:

• Walk the walk. "You've got to lead in a way you'd want others to emulate when you're not around."
• Innovate. "You need to get everyone trained to think out of the box and be creative."
• Execute, execute, execute. You need to develop an operations strategy and execute that strategy."

Monitor leading indicators of process safety performance.

It is easy to become complacent if the only information being viewed is lagging incident data. But process safety lends itself to leading indicators, and the board should regularly see a meaningful summary of leading process safety data

Changing the culture by changing the experience

If you want to change the culture, you have to change the experience. Distilled to its essence, culture is the outcome of collective experience. Dozens of everyday actions reinforce beliefs about what is “right” and what is expected – even when what is “right” or expected means that people are placed at risk of injury.

When people join groups where change seems possible, the potential for that change to occur becomes more realistic.

Please Like below: or If you implement one or more of these ideas, I would love to hear how it worked. Get in touch with me at any of the comment link below – Thank you.