The Benefits of Community in Safety Management

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with David Sarkus, safety speaker, consultant, coach and author, who has been recognized by ISHN as one of the top 50 leaders in his field.

David first started exploring the role of community in safety management during the 1990s, and this subject has been a primary focus of his career, research and writing ever since.

Based on the simple principle that developing a sense of community helps people care more about each other and what they do, he realized community could play a vital role in keeping everyone safe in the workplace.

David later identified five key drivers of community in the workplace. He walks EHS professionals through each of these - mission, diversity, openness, fairness, and consensus - and uses high-profile examples to demonstrate how they can either build or erode safety within your organization.

♪ [music] ♪ - [Mary] My name is Mary Conquest, I'm your host for Safety Labs by Slice, the podcast where we explore the human side of safety to support safety professionals. We move past regulations and reportables to talk about the core skills of safety leadership. Empathy, influence, trust, rapport.

In other words, the soft skills that help you do the hard stuff. ♪ [music] ♪ I have David Sarkus here today to talk about developing community and the role of community and safety management. David is the founder of David Sarkus International, a leading health and safety management consulting and training firm based in Pittsburgh.

David is a speaker, consultant, coach, and author. He's been recognized by ISHN as one of the top 50 leaders in the field. David has written five books, including "The Safety Coach, Unleash The Seven C's for World-Class Safety Performance." Welcome.

- [David] Hi, Mary. How you doing?

- Good, good. So, David, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself, about your career and background?

- The career is extending quite long now, over 30 years, but some of my summer jobs in college were heavy construction and a lot of risk, a lot of danger. And I always had people looking out for me. And I attended West Virginia University after and, when I was nearing completion of my undergraduate work in education, I had a good friend, Chuck Smith, his helmet's right behind me.

And Chuck was in our masters program at the time, in safety management, and he was encouraging me to move into safety. So, I played sports in college, football, I had some great coaches who influenced me and influenced what I do now.

And the master's program at West Virginia University further influenced me in terms of my interest in culture. I had a professor by the name of Jim Webber, and Jim was always talking about culture. So, my research started there with Jim Webber, at West Virginia University, and I looked into the works of Shane and Schneider and many others who were influencing my thoughts in terms of leadership and culture, at the time, because they're inextricably linked.

So, that's where my interest in culture began, and then it extended throughout my career. My first job was with communications satellite corporation, in Washington DC, and that was in the early 1980s. And I was starting to put some of my strategies and tactics around influence together then from some of the coaches I had, coaches like Nick Saban, who's now at Alabama and he's won six or seven national championships.

Maybe more, I lost count, he's had so many. And then moved on to the Kennedy Space Center and I lived through that horrific space shuttle Challenger event, and we could talk about that in different ways. But that was a culture leadership issue that should've been taken care of early and it wasn't, in terms of openness and honesty.

And then I moved on to United Airlines in Northern California, and from there I went to TRW Space and Defense. And then I've been on my own here now, since...wow, 1996. And that's a good long time. And I wrote the first article on servant leadership and safety back in 1996, which leads us to some of this discussion, Mary.

- Yeah, it sounds like you've been thinking about it for a long time and come at this from a really holistic perspective. So, community is what we want to talk today, so, let's talk about the role of community in safety management. Why is that your primary focus?

- Well, it's one of my primary focuses. I first heard the word "community" relative to organizations back in the 1990s when I was working for TRW Space and Defense in Northern California, and I worked closely with a gentleman by the name of Jim Leblanc.

And Jim was a great supporter of safety. It took me some time to influence him in the way that I wanted to, but we were doing some unique things at the time in terms of behavior-based safety and team-related or team-oriented work to improve safety. And I was talking to Jim on one occasion and he said, "You know what I really want to do here in our place, in our space, is to develop a greater sense of community."

And I said, "Wow, that resonates with me." And I went back home and I thought about community for a long long time. And Jim went on to say, "If we develop a sense of community, people will care more about each other. They'll care more about what they do, they'll extend themselves further, we'll have a greater sense of identity with the group and they'll be stronger together if we build community."

