The Gray Areas of Ethical Decision-Making in Workplace Safety

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Dr. Bettina Palazzo, a business ethics expert who is the founder of the consultancy: Palazzo Ethics Advisory.

Bettina applies her extensive academic and practical knowledge of ethics to workplace safety.

She helps EHS professionals unpick the psychological dynamics that lead to unethical behavior and explains why workplace safety decision-making is not always black and white.

Her inclusive approach to safety management contains great advice on communicating with co-workers, including starting with the “why”, focusing on individual needs, using jargon-free narrative, and avoiding parent mode.

Bettina also highlights the importance of ensuring your leaders role model good safety practice and create speak-up safety cultures.

♪ [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] ♪ Hi there. Welcome to "Safety Labs by Slice." We learn from a very young age what is right and what is wrong. From don't hit your sibling, to don't run a red light, to don't steal money from your company, we understand that there are correct and incorrect ways to behave.

Today, we're going to talk about the gray zones of ethical decision-making and the psychological dynamics that lead to unethical behavior. And, of course, we'll do it in the context of workplace safety. I've got ethicist Bettina Palazzo with me to help me dive into all the nuances that make workplace situations more complex than just right or wrong.

Bettina stumbled on the topic of business ethics in the early '90s and soon found out that it is such a rich and exciting topic that she never stopped doing anything else, at least professionally. She suffered through the cumbersome but rewarding effort of getting her head around the philosophical and economic foundations of business ethics, won an award for her Ph.D. thesis, and rode off into the sunset to join KPMG, a multinational professional services network and one of the big four global accounting organizations.

There, she helped build their business ethics consulting service, which was tough pioneer work at that time. After a short detour into strategic management consulting, she returned to her true passion and started her own business ethics advisory. Over the years, Bettina has learned that you cannot press ethics into checklists and processes, and that unethical companies make unhappy people.

She's driven by the desire to create corporate cultures that make work fun and meaningful instead of dreadful and depressing. Bettina joins us from Lausanne, Switzerland today. Welcome.

- [Dr. Palazzo] Hello. Happy to be here.

- So let's get into the big question about sort of why ethics, and that is why isn't it as simple as right or wrong? Presumably, if a safety manager writes a procedure and a worker follows that procedure, there's a clear right and wrong way to do things. So where is it that we run into the gray zone, and why does that happen?

- Yeah. The gray zone is because things are complicated. You can't anticipate all the things that can happen in the workplace. So you need to have people empowered, that they see things that might be dangerous. You can't prescribe everything because one day there might be something different.

And I'm not a true safety expert, so I have trouble coming up with a good example here, but so I think sometimes it can be things like humidity that changes everything in a work context and you didn't think about this, or many, many other little details.

And what usually safety experts develop is this kind of radar. You want to always kind of check your surroundings and see what could happen. Parents also get this over time, that they kind of scan the environment around their kids. And that's something...of course, it's the duty of the company, and processes, and the safety people to do this for the people, but the people are just always closer to the processes.

And if they're under certain pressures and they don't understand why this is an important safety measure and what could happen if I don't follow this rule, then they might be tempted to not do it, or they don't think about it because very often, we are on autopilot and we just forget.

It's like as stupid as don't look at your phone when you walk down the stairs. Like, everybody, we know that, but we sometimes do it, or when you drive.

- Exactly. So you've answered this with a yes, but I'm going to dive a little deeper. If someone is choosing to ignore a rule, does their intention or context matter? And you've said yes, so I'm going to ask you to elaborate a little bit on why.

- Well, it all seems that this feeling that if we have a rule, then everything is fine. And you don't think about the behavior and people are complex people and that we are sometimes not so rational that we think that there are no smart accidents usually. That's why we have to carefully look at the context and see why do people take shortcuts.

- We've talked about context in terms of physical context, what kind of psychological dynamics are likely to lead to unethical behavior?

- Well, just for the physical context, so there's one important thing that's also known, with lots of research, and there is this special case with the BP refinery in Texas where they had this big explosion where the physical context played an important role because people were just overworked. They were tired, out of their mind.

And this had this catastrophic results.

- And what kind of psychological risk factors have you seen or would you expect to see in workplaces?

- There are many. There's more research that shows that we have many biases. We have this impression, we think, "Oh, this won't happen to me," and there's overconfidence. Discounting on the futures, or, "It hasn't happened."

