♪ [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." Today, we're going to talk about trust in the workplace, not trust fall exercises or human pyramids that are built at company retreats, but integrated organizational trust and its companion, care.
Our guest today wrote the number one Amazon best-selling book, "Next Generation Safety Leadership: From Compliance to Care," and today, we're going to talk about the ideas he shared in the book. Clive Lloyd is an Australian psychologist specializing in safety leadership and culture development. He was recently named among the top five global thought leaders and influencers on health and safety by Thinkers360.
Clive is the co-owner and principal consultant with just consulting and developer of the Care Factor Program. For the past 20 years, Clive has assisted organizations to improve their safety performance by developing organizational trust and psychological safety. His experience includes working with companies in the mining, oil and gas, construction, and utilities industries.
He's worked with organizations around the globe. And once again, the book is called "Next Generation Safety Leadership: From Compliance to Care." Clive joins us from Queensland, Australia. Welcome.
- [Clive] Thank you, Mary, and thank you for the very kind introduction. Appreciate it.
- So, let's dive right in because I have a lot of questions. You call trust the currency of leadership. Can you explain what you mean by that?
- Yeah, sure. So, currency for me is something of value, something we can use to invest to get a particular return. And for me, over the years, I've discovered trust probably is the most powerful currency for leaders to use to get return on that investment. And that's outside of safety, that's in general.
But if we look at that safety space, when I first got into it 20 years ago, it seemed to me the primary currency was rules. You know, let's invest a lot in rules with the outcome being hopefully, compliance, you know, so people comply to these rules. And what I learned was that's not a particularly effective use of a currency. There are sort of unforeseen consequences often when we use rules as the currency.
And again, what I've learned over the years is when we invest with trust, when we actually use that as our currency, not only do we get outcomes in terms of safety, return on investment, if you like, in terms of safety, but it's across the board. And what I've discovered, in fact, is you can't really do much at all without that.
If we aren't prepared to invest in developing trust, nothing works as well as it could. So, it's that simple thing for me is leaders, you've got at least a currency available to you, please use it rather than relying on other... I think rules still are used as a currency.
To me, it's lucky there's a cryptocurrency of safety, right? It's a dodgy investment. Possibly it can work sometimes in some areas if you get lucky. It's not a very reliable currency to use, trust is. It's a really reliable currency with really good returns on investment. That's all I meant, Mary, by trust as a currency.
- The skills that it takes to build trust are often referred to as soft skills, which, when I hear that it seems a little bit dismissive as though these skills are sort of optional or weak. But that's not the view you take. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
- Yeah, you're absolutely right. They still are and sort of marginally frustratingly for me referred to as soft skills. I get what people are saying. There's the hard skills, like learning engineering and that building bridges stuff. That is really, really hard, and I get that and I'm glad people have those skills. I certainly don't. But what I've also learned over the years is without these allegedly soft skills, it is very, very challenging to bring people along on the journey to create trust in fact.
In fact, if we really want to invest that currency of trust, these allegedly against soft skills are crucial. So, other people I've heard refer to them as crucial people skills, and they actually are. My background is clinical psychology. And, of course, once again, these particular skills of engagement, bringing people along, actually just gaining that full engagement, building relationship with people, they're absolutely crucial in the field of clinical psychology, of course, but they're crucial leadership skills to me too.
If we don't have those skills, everything else becomes more challenging. And I don't think they're soft, ironically, I think they're rather hard. I think they're hard in terms of difficult, and I think that's why maybe sometimes we do dismiss them. They're not easy.
They don't come intuitively to some people. They, like any other skill, can take a lot of work, a lot of practice, and a lot of development. And hey, leaders are very, very busy people as a rule. And maybe therefore the preference to be, you know, on what we see may more is the tangible skills that we can do things with to build that bridge or to invest in that. I get that.
I get it's really important. But again, these crucial people skills make everything else better. And there's limits to what we can actually do if we don't [inaudible 00:06:09] have them. So yeah, I don't see them as soft skills at all. I think I do make that quite clear in the book.
I get why people see them that way or frame them that way, but I think we would do well to start framing them, you know, differently.
- Yeah. I tend to call them core skills versus as opposed to technical skills, hard skills being technical.
- That's a better frame.
- That's my preference because they are core to pretty much everything.
- Yeah, especially effective leadership.
- So, what is the relationship between trust and care?
- Yeah, great question. So, we may discuss this later, Mary, but for me, just that notion of demonstrating care to our people. It's what I describe in the book, the word the academics often use for it is benevolence. Academics say why use one word when you...one syllable when you can use four. But I love the word by the way, benevolence, but what it's hinting at there is not just caring.
I'm of the belief and I think I overall have a very kind view of human nature I believe, but this notion of caring is actually not enough. I truly believe most leaders care about their teams to a more or less degree. What we've found though is just caring is actually not enough.