And ever since Jim spoke to me about that, I started to think about it more and more. And, in fact, I started to present on community throughout the United States and some parts of Asia some 15, 16 years ago. So, my thoughts are getting more refined, I'm continuing to refine those thoughts and have some great examples of what community can do for a given organization.

- Well, actually, let's go that route. Do you have an example you want to share right now?

- Well, I had two companies, as we move through this, two companies that I started to see some huge differences in when I created a climate survey, a perception survey, that I've been using over the last 20 years. And in this climate survey, I began to discover various statements that seemed to indicate that they were influencing the kinds of results that we were getting.

In this climate or perception survey, I validated it years ago about 55, 56 statements, 10 dimensions or categories like leadership and supervisory support. And these 10 statements started to jump out over and over again and they seemed to influence better kinds of performance.

And I started to place those into some dimensions of community that I did quite a bit of research on and I came up with five dimensions. There could be more, there could be less, and they could be quite different, as I extend my research. But we saw huge differences in these statements and dimensions in terms of the employee perceptions and the level of agreement.

For example, in one of the first dimensions of community mission, I had two statements placed in there. And company A, this construction company, had huge forms of agreement at 95% or 98% agreement with the statements. And company B, a steel manufacturer, had much less or lesser forms of agreement, say, 60% and 70% percent, or even less throughout the dimensions or 10 statements that we began to assess.

So, that was the beginning of some of my more empirical work based on community. And as we discuss this more, I could discuss each of these dimensions in a bit more detail.

- Yeah, for sure, we'll come back to that. And I got ahead of myself a little bit here, let's start with some common understanding and definitions. So, what's the difference between a team and a community?

- Great question, Mary. We could characterize community in a lot of different ways but I characterize community as a group of people coming together with a common set of values to improve the place and space that they're within. They may have different beliefs, different thought processes, different backgrounds but a common set of values that brings people together for a common mission and purpose.

Now, almost any organization we could think of right now, there's a group of people coming together along a common set of values within that organization and sometimes common values individually coming together for a given mission and purpose every day to produce something or to serve someone or some group. And those communities are much more durable, if we were to compare them with teams.

Teams come together typically quickly with a more decisive and well-defined or narrow mission and they have a begin time, they have an end time, and they're over with, they go back to their own place or space and come back together again. But a community of people stays together longer, a more durable group that remains together, sometimes even in their own community, outside that space where they work.

So, we can continue on with that, but community is broader and deeper than teams. And it's something that I believe we could take advantage of in our organizations, especially as safety professionals and leaders, so that we could have the kind of organization people want to stay within, that they're proud of, that they identify with in the marketplace, and even want to talk about their company wherever they live, outside of their space at work.

- Yeah, it occurs to me, as you're describing this, it's almost like an organism, right? It's a living thing and members change, but that sort of spirit stays the same.

- Great analogy, Mary. Yeah.

- Yeah. So, let's get a little more...and actually earlier, when you were talking about the dimensions, I was thinking, you know, people use the...I don't want to say "buzzword" but the term "toxic workplace" comes up a lot now more than it did, say, when you were starting your work on this. But I think that that's a little bit what you're getting at. So, let's go deeper into these five dimensions.

Do you want to start with mission?

- Sure. I think you hit upon a key word as well, Mary, the...I got to start this over again here. I think you're hitting upon something that's very strong, powerful, and resonates today, as we talk about retaining or maintaining workers in the workplace, because they enjoy where they're being versus toxic workplaces where they don't enjoy their manager, their supervisor, and it's not a real healthy place to work.

And they take their problems home with them and the problems at home get even worse and they bring those back to work and it's a vicious cycle that can't be cut off very easily at times. But when we're talking about community, we're talking about a healthy organization with open communications, with people who enjoy being there, and they enjoy being around others who are also working side by side with them or throughout the organization.

And one of the key dimensions that we found really has concrete evidence of giving us better results is having a sense of mission and purpose every day. We could have strategic definitions or characterizations of mission in this context, that we can have more tactical...I'll start with the more tactical.