And, "We will take care of this later." And you keep cutting the cost because you think, "Yeah, there's still room for it," but then it hits you unprepared. Yeah.

- Yeah. So often, we...I mean, if you talk about parenting and driving, you know, we think, "Well, it hasn't happened to me yet. I've done it a million times and it hasn't happened," which has nothing to do...

- "I'm a better driver than other people."

- Yeah. It has nothing to do with whether it's going to happen the next time you do it.

- Yeah. And it's hard because attention is one of our scarcest resources, especially today, with all the distractions we have. And I think one of the most important challenges to safety that it's a little bit boring and you have to pay attention to it all the time, and get on people's nerves, and keep bugging them with it and being uncomfortable.

Yes, it's uncomfortable if you have to put in your ear protection.

- Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Any kind of PPE, it's like, "Oh, I can't move as freely." It's like, "Yes, but you're not going to get killed by...

- [crosstalk].

- Yeah, exactly. So you have talked about three common ingredients to workplace accidents, and those are performance pressure, time pressure, and power. So can you explain what you mean by how these factors influence workplace safety?

- Yeah. So to imagine this context and the psychological drivers that can push people who have all the good intention to be ethical and to be safe, it varies with every organization, how hierarchical they are, how profit-driven or time-driven they are.

But let's just imagine oil drilling platform. And there, we know that they are struggling all the time with work safety. That's a really dangerous place to work because if something happens, you can easily lose a limb or even die.

And we know there are two situations when you have most breaches of safety regulations. So the first situation is when the platform isn't running, when there is some problems to fix. And here, we have to know that the oil platform is really a money-making machine, it makes a quarter of a million dollars a day.

So people run around like crazy because they want to get it up and running again. And then you are pushed to forget about the safety instruction because you want to be fast and get into the profit zone as soon as possible. And the second situation is when a thunderstorm is coming up and they have to brace the whole structure so nothing flies around.

And there, you have time pressure. And very often in organizations, what you have, and that's what you can see in many, many corporate scandals, you have a combination of both of them. So that's really the mortal cocktail, time and performance pressure. And then that's often pushed also by authority pressure, by power. If the boss tells you, "Get this thing running no matter what," and not saying, "but please also pay attention, don't mess with the safety protocol," then people will want to fulfill what their boss is telling them.

- Yeah. And I think safety professionals struggle a lot with...of course, their main focus is safety, but someone might be reporting to a boss whose main focus is a different pressure, right? That time pressure. There's a power dynamic there that it's like, "Well, they want me to do it safely, but they really want me to do it fast.

So I might just cut some corners," basically. And so sometimes a safety manager is able to affect time or performance pressure, but sometimes they're not, like the examples you gave. I mean, it's the nature of the business. What can a safety professional do in that situation? Where else can they focus to make it easier for staff to make ethical decisions?

- Well, what they know, for instance, from hand washing in hospitals, which is so important to avoid infections, is so that..there, they had also tried everything from posters in the toilets, to bonuses, to fines to whatever, but they found out that the most effective thing is if senior physicians do their role model task and wash their hands frequently.

This is the most powerful thing. So consequently, what safety managers need to do is to win their leaders because the safety manager is usually often understaffed, I imagine. And even if you wouldn't...you can't put one safety manager behind every employee.

So everybody needs to be a kind of a safety manager. And especially the leaders need to understand that they are under constant observation. And if they don't religiously follow the safety protocol, you can't just simply not expect that other people will.

- Yeah. I mean, leaders set the tone for all kinds of how we treat each other and all kinds of things.

- For everything.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- So get the leaders onside. That's a good piece of advice. Talk to me about the curse of knowledge. What is that, and how does it affect safety professionals?

- Yes. The curse of knowledge is that the more you know about a subject and you're an expert, you get into this kind of dynamic where it's very hard for you to imagine to not know what you know. So you say one word, like you said PPE, and many people don't know that it's personal protective equipment.

- That's actually a great example.

- Because we use abbreviations. And it's not only abbreviations, it's also concepts which we...so we say one word, but the expert has a whole universe of meaning behind it, whereas the other person only hears the word and doesn't really know what it means. And that's very difficult to overcome once you are an expert.