It's a great start. We actually need to demonstrate care, and that's a different thing. Often when we're doing our leadership courses, I ask two questions back to back. Question one, put your hand up, I often say, if you believe that leaders within the company actually do care about their teams.
Now, frequently, most if not all hands will go up. And I believe that is sincere. I believe that is genuine. I follow that up though with question, put your hand up if you believe leaders in the company are really good at demonstrating care to their people. And it's interesting, Mary, hardly any hands go up, right? And so there is this gap, and it's often shocking to leaders in the room when they see that in front of them.
And we talk about the difference. And the big difference here why this is important is when I then do the same workshops at the crew level, the workforce level, and I ask them question one, that is, do you believe leaders care about their teams? Often, not many hands will go up. And think about it. How would they know? If we're not actually demonstrating care, how would they know?
So, you know, a lot of what now...so the link between care and trust, and again, we may discuss this later, when we look at the research, and, you know, this is intuitive to many people, but let's go with the research. I'm a bit of a research-driven creature. We look at what constitutes, in other...what do leaders need to demonstrate consistently to create trust and sustain trust?
And there are those three core factors, integrity, ability or competence, and then again, what the academics call benevolence. care if you like. And so it's that care factor that, we'll probably come to this, is the most powerful in terms of overcoming mistrust. And think about it.
If we're aiming to bring people along on the journey to create that trust, how can we even begin to do that if our workers perceive that we simply don't care about them? It's just not going to happen. And so, while the other factors of building trust are really, really important, it is that one component, the care factor that really tends to stand out, especially in terms of overcoming mistrust.
So care in this context is just one of three aspects, three factors, if you will, of creating that trust.
- Yeah. And I mean, we're here now. Let's talk about it now. You had mentioned the three components. And you said they all...sorry, can you repeat them again just for the audience?
- Yeah, absolutely.
- Ability, integrity.
- Yeah. This is not my model. This comes from Mayer et al. So, it's probably one of the most widely cited models of organizational trust. Perhaps outside of organizations, you know, with our families and friends, it may look a little bit different, although I think it probably does permeate all. But yeah, there are three core factors. Integrity, so in other words, doing what I said I would do.
It infers things like honesty, reliability, and so forth. I think most people would understand intuitively that we need to demonstrate integrity. It's not all about those core skills that we were just talking about, Mary. Ability or competence is in there. In other words, as leaders, we need to demonstrate that we are good at what we're supposed to be good at.
It doesn't mean we're good at everything. Nobody is. But we do need to demonstrate to our people that we're good at what we're supposed to be good at. Then again, that third factor is benevolence, demonstrated care. Now, we do need all three. For example, I might really care about my people and demonstrate that. I may even demonstrate integrity.
But if my people perceive I'm no good at all at my job, I'm really incompetent at my job, it's going to be really challenging to create and sustain. Now, equally, I can be really good at my job, highly competent, and even demonstrate integrity. But if my workers perceive that I simply don't care about them, once again, it's going to be incredibly challenging to build and sustain trust.
Now, again, sort of all three are important, but different ones stand out as more powerful depending on the situation.
- Yeah. So, you had talked about there's one that stands out in terms of creating trust, and then there's one that stands out in terms of overcoming mistrust.
- Yeah, that's right. And again, not moving away from the fact that we do need to demonstrate all three, but when we look at the regression models, to create trust in the first place relies a lot more perhaps on that integrity piece. And again, I think people would understand that intuitively if we get a sense that somebody is lacking in integrity.
We click on this step really quickly sometimes intuitively. If somebody's lacking in integrity, they're not honest, they're not genuine, they're not sincere, they don't follow through on promises, again, really challenging to create that trust in the first place. So, integrity does stand out there. What is interesting, and I found this research really interesting quite a number of years ago, to overcome mistrust, which is a different thing, it's that care factor, that benevolence factor that really stands out.
But again, if you think about it, it does make sense. If there is existing mistrust amongst the team, we still get this strong sense that leaders simply don't care about us. It's going to be incredibly challenging to overcome that mistrust. So, why did we call our flagship program the Care Factor? Well, because of that, that's the space that we often end up working in, is actually overcoming pockets of mistrust.
By the way, it's always easy to create trust in the first place than it is to overcome any existing mistrust. But we've learned we cannot even hope to do that unless we do demonstrate care. There's a saying, I think right at the beginning of my book, "Trust arrives on foot, but leaves on horseback." Yeah.
So, in other words, it can take quite a while to build, but yeah, it can go very, very quickly. And to overcome that, we have to put all of our attention on making sure the workers understand that we actually do care, and, in fact, we can actually demonstrate that.