If we have a sense of mission and purpose every day, people want to build safety into every activity, or nearly every activity, from the beginning of the day till the end of the day. The sense of mission and purpose is often found in construction organizations where they know exactly what they have to do in that day.

They do a risk assessment before the day starts. They make sure they have the right tools and materials and people, the right sense of people working together and how they'll communicate and how they'll move forward. But having a great sense of mission and purpose with safety built in is something that's essential to building and growing your community at work.

But having that focus, building safety in every day, taking timeouts when you're going in a direction that doesn't seem to be a safe direction, and coming back to the mission and purpose of safe productivity, safe production, that gives you that real sense of focus and mission, again, with the right people, materials, tools, and equipment, and starting out the day talking about safety and assessing what's going on around you.

- Yeah. As you were talking about that, I've never made that connection before, but really, if there's a community with a mission, they've got a common mission, it only makes sense that they would try to achieve that safely. Because, I mean, they may not be explicitly talking or thinking about safety but, in order to achieve anything, it makes perfect sense that you look out for each other, and safety just kind of naturally flows into that.

So, yeah.

- Yep. Good thought, Mary. And when I assessed the two statements within this particular dimension, one varied around the fact that our purpose is to look out for each other's safety and to take care of my own safety as well. When we looked at those statements, there were large perception gaps in terms of the agreement we had with company A and B, company A being the better safety performer and company B being the less safe performer, but there were really large gaps there in perception in terms of what people felt.

And mission can be looked at strategically as well. Do our people at the top, our CEOs and our strategic leaders, have a sense of building safety into the organization, again, more strategically? You know, do we have a plan for safety? Is that plan flexible? Is it strong?

Do we have the right people, the right leaders at the table with other leaders to influence their thinking and build safety into our larger culture and community, all with a greater focus on building safety in, integrating it into almost everything that we do?

- Yeah. I mean, in the end, being unsafe is always going to sort of hamstring any kind of mission or goal that you have. So, I want to move on to the next dimension, which is diverse and inclusive opinions.

- Well, this dimension stood out as well when we were looking at both of these companies' big perception gaps, once again, but really great companies, especially companies that are thriving today, not simply surviving, know the benefits of getting diverse opinions from people with different backgrounds, different thoughts, different opinions, so that we could bring those together and enlighten people who haven't looked at something quite the same way.

And it's the really good and humble leaders who say, "I want to hear from you, I don't have all the answers," so, he or she is able to bring those opinions together, formulate a possible path forward, and continue to get people to raise their hand. And it's important on a number of different levels, excuse me, to make sure people feel that they belong, to make sure people feel that they're contributing, to make sure people feel that they're a part of the group and remain a part of the group and their opinions won't be laughed at or mocked and they always feel a strong sense of identity in getting out their own perceptions or their own views.

Because everyone's view can be quite helpful when it comes to safety, especially when we have people with all kinds of backgrounds from engineering, from different cultural backgrounds, from human resources. Whatever it might be, those kinds of opinions could provide breakthrough thinking at times to reach another level of performance when it comes to safety or productivity quality, morale, whatever we might be addressing.

- I think they're all pretty intrinsically linked. So, if you're addressing one, whether you mean to or not, you're addressing the others.

- Absolutely.

- And that brings me into the next one. Because, as you were speaking, I was thinking, "Yeah, people really do need to feel sort of psychologically safe to speak up." So, the next one is openness and honesty.

- Openness and honesty, really really important for our viewers. Being open about the risks that we're facing, being open about what that schedule looks like to complete the job, being open about the kinds of injuries or accidents, excuse me, that may have persisted in the past, or the kinds of risks that we often don't want to talk about because our leaders don't want them to be talked about.

So, if we have leaders who embrace openness and honesty, they'll get people to raise their hand and say, "We have a problem with this," you know, "can we discuss it without fear of retaliation or retribution of any sort?" Great organizations have that kind of openness amongst their workers and their leaders and amongst leaders and other leaders.