So you need to constantly check with your target group that they get you, or you have all the little pieces, like LEGOs. So let's imagine you have a whole pile of LEGOs, which is the data, your safety data. And for you as an expert, you look at this whole pile and you see the whole story.

You see, like, a whole LEGO house, with a little dog and a tree, and for you, that tells a story. So what you need to do as an expert is to put your insider knowledge into a story so that other people can understand it. Yeah.

That's what could be an example.

- So it's a communication rule.

- It's a communication thing. So you need to be in constant contact with the people you want to educate and ask them if they understand it and also give them the room to tell their stories.

- Yeah. I can imagine if you only sort of associated with other safety professionals, you would have this common vocabulary, and it would be pretty easy to forget that your average person who's doing a very specific technical job, I mean, they haven't been trained. You know, so questioning assumptions and also maybe giving them the safety to ask questions and not feel...

- Right. Make it about them.

- Yeah. Not feel dumb by asking what...

- Yeah. Make them feel smart. Because they are smart. They are in the processes. They can teach you more about the last near hit that they saw. And maybe they might even have smart solutions to overcome the problems or find better solutions where a cumbersome process could be adjusted so it would be easier for them to actually stick to it.

Yeah. So, involve everybody. It's a very simple rule that also experts tend to forget because, well, in a way, they do know better, but you need to get the street smartness and the expert smartness together.

- Yeah. Yeah. I think everyone knows these things abstractly, but they don't always get put into place. That leads me into what is it important for safety managers to understand about the role of authority or power in the workplace? You touched on that earlier, but let's go into that a little more.

- Well, especially if you're working in factories, well, you have employees that might be easily intimidated by people with more power. When I did work safety social accountability audits in production sites, I always found it very hard to get the people who worked there to talk openly to me that didn't know me.

And then you have different cultures where also authority and speaking openly to authority might be more difficult. You have language barriers, you have intercultural barriers. And even if you don't have that, even if you have outspoken people, people with authority tend to forget how scary they can be to people that think you can fire them.

Yeah. So you need to be very...so that's why you need to constantly prove that if people address you with safety concerns or with whatever concerns, that it will be safe and worthwhile, that they will be taken seriously, and that they will not be punished.

Because otherwise, power just have this potential that it silences people because they are dependent from the powerful person. Maybe that's not so much, but it's more in their head, even if they are protected in a very social protective legal context, like in Germany, you still have this fear from your boss.

- Yeah. Earn their trust so they can be vulnerable. Because they are...yeah, you're right, I think that as people move up, they forget how vulnerable it feels to either when you're just starting a career or you're on the bottom of some sort of skill ladder, like you're just learning.

- Exactly. I mean, you need to address this and you need to model this because your people watch you. If they see that you are not speaking up to your superior, and they will learn your behavior even if they're not with you in the same room with your boss at that time because there's always rumors and people will understand how you are dealing with tricky issues also with your superiors.

And powerful people, they think, "Well, people can talk to me. Why don't they talk to me?" They're kind of annoyed because they forget about what effect they have. And they forget that every instance there counts because they might be impatient with somebody who addresses them because they are stressed out that day and react in a bad way to a team member addressing them.

And the unfortunate thing is that this has a compound effect. It's not only this one little conversation that didn't go out so happily, there's this ripple effect to everybody else because then the person who was silenced will never speak up again. And he will talk about this to his team.

And you can talk to this person... So the leaders have to prove time and time again that they are open to comments and to concerns, and that they will react in a good way. And that's not easy also for the leaders because the leaders, of course, they need to be sure about themselves.

And if somebody's questioning them, they might get defensive. So for the leaders, the most important thing...reaction, if somebody comes to them with a problem, is thanking people, take a deep breath and switch into curiosity instead of trying to fight this off.

Even if you think, "Oh," like, "I don't want to deal with this. They should be responsible about this," you never know if a small problem might just be the piece of a puzzle of a bigger problem, so curiosity. That's not kill the cat in this case.

- No, it might keep the cat alive.

- Yeah. Saves the cat.

- Exactly. Talking a little bit more about communication and power or authority roles, what is transaction theory, and how does that affect workplace communication?

- Yeah. So transaction theory is a pretty old psychological theory. It was quite popular in the '80s. There was this book, "I'm OK – You're OK."