- Two things that occurred to me while you were talking is that you almost never, I'm sure, start with a blank slate, right? I mean, organizations don't...especially by the time they're hiring you, there's something going on. But the other thing you said was pockets of mistrust, which illustrates that it's not a blanket...something that I hadn't really thought about before.
It's not a blanket thing, like, everybody trusts or everybody mistrust. Sometimes you can have a 70% good, trusting, but maybe there's one team that or that sort of thing.
- Yeah. And this is what complicates this...
- Yeah. That's a little more hopeful.
- It is. It is. And it can go the other way too because it can hold some organizations back. But we often talk about culture, for example, as this blanket thing. And organizations often bring us in and their request to us is, "Clive, we want to change the culture." And already I'm starting to think, "Oh, gosh, here we go." And they often ask, "How long will it change, Clive, you know, to move from a level 2 culture to a level 4 culture?"
There are too many variables there, right? And it's largely because we don't have one culture. We always talk in terms of the culture. We don't have one culture. I would suggest strongly that every team to a degree has its culture. And it may well be that overall, the culture exists at, you know, a level 3 or something like that, but there will be these pockets that maybe one or two pockets up at level 4, another pocket or two down at level 2.
Despite the fact that on the website, the values are the same throughout the policies and procedures, all of that stuff is the same everywhere you look, what does that generally come down to? It generally comes down to leadership. And in this case, local leadership. That particular leader, for whatever reason, has been able to create the climate where things like trust and psychological safety can thrive, whereas quite simply, other leaders have not.
And again, I'm not in the business of blaming leaders, as I write also in the book, we can blame or we can learn that, you know, very popular mentor right now, I extend that to leadership. We can blame or we can learn, but let's learn and so forth. So, absolutely, this is very, very variable.
Within one organization, it's not one thing, it's not one culture, and we need to attend to that.
- So, you were just now talking about levels, and I do want to zoom out again to the organizational level. In the book, you described five levels of organizational functioning in the evolution or the movement from compliance to care.
Yeah. So, if it's all right with you, I'd like to just quickly go through them and have you explain briefly what you mean by each. Yeah. Great.
- So apathetic is the first one,.
- Apathetic. So, before I get into the various stages, let me just say a couple of things. First up to quote the famous statistician, George Box, he once said...let me think of the quote. All models are wrong, but some are useful. And I think most sort of safety culture development tools would fall into that category, including the one I'm using.
And the one I've been using now for many years effectively is Professor Patrick Hudson's model of cultural maturity, but that's 20-odd years old now. And why I think it's useful still is because when I work with organizations, I believe in meeting people where they are. My own preference is not really to talk about safety culture because I don't think that's really a thing, even though I've just a wrote a book about it, right?
In other words, I certainly believe in culture, and I believe you've got a maturing culture, well, safety culture would sit as a function of that, if you like. With Hudson's model, I always found it useful for organizations, many of whom use that anyway, so let me meet them where they are. It was useful for helping them to work out where they currently sit to some degree. And I think that is useful.
If we can get a bit of an idea about where we currently sit, possibly even with regard to where other similar organizations or similar industries sit, that can be useful. More to the point if we know where we currently are, that can help us to really work out quite clearly what we need to do to progress, what we need to do... And so I've found it really useful.
Hudson's model, again, that 20-something years old, it didn't include many of the things that we do now to work with clients. Things like psychological safety, for example, was not part of that original model. Other aspects...Hudson's original model had those five stages drawn as very discreet entities. That is, you're either in one of those boxes or you're not. And in my experience, it's not actually like that.
There might be elements of the organization that sit...they straddle maybe a few of those different areas. And so for me, I just made some tweaks to that model. I drew it as not just five discreet boxes but as a journey because we can backwards too. And we might come to that. And so there was other things like trust, trust was part of Hudson's model.
He did concede that increasing levels of trust tended to be associated with more mature organizations, but he didn't really sort of go into any depth on that, whereas for me, it's absolutely core. So, there were a few things like that. So I made a few changes for the book.
And so, similarly though, to Patrick Hudson, those apathetic, let's start with that. Really in those cultures, safety is just it's something we've got to do, right? The damn regulators and make us do that. There's no great wish to have it there. It's like, you know, we work in a dangerous company. Incidents happen.
And there's a resignation to that. It's really about avoiding punishment, so managers avoiding punishment from the regulators, for example. For the workforce, it's more about avoiding punishment from the managers and so forth. So, it's based purely on putting the tick in the box, avoiding trouble, staying outta trouble. Now, unfortunately, that will first up quite naturally, they hurt way more people, particularly really serious injuries.
But there's a lot of fear amongst the workforce because incidents are generally seen purely as the fault of the workers. You know, they are stupid. I've heard that said, they're stupid. They don't follow procedure. They don't speak up, they take shortcuts. So, intrinsically, it's about blaming the workforce. Now, where you have blame, high levels of blame, you have high levels of fear and wishing to avoid punishment, so secrets are kept from management.