So, that kind of openness and transparency is so important in terms of keeping lines of communication open, discussing risks and issues and concerns without feeling that you won't be heard or that you could be punished in some way, formally or informally, or simply left out of the group because you may be someone who's discovering things that we don't want to discover or discuss.

You know, that happened at the Kennedy Space Center when I was there in the 1990s. The space shuttle Challenger had an O-ring problem, leaders didn't want to discuss it. And I'm giving you the the short overview, a horrific explosion occurred, the space shuttle Challenger exploded about 120 seconds into flight and it changed the course of our national space history forever.

And the case studies that revolve around that revolve around leaders who didn't want to be open, that didn't want transparency, that didn't want to discuss the undiscussables. And we have to be willing and ready to discuss those difficult things and issues and concerns that we often don't want to but it's always better...especially we see this in healthy organizations where those kinds of things are openly discussed, they're put on the table before something bad or before something egregious or horrific happens.

- Yeah, I don't think there's anyone who was old enough or alive at the time that doesn't remember the horror of that explosion. And it touches on something that you had mentioned earlier too, which is humility. That's something that comes up again and again, as I talk to guests, is leaders being humble, knowing that they don't know all the answers, and, therefore, you know, opening things up.

- Absolutely. And, you know, Mary, these dimensions that I'm discussing today, they overlap, they're not pure or purely defined. In some sense, they overlap, they support each other and they're linked together, but yeah, humble leaders, it takes a humble leader, in general, to build a greater sense of community, you know, or it just won't happen.

So, leaders who are humble, who are open, who know the importance of engaging their workers, those are the kinds of workers who can develop a greater sense of community. And leaders who are sensitive to the needs and concerns of their workers as well.

- Yeah, who don't easily dismiss comments. And on that note, let's move into fairness and cooperation.

- Well, fairness and cooperation...I have to say, when I was at United Airlines, I started to see some concerns and issues at times whenever we had something as prominent as an aircraft damage on the ground, when we were servicing that aircraft or refueling that aircraft.

A bad sort of damage would happen with ground-equipment people. The mission for that aircraft was grounded, the aircraft was delayed or taken out of service because the damage was bad. And I think, at times, I could be wrong, I think, at times, we rushed to judgment, we did a quick evaluation, we placed the employee at blame, and they were let go.

I think that happens all too often in some organizations, not all organizations, but fairness is linked very strongly with cooperation. And fairness is often linked, in terms of safety, with the importance of rules enforcement, some form of discipline, and being fair with any form of discipline that may have to be executed in the organization.

So, if we're not fair, people disengage from their leaders. But when we're fair, they engage with their leaders. And we have groups that will stay together and work harder with each other to support each other but, when we have a larger degree of fairness, we have more cooperation. People work together more easily, more readily, they want to achieve better, they're less selfish. But when we don't have a great sense of fairness in terms of employees who have the right tools and equipment, rules are enforced fairly.

When they have the right time to complete a job, when they have the right people or amount of people to complete the job, that all rolls into this aspect of fairness and then we get greater forms of communication. That's why I grouped them together. And again, with company A and B, we saw large discrepancies or gaps with the amount of agreement that we had between company A, the construction company, and company B, the steel producer.

So, boy, fairness and cooperation, so so important, and not rushing to judgment and getting collective opinions before we do something that could affect fairness within our groups. So so important.

- Yeah. I think part of that too, especially when you talk about rushing to judgment, is to recognize certainly people make mistakes, and sometimes people do need to be let go, however, I think it's really important to recognize, "Is it the person or was it the systems around the person?" And that's a fairness issue.

- Absolutely. Absolutely, Mary. Great point. You know, I use systems thinking many times, "What are we doing to influence that person's behavior? Did they have the right tools? Were we rushing them? Did they have the right knowledge?" I could look at some of the construction jobs I worked in as a young person, and one job in particular I never had training to operate an overhead crane in the mill.

And to make a long story short, I caused a really bad form of damage to a piece of equipment on the ground and I had no reason to operate that crane in the 1980s, when I had more hair. And I caused significant damage, I had a great supervisor who took care of the issue overnight, but I didn't have the training.