- Yes. I remember seeing that.

- Yeah. You remember that one. And it's the idea that we all are constantly communicating in different ego modes. So we either are in parent ego mode, in adult ego mode, or in child ego mode. And for communication to be successful, if I am talking in parent mode, then the other person needs to accept that, yes, I'm in child mode here.

If not, because this person thinks they are in adult mode...people who have teenagers out there, they know what happens.

- Yeah.

- Conflict and resistance. Yeah. And since people first get confronted with rules and regulations and things not to do when they are kids, the risk is high when you communicate as a safety manager with your adult target groups that they think, "Oh, he think I'm a child, but I'm working on this huge machine. I'm very responsible. I know what I'm doing."

And they resist you. So the trick is that you...and it's hard if you are prescribing things to not kind of unconsciously drift into this parent mode. So you have to find a way to address the others as adults. And how do you do this?

How do you address people as adults? And here, again, it's also important to not drown them with your meta-language, but explain it in their ways or make it about them. Also, be in contact with them, ask them about their situation. Use examples from their background.

And well, we have different situations, different work groups, different machinery, so you have to adapt it to them. Otherwise, they have to kind of find out what's relevant for me, and then they are annoyed. So don't annoy them, and always explain why it's important for them.

So don't just say, "Switch off this button before you start cleaning the machine," even though you might imagine that it's clear that you should...if you don't switch off the button to the meat grinder before you clean it, it should be quite obvious. But repetition, repetition, repetition in an attractive communication from human to human that takes the other one seriously.

For safety people, because for them it's so clear, they get frustrated because they keep repeating the same things. They keep having the same non-compliance incidents. And that easily then gets transferred to even the "compliant people" with annoyance and giving them the feeling that they are disobedient kids.

So always stay modest, always be compassionate, and explain it over and over again because the thing is, when you can't hear it anymore, it's starting to finally sink in at your target group.

- So it sounds like, you know, exercising empathy in terms of, "Okay, I know this and this makes perfect sense to me." And rather than asking, "How could anyone not?" just say, "Well, maybe they don't, it's possible." What about if...so when we were talking about power dynamics, an employee who maybe feels that vulnerability, even if as a leader, you don't think that you've projected that imbalance of power.

If they feel that vulnerability and they approach you more, I don't want to say as a child, but with where they make their vulnerability really clear, how could you sort of bring them up and make them feel safe to be like, "No, this is a relationship of equals?"

- Yeah. Well, again, so take a breather. Don't become impatient. And switch...you don't want to...don't be judgemental, that's the most important thing first. And try to understand their position.

So ask lots of open question. When did this happen? What did you notice? What do you think we can do about it?

- Yeah. And then you're drawing on their expertise.

- Yeah. It's the basic technique, which is kind of simple and active listening, where you don't give them advice directly. That's kind of devaluating them, "I know how to do this." But guide them to get there themselves.

So find out...because often somebody comes to us with a problem, because we are managers, we are smart and we are fast, we instantly know, "Oh, this is the problem. This is what to do." But maybe not. And it puts the other one...it makes them less adult. So ask more questions, try to understand the situation better.

And then ask again or shut up again, and say, "Is there anything else?" This is called [inaudible], this phase. And you might be surprised what you find out. And only then you can ask the person, so what would help them. Is there something I can do so you can do this better next time?

What did you learn from this incident? And then paraphrasing what they say so they really feel hurt. I think giving people the feeling that they are hurt is very magical because they feel valued. And then if you repeat what you understood, they also might understand themselves better and come up with even better solutions than the ones that you as an outsider might suggest.

- Yeah. So all of that is great advice for my next question, which is about creating a speak-up culture. So this is something that I hear a lot speaking with people. But I often ask, and you have just given some examples but you may have others, changing a culture is something that we talk about a lot, but how does one actually go about doing it?

What would your advice be there for that?

- Well, again, as we said before, it starts at the top. When I first started working on speak-up culture, I always take this train and I have these people I always meet there in the restaurant, the train restaurant, and I told them about this. And there's this guy, Pierre, who's always very critical about my stuff.

And he just said, "No, you can't accept people to speak up at work if the top person isn't accessible for uncomfortable truth." So the leadership needs to prove in words, and in deeds, and in priorities how much time and money do they spend on this.