There were other influences. I didn't have the knowledge, I was a 19-year-old kid operating a huge crane in a steel setting. And that certainly influenced some decisions that I made that caused that kind of damage. And those sorts of things, looking upstream, are always important. Do we have the right knowledge and training, the tools and equipment?

Are we being fair with all those kinds of things that we need to, you know, tools, equipment, materials, training, equity, and having access to the kinds of knowledge that we should have and need to have for our workers?

- Yeah, and I think too, if you rush to judgment, if they were to just say, "Oh, it's your fault, you did something wrong," it's actually a lost opportunity for the organization to look at...I mean, they're just going to repeat that mistake, right, if...

- Absolutely.

- I don't know about that particularly example but, in general, right, it's a lost opportunity.

- You're right on target, lost opportunity for conversation, for learning, for coaching. When I damaged this piece of equipment, as a 19-year-old in this steel facility, really I had a great supervisor who didn't fully know what he was doing in terms of placing me in that job. But after I damaged that piece of equipment, he called me down from the crane.

I was so nervous, I thought my crane was going to come down. But Jim called me down from the crane, didn't holler, didn't scream, told me what I needed to do to avoid that kind of thing from taking place in the future, which was to pull my hooks all the way in and up when I was pushing these cranes.

No screaming, no hollering, but I got the message and I became a much better operator, even as a 19-year-old, in that crane.

- Yeah, which is so much more effective than if he had just, you know, called you names and...so, moving on then, I'd like to talk a little bit about building consensus. This is the last dimension here.

- Building consensus...I'd put consensus last because I feel like it's one of the most important dimensions but consensus doesn't mean we have a complete agreement but it means everyone's heard before we move forward. And I think it's essential to building a great sense of community. Many of your viewers right now will recognize that, when there's a sense of community, that form of consensus needs to be built, especially when there's a high-risk activity that we haven't faced before, when people are unfamiliar with a job.

We need to make sure we hear from most everyone and most everyone can get their opinions on the table, to discuss those opinions, to come to some form of agreement on a path forward. And to recognize the fact that consensus builds stronger forms of relationships, a greater sense of belonging, greater forms of problem solving, and allows people to run a meeting to begin to realize how important consensus is and to build consensus into important or high-risk jobs that haven't been done before.

But consensus is so important rather than simply moving ahead with limited forms of opinion and limited forms of input because people want to make real contributions to keeping others safe and themselves safe. So, consensus is really critical to building community every day, most every day. Again, tactically and even strategically, as organizational leaders come together on a regular basis to build safety and community into the larger culture or the culture as a whole.

- Yeah, it occurs to me, consensus, in order to get consensus, really all the other dimensions feed into that, right, mission, inclusive opinions, openness, fairness, cooperation, honesty.

All of that is required in order to get consensus.

- Absolutely. And my suggestion is, when we help people and help them better understand how to build consensus, we build leadership within the group. And if a formal leader leaves, those leaders that we've helped to build can step forward without allowing the group to crumble and fall apart and begin to miss some steps and misalign their work with what's really important.

So, consensus helps us to build greater forms of leadership within the group, both formally and informally, and it's just imperative to build consensus. And that's what servant leaders do. You know, we were talking about what kind of leader makes a community go or grow, and it's the servant leader, the humble leader. The individual who doesn't have all the answers, who says, "Hey, help me out.

I need your opinions," you know, "before we move forward, I need your input."

- Yeah. It seems to me that, if you have a group and the leader leaves and the group crumbles, then you never really had a community. You maybe had a bit of a cult of personality but, you know, that's not a true community.

- Good thought. Or you had a team that came together for a short period of time but the leadership didn't have time to grow and step up and be engaged with others in a way that the formal leaders can do.

- Yeah. So, a lot of our listeners are...I mean, if you're in safety management, then you are a leader, in some sense, to varying degrees, I suppose. What kind of leader do you think it takes to successfully build community in the workplace?

- Well, you know, you were touching upon something that's really important, Mary. You know, sometimes we have managers who are managing programs. And sometimes those people don't have great leadership skills, but everybody's skills can be developed. And then sometimes we have managers who are great leaders.