Do they actually share stories about the speak-up situations they encountered in their life, for instance? This is what needs to be done, and show that they are serious about this. And then you need to cascade it down. And this is hard because it's not something you learn in one workshop session because the reaction if somebody comes to us with something uncomfortable, with a concern, or even might say, "You haven't done this right," is always being defensive.

Especially if it touches on slightly ethical topics, it's called moral identity threat because we all think of ourselves as beautiful ethical people, which in a way is good if you think this way, if not, we are psychopaths, but it's also true that we are all work in progress ethically.

We just can't be saints. But if you don't get feedback, you can't improve.

- Yeah, exactly. And I think for all these questions that we ask, the whole discussion, and even the whole podcast is there aren't really any silver bullets, but these are still skills that you could practice, I think.

- Yes. I think that's super important that usually the education that we get in business or in factories is we don't get these skills. You know, it's more as kids are in school, we are more trained to kind of hide our mistakes. We don't want to celebrate our mistakes and see it as an opportunity to learn.

It's so deeply ingrained. We want to be perfect.

- Yeah. That's unfortunate since none of us are.

- Yeah.

- So when we spoke earlier, I want to get more specific on the communication piece, you mentioned three pieces of advice. And I've heard you say them here, but I'm going to go specifically for them. When you're presenting safety information, you have three pieces of advice, and I'd like you to expand on each of them.

So they are always start with the why, make it about them, and use narrative.

- Yeah. So the why is super important because we know...it's also related to the curse of knowledge. We know from research, the less people know, the more you need to explain the why something is important before you can even start on the how.

Why should people follow a strict safety protocol if they don't get why this is important? And how do you get the why? You get the why by explaining well what could happen to me, to the company, in general, if this rule is not observed.

And so this is important for people to understand. And if they understand the why, they're also automatically more motivated to follow the rule because you respect them by explaining it to them well, so they are seen as rational adult people that get this.

And if you have a good why, even the most uncomfortable how is supportable because it's the core of our motivation. And then the one that's make it about them, here, the thing is, of course, as all experts, and especially in safety, you have all these regulations and you want to bring it to the people.

So you are in this mode where it's about you, you want to dump stuff on people. And I get that. I also want...because you are the... It's like I think in "Modern Family" at one time, there is Sofia Delgado, who says, "I have all the answers."

And I could really feel her there. But if the people that could profit so much from your answers are overwhelmed with this and you haven't done the work to connect with their world and explain it from their perspective, it just doesn't help.

- Yeah. You can't really push someone into caring about something. You have to relate it...they have to...

- Yeah.

- Yeah, exactly.

- You have to show them what's in it for them and speak their language. And storytelling works...so this is the third part, the narrative part, is that if you tell people... So what would be one abstract term in safety management?

- I'm not sure. Abstract term like risk assessment or a near miss?

- Like near hit. Let's say you are in a safety training and you talk about near hits. And so it's a pretty self-evident term, but not everybody might understand it. It's like conflict of interest. It's also a fixed term and everybody has a... So you have some feeling what it might be, but if you understand...

So last week I saw my colleague who puts this letter somewhere and it didn't look very stable and [inaudible] to make a story around it. And then people remember that much better than if you say, you know, in this kind of policy language, we always take care to attach our blah, blah, probably abstract term they want to catch all possible letters in the world in one word because they don't want...

So this abstract language can be very difficult. It's like an eye-opening thing was for me once when I did the code of conduct training, and we talked about conflict of interest and people did not understand it, but when you tell them the story, so your aunt asks you if she should buy some stock from your company and you know something that could influence the stock price, then they get it.

- Yeah. I think humans are kind of wired for narrative. There's probably lots of research on that. I'm not familiar with it, but that's just kind of my thought. Yeah. It makes things more concrete, which is what you're saying, I think.

- Yes. It's like...yeah. Another example, firefighters, they work a lot with stories. So they tell the rookies. The older firefighters tell the stories about, in this and this situation, we did this and that because if you don't do this, then you will have an explosion, for instance.

And that way, the new person doesn't have to be in this situation before, but if they recognize a similar situation, they will know what to do. And they will remember that much better than in some abstract guideline on when to not open the window in a fire.