And I know that the kind of leader that we need to build community is that humble leader, that servant leader who wants to persuade rather than punish, who has a vision for safety, wants to build some kind of stewardship, wants to promote healing within the organization, or build a sense of community and greater engagement.

And again, I'm wrapping my thoughts around servant leadership, and we could go further with that, but it's a leader who knows that his or her success is tied directly to the forms of engagement that he has or she has with their workers. So, if leaders don't believe that engagement is important or giving away some of their power to their people for important decisions, then you can't build community.

But a leader who recognizes the importance of engagement and their workers, who are the answer, not the problem, then we have some real potential for greater success in building community.

- I think a struggle that a lot of safety professionals have too is that they're not necessarily in the leadership position. Like, they could be in a situation where there isn't a community they recognize, you know, they're listening to our podcast, reading your books, and recognizing that, you know, "This is missing. This is lacking. And I need to build it."

And so, in that way, if they take that step forward, they become leaders, even if they're not in the c-suite or, you know, structurally leaders. What are the most important characteristics do you think that they could develop and maybe some practical steps for someone who's in that fairly difficult position?

- Well, I think when you have safety professionals of all sorts, younger or more mature professionals, they realize the importance of developing relationships to get things done. So, when safety professionals have a good relationship with operational leaders, when they have credibility, which is expertise and trust and passion, then they get the ear of their operational leaders and they say, "Hey, there's a few things that I'd like to try," or, "there's some things I'd like to discuss that I'm hearing or seeing really works, and we have elements of this already. Can we discuss how we could build a greater sense of community in the workplace?"

Maybe that's not the right word for some organizations at times, maybe it starts with a team and then it evolves to community, but professionals, or safety professionals more specifically, who know how to build relationships with important organizational leaders...like I did, 25 years ago, with Jim Leblanc, I had Jim's ear, Jim was a great advocate for safety, he was buying into some of my thoughts, and those discussions evolved.

And there's certainly information out there that one can tap into, like some of my own, in terms of these dimensions for further discussion, but it takes an astute manager or leader who can build relationships, who has a vision for safety and knows that this might be or could be the very next step to evolving their culture, and then selling it in terms of improving the overall culture through a greater psychological sense of community.

Which would, again, mean where we started out, improving productivity and quality and morale and getting through these retention hurdles that we're now facing because people like to come to work, they don't dislike coming to work, and they're so proud of their work they go out in the marketplace and tell others about the company that they're working for and why that company's so good.

And safety might even pop up in the discussion.

- Yeah. So, I'm hearing three things in what you're saying. One is sort of, "Read the room, know your organization," you know, "start with the language that's going to work." The second is, "Lead by example," which is simply, you know, it's a bit of a buzzword, but it's true. And then the third is finding advocates or allies, I suppose.

- I think finding advocates and allies is probably the most important thing. And secondarily to that is the fact that you have common values, organizational values. And I think that's something that many organizational leaders have that they can embrace and something that will resonate.

If we start our discussion around the values that we have within our organization and how we can build a great foundation on those values and build a sense of community and we have the right buy-in from some leaders who are beginning to listen to us, then we have the possibility of growing community in the organization.

And I just spoke, in Las Vegas, about a week ago, and I had one group in one of my breakout sessions and I asked the group of probably 100 people to raise their hands in terms of, "Who is beginning to discuss building community in the organization?" And I would say a good 50% to 60% of those participants in the room raised their hand and said, essentially, "We're trying to build community in the workplace."

And anecdotally, I think they're trying to do that in and through safety because the safety of people is so important that that brings people together as a common set of values or an aspect of the values that many organizations already have.

- Yeah, it's important to start with common ground and then you can kind of expand from there. Because you've had a long career, I'd like to ask, do you have a sense that, if you had asked that same question to a group of people at the beginning of your career, do you think the show of hands would've been the same? Or do you think the conversation is changing?

- I think the conversation has changed drastically. I think people would've been shaking their head looking at me like I had six eyes if I would've talked about community over 30 years ago. But community, as we know, it's been in discussion for over 20 or 30 years in organizations. And sometimes we're a little slow in catching on in terms of safety, but I think safety professionals and leaders who are really embracing safety need to get a grasp on community.

Because I think community is the answer for many of the problems we have in terms of improving safety and retention and morale and productivity and all those things that I don't want to repeat much further. But community really can bring your organization together, give it a stronger sense of identity and purpose and pride.

And it brings people back to the workplace the next day where we want to get them. You know, it's hard to keep people in the workplaces today. And building community in a healthy culture is part of the answer, I believe.

- Yeah, and I think safety, in a way, it's pretty non-controversial to find that common ground. I mean, who's going to disagree with the statement "we want everyone to go home safe"? - Yeah. I mean, who can disagree with that? Even if they don't fully convince themselves privately, publicly they're going to want to raise their hand and come to some form of strong agreement, I believe.

- Yeah. And so, it's great that the discussion is evolving and getting more holistic with people like yourself on how to reach that. So, I'm going to switch gears a little bit and ask you a few questions that I like to throw at all of our guests.

They're not trick questions, they're just interesting to hear. So, if you were to develop your own non-technical safety-management training curriculum, where would you start? What core human skills do you think are the most important to develop in tomorrow's safety professionals?

- Wow, that's a great one, Mary. I'll tell you, the curriculum, from my perspective, would be fairly robust in terms of having some really good social psychology classes or organizational psychology classes have some technical classes that would revolve around engineering, some financial astuteness would have to be developed, and giving people a greater sense and understanding of culture, of influence, and various elements of culture would be critically important.

And then, from a more programmatic sense, having people better understand the regulatory involvement that's necessary. But I think an organizational background or organizational psychology background fits really well into safety and blending in some financial awareness and astuteness and leadership courses could be a really robust curriculum.

And I think it's those kind of leaders that would be more apt to rise out of safety and go to the very top of the organization because they see safety as a critical aspect of the organization that can help to benefit everything that we do. So, yep, primarily it would be some good culture and leadership and organizational psychology courses, programmatic courses that delve into a compliance, some leadership courses and financial.

So, it would probably be along those four lines.

- Yeah, I find it really interesting that you mentioned financial because a lot of safety leaders bemoan the financial constraints that they have to work within. But I actually think understanding that, from an organizational perspective, leads to more empathy. So, you can understand the kind of constraints that, you know, the people above, when they're saying no, I think it's a bit easier to persuade people to take safety more seriously if you can understand their point of view and what's important to them.

- Absolutely. I think it's critical that safety professionals better understand the financial aspects within their organizations because we simply don't have an open checkbook to identify every risk and resolve it completely or every hazard and remove that hazard, so, we have to be aware and work within those financial constraints.

Because again, none of us have the kind of budget at times that we really want to but it's something that we need to pay attention to and work with other organizational leaders and, as you say, have greater empathy and understanding and be able to resolve the issue or challenge in multiple ways and not be so confined to one type or one avenue of thinking that might take us down a path where we simply give up because we say, "Ah, they defeat us every time we try to do something."

Well, maybe you need another advocate to raise the flag for you. Maybe you need to think of this in different ways that you can get to the kinds of end results that you really want to achieve.

- Yeah. Thank you. So, the next one is, we're going to turn back time here for a minute, if you could travel back in time and speak to yourself at the beginning of your career and you could only give young David one piece of advice, what do you think that would be?

- It would probably be not to wear so many hats because I lost my hair like 10-15 years ago. So, that might be one of my answers. But I think if I were to do it all over again, I would've jumped in with this masters I have in organizational psychology much sooner.

That was a large area of interest for me early on and this relational skill that you have to develop with others is so important. And I don't have a technical background but having good relational skills, having a sports background helped me to better develop relationships and advocates.

And not giving up, you know. I didn't give up very easily in industry and I don't give up very easily now, so, there's multiple ways to save a problem...excuse me, there are multiple ways to solve a problem. So, I kept coming back with other challenges, other areas of support, other areas that might promote my cause.