So this kind of sharing of stories is super important. And I work a lot with this in my trainings, where I talk about some general stories that can happen. And if you do this with a group of people, then all of a sudden, they remember their own stories, and all of a sudden, they see, "Oh, yeah, this happened to me. I didn't know what to do."

And they all see, "Oh, this also happened to my trusted colleague. I thought he had never problems, like, this was just me." So that creates this safe space, which is super important.

- It sounds to me there's a connection there where just by using narrative, you're helping people make it about them, right? They see themselves in narratives more than in abstract policies.

- Exactly. And they all see that everybody has these stories. Usually, it's tricky, you don't really dare to talk about them because it could make you vulnerable if the organization is not creating the safe space for you. And you also see it is making their lives more difficult if you carry these stories and you don't really know how to deal with them.

But if you can open up about these stories, even if it's just little things, you create this safety and you can catch little...because you want to catch the little things before they snowball into big things. Because that's often what happens in safety, it's something little, and then nobody pays attention to it, nobody talks about it, and bang. Literally.

- Yeah. It's part of some complex system, and there's some unforeseeable domino effect. You told me also that you think leaders underestimate what safety can do for a company. And you talked about the instrumentalization of ethics, which essentially shows people that you care beyond profit margins and that that has far-reaching effects.

- Yes. And I've been thinking today when I read your questions that, so why is this? And I think it might have some gender issues in it because it's no accident the ethics of caring is a feminist ethical theory, which wants to move away from just, oh, we look from above at the situation, and then we look at rights, or dos and don'ts, or utility, or duties.

And that stays kind of neutral. It's not really connected to the people. So the caring part, that's what feminist ethics brought to ethical theory, makes it more personal. So maybe this caring aspect doesn't really fit into male bravado thinking, that that would be... And there has been cases where also on oil platforms where they've worked on this very macho culture to get people share more about their safety concerns, that they care, so that they don't play the tough guys in scary situations, which is super dangerous, but is a real risk.

And in this example, they approached this in workshops and they started a conversation and a change about this, and they could improve the safety because of this, because they created space for being more vulnerable. And then I also meditated about...so safety is like the basis of the Maslow pyramid.

If you don't have that, how can you be...if you are scared going to work, be it because it's an unsafe environment in the factory or because you might be harassed, for me, also harassment is a safety question because it can harm your health, then you cannot really be productive.

- Just to go in there with listeners if they haven't heard of the Maslow pyramid, it's a hierarchy of needs, as I understand it, right? Like, our basic needs. And one of those is safety, is what you're saying.

- Yeah. So first is your physical well-being, that you have enough to eat. And then it's that you feel safe. And after that, only then comes self-realization. So that's really one of the basics. We don't get much done if we are scared.

- Yeah. Yeah, exactly. If an organization's leadership is consistently underestimating the impact of safety, how do you think a safety professional could try to change that perception?

- Yeah. That's awkward.

- Give me the magic answer.

- Yeah. I wish. Well, you really have to embrace this role that you are an uncomfortable messenger to your leadership and explain it to them over and over again. But not in a confrontational way because also here, you have to make it about them. Because, of course, the top leaders, they have so many things on their minds, and it's easy that something like work safety kind of slides into a third-priority position.

So you have to also make it easier for your leaders to do their thing in safety. Give them some tools where they can quickly and easily do their part. So tell them, "If you want to be a role model in safety, always do this and that," or in every message, address this with one sentence.

How should your people know that you care about safety if you never mention it? And if you mention this and show that this is a priority to you, you will also have more feedback on this because why should people expose themselves and talk to you about a safety issue if you never mention it?

That's super important. There are studies that show this for ethics, if you as a manager, on all levels, because usually it's not only the tone from the top, it's also the tone from the middle. That you always look to the person in front of you, like if you have a mountain guide, you look to the person in front of you.

So that's also important, to give the leaders of all levels tools how they can do this every day, one conversation at a time. And then you will get a lot out of it because as you say also in your motto that this creates trust and it creates motivation because if I feel treated well and cared for, then I will be more motivated.

It's automatic.

- And I think some of the communication tools you talked about in the context of speaking to frontline workers probably also work with, you know, speaking up to leaders and managers, right?

- Exactly.

- As you said, make it about them, use narrative, that sort of technique. And answer that question, yeah, what can I get out of this? Like, looking at my priorities.

- Of course, work safety, if you have accidents, I mean, they're super expensive. You can always give them the numbers. Although I do have the impression, I've been thinking about the business case for safety or for ethics or for diversity, it's all the same. It's always that we have tons of studies that show it's a no-brainer to do this well because it saves you a lot of money, it creates lots of goodwill, it creates lots of motivation and loyalty in your employees, but somehow just the avoiding of cost doesn't motivate people that much.

So maybe we need different goals, like, because we want to be a caring organization, because I want to be an exceptional leader because exceptional leaders care for their people. That's how they get the most impact, if they care for their people.

- Which brings us full circle to it's the ethical and the right thing to do, right?

- Yeah. Of course, you can do all of this because you want to save cost and you want to avoid accidents and numbers and whatever, but if you want to reach people's hearts, you have to talk from the heart.

[inaudible] said this, not me, unfortunately.

- Well, you remembered it, so that's good. I have a little series of questions that I ask all our...three questions that I ask all of our guests. And so this one I'm going to call it the University of Bettina. So if you were to develop your own safety management training curriculum and you were looking at non-technical training, what core human skills do you think are the most important for tomorrow's safety professionals to develop?

- Yeah, I mentioned them already. It's the empathy, the active listening, and addressing the others as smart adults. So that's how you get them in the bow. It's not by dumping rules and procedures on them. And maybe even develop some procedures with them.

- Yeah. Yeah. If you could travel back in time and speak to yourself, this is at the beginning of your career, and you could only give young Bettina one piece of advice, what would that be? It's a tough one.

I know. I know.

- That's a tough one. Plus you didn't prepare me for that one.

- No. Well, I ask these of all our guests.

- Well, yeah. I usually think I would advise myself to try out more stuff, be more courageous, and worry less.

- Yeah. That's a good one. I think that's something we all learn with age and experience.

- With age.Yeah. But it's a pity that it takes us so long.

- Yeah. Well, isn't there an expression about, you know, if I knew then what I know now, like, youth is wasted on the young? Okay. So the last question I wanted to ask is about tools and resources. So are there any practical resources that you think might be particularly helpful to safety managers that are trying to improve these skills?

It could be a book, but it doesn't have to be, it could be a website or concept.

- Yes. So for what I totally love is a tool called Leadership Embodiment because it is all about speaking up and receiving feedback, but it's not only mental, it includes your body. And it comes from a woman.

What's her name? Wendy Palmer. Wendy Palmer, she has the...I don't know, what's done in aikido. And so she comes from this non-violent martial art, where you take your opponent's energy and just take away his desire to attack and get him back on the right track.

So that's a really great technique, and it's rather simple, that shows you how you can include the other person if you have to speak up with them and tell them, "Hey, you can't do this," so they don't get defenses. So you have to be centered.

You don't act out of because you want to be right. Because that's something that's very tempting in safety because you have this righteous rage and somebody did something wrong, and then you can feel so right. So people get a big kick out of this. But that will push the other person in defensiveness and you won't win them over.

So you are centered, you are thinking, "We are in this together," and then you explain why this is important. Leadership Embodiment is a technique. So leadership embodiment, how to give feedback in a non-violent way. And it also helps you not to accept feedback in a way sort of the feedback doesn't hit you in your heart and you're, "Oh," but you imagine that it drops in front of you at the table and you look at it, and you see, oh, is this right?

Is this useful? Is it right? Is it useful? What can we do with it? So you switch it around to a process of learning. So that's super helpful book.

- Yeah. I think that would help most people in just really most aspects of life and relationships as well.

- Yeah. Everything. And what I especially like about it, that it also takes care of the physical aspect of it, which is we often forget because we are not just heads on sticks.

- Bettina, where can our listeners find you on the web?

- Yes. My website is bettinapalazzo.com. Palazzo is one L and two Z, like the palace in Italian.

- Right. Oh.

- And I'm mostly on LinkedIn.

- Okay. Good to know. Well, that's all the time we have for today. Thanks so much for joining us.

- My pleasure, with all these wonderful questions you ask. I really admire that a lot, how you do that.

- Oh, thank you. I'd like to thank our listeners for tuning in, and I would also like to thank the "Safety Labs by Slice" team, an ethical and fun group of people if I ever met one. ♪ [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. ♪ [music] ♪