So, I think the organizational background and psychology, I would've jumped in much sooner, formally, for an educational experience, and really focused on more aspects of influence in terms of how I can influence and engage other leaders. And that's what I do now. I engage leaders, I help to place a mirror in front of them and their organization to assess it, to better understand it, and then present possible solutions to better engaged leaders and workers, to move towards a common vision that needs to be shared.

And that's what we're talking about today, sharing a common vision to make your organization better, but this time by making it better, by building a greater sense of community and aspect of culture that is very seldom discussed, at least formally, today. But I think it's right around the corner and safety people, safety professionals are in a great position to start influencing other leaders to talk about building community, not just a culture, but building a great community in and through safety that can make everything better.

- Yeah, I really sense...I mean, of course, our guests are on the forefront of that but I sense that there is a big shift in the way people are thinking about safety. So, this last one is about getting practical. This is where I ask you for your best most practical tips or resources for safety managers who are looking to improve their work-relationship skills.

So, it could be a website or a book, it could just be a concept.

- Yeah, I have books on my website that people can look at. And I know we'll get to some of that, but I would start reading some books by Ken Blanchard, culture books by Shane. Get into some good psych lit research. And by that I mean, if you have access to a university library, start doing some searches for community and leadership.

And I often tell people that safety professionals especially should have a leadership model or leadership practice that they call their own and that they embrace. For me, it started over 20 years ago when I started reading about servant leadership. I said, "That's me, that's what I do," you know. So, I think it's important for professionals to grasp and embrace, again, a leadership model that they feel is most closely aligned to them and to work for organizations that want to embrace their form of leadership.

And servant leaders have a vision, they persuade, they don't punish. And I covered some of that before, so, I encourage your leaders to read more about servant leadership, transformational leadership, a whole host of other forms of leadership. Read as much as you can about culture, read as much as you can about improving relational skills.

And I don't have a lot of books and resources on that, but learning how to deal with difficult people and improving your mental toughness and resilience without getting emotionally involved or getting emotionally overboard or going emotionally overboard is really important. But read as much as you can about leadership, have a model that you embrace as your own, and start to learn how to embrace and build great relationships through the kinds of advocates you need and the kinds of advocates who may not be able to help you or the kinds of people who may not be able to help you as well.

Because you need to learn how to deal with difficult people, people with different backgrounds and beliefs who don't always agree with you. So, that improves your relational skills and your negotiation skills as well.

- Yeah, I was going to say they do help you, just not in the way that you think they're going to help you. They help you by giving that experience. So, what final insights can you leave with our audience today?

- Well, I'll hit upon two or three. Start reading about community, it's right around the corner. Because I think community helps us to build the kind of culture that your leaders are looking for and they may be looking to you to build a greater sense of community. Number two, raise your hand when people say, "We have a retention problem," because building community can be a part of resolving some of your retention woes.

Think about the five dimensions I addressed with Mary today, having a sense of mission and purpose, fairness and cooperation, openness and honesty, and building a form of consensus before you move forward. Those are very functional and practical dimensions that you could start discussing, "How well do we do with fairness and cooperation now? What do we do that's not quite as fair as what it should be? And how can we get better, what's our future state of excellence look like?"

So, think about the five dimensions I discussed today, where you are now and where you'd like to be in that perfect state. And those are exercises that you could begin to implement right now with some of your leaders and workers as well.

- Great. Where can our listeners find you on the web?

- Well, again, David Sarkus, S-A-R-K-U-S. And my website is www.davidsarkus.com. So, I have a lot of information on my website. There's a lot of material to explore there. I have some books that can help you as well and some other resources that are online.

In fact, I have an online course on building a greater sense of community with servant leadership in mind, as a online self-paced course that some of your organizations would benefit from.

- Well, that sounds fantastic. So, that's very practical, that's what I love to hear. Well, thank you, David. Thanks so much for your thoughts today, and we really appreciate it.

- Thank you, Mary. Great questions. ♪ [music] ♪ - Safety Labs is created by Slice, the only safety knife on the market with a finger-friendly blade. Find us at sliceproducts.com. Until next time, stay safe.

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