There's us versus them, and secrets are kept. As I also write in the book, we can't fix secret. We certainly can't fix. So, apathetic looks like that. Now, reactive, safety is a priority. So, we've moved a bit there, the trouble is it's often more of a priority of after an incident.
That's when we get the action, right? And still, it tends to come back to the workforce. They might start employing some, you know, BBS tools and things like that, where effectively it's still blame-based safety, BBS sort of thing. So, we still tend to blame the workers if we progress involving then...and as the name suggests, now we've made a bit of a shift.
We're now bringing our people in. We understand they can contribute. In fact, their contribution as we mature becomes more and more valuable. We realize they are effectively the experts in the jobs that they do. They understand the nuances of the work, where the new policy fits perfectly, and sometimes where they have to adapt it just to get the job done.
And there's that realization that if we bring them in, if we involve the workforce, then our systems work better, our procedures work better. And just quietly, of course, as we bring in the workforce, what we're also increasing there are levels of trust. So, fear starts to drop and trust starts to come up. Now, when my whole team starts to feel that level of trust, that's what we would refer to as that psychological safety.
So, we're starting that process of involving. Now, proactive, of course, that has just become just what we do. We see that incidents happen because of a whole range of variables, including leadership decisions, including management decisions, the workforce then are fully involved in safety right across the board.
Ultimately, we get to what we call the integrated. And it's integrated because safety's now not a separate thing. We don't view safety as this separate entity. It's just how we do work. And for me, I love to hear this. The level 5 industries tend to not even talk about safety very much, whereas in the lower realm in safety, we create this whole separate world about safety.
We have the safety team who hold the workforce to account and so forth. Level 5, that's rare. We talk about doing work well and reliably with the full and welcome collaboration from the workforce. Trust is very high. Fear of speaking up, fear of admitting mistake is essentially gone. The us versus them is largely replaced by we.
And, of course, because of that, because we've got the full involvement of the workforce, we tend to identify more risks, more hazards very proactively. If we do that, we can manage and mitigate more risks. And, of course, naturally, these flows do they tend to have way less than their fair share of incidents, especially the serious ones. So, that's roughly the progression.
Now, for me, the things that stand out the most there as we mature, we increasingly bring the workforce in. We listen to them. We respond to them, people that are now involved. And the other big thing for me, of course, is the elevating, the ongoing elevating aspect of trust and psychological safety. So, that's in a very nutshell version, Mary, the progression as I see it.
- And I think it's important you mentioned this to say that it's not like a predetermined pathway that goes from this step to this step, or that's even...you know, that has, okay, we've been here for five years, now we automatically move up.
- Yeah.
- You said that you can move backwards as well, and different teams or different areas perhaps of an organization can be different. But I'm curious about one thing, whether you're moving sort of forwards or backwards or trust going up or down, do organizations ever sort of skip? Like, would they go from reactive, skip over-involvement and then become proactive, or kind of is it more like an evolution, a maturity?
- Yeah. Look, it doesn't have to be perfectly linear. It doesn't have to be at all. In fact, let's just say I'm a...so my company's at level 2 and we have aspirations of course, to progress. My thought would be, why would you plan to progress to level 3? Why would you not seek to put into place the systems required and so forth to actually, at least start the journey to be at level 4?
And so I believe that is possible to do. In reality, it does tend to be a bit more linear than that. For example, if I'm at level 2, which is not involving at all, and I want to be at level 4, which involves a great degree of involving our people, there is still, of course, that necessity to start that process. And the workforce, for example, might be a little reticent.
They might be kind of hesitant to get too involved because last time they did get involved, they were punished for it. So, you know, it still tends in reality to progress in that way. But my suggestion to companies that we work with is, let's plan for...rather than arduous going through 2, 3 to 4, let's look at what we can set up now to actually be up there.
But in reality, it tends to be yeah, moving through those areas for various reasons. Now when we go backwards, it's often not linear at all in that...and this is interesting, Mary, because the journey upwards tends to be linear. I have seen organizations who may have been at level 4, at least most of their teams would be at level 4, they can go right back to level 2 very, very quickly.
All it takes is one executive, for example, one change at the executive level who actually undoes very quickly...again, trust arrives on foot, but leaves on horseback, and something like that can cause an instant regression. The other classic, of course, in the safety field is we can be existing quite nicely at, you know, level 3, maybe level 4, and then we can regress to level 2, especially after an incident, particularly a serious incident.
I tend to gauge more than anything where a company is sitting largely based on how they respond after an incident because it's all too easy. In fact, almost automatic to regress and to go straight back down to level 2. So yeah, it doesn't have to be linear on the way up, it does tend to work out that way in the real world.
Moving backwards, often not linear at all, there's often a big jump there, unfortunately.
- And I mean, you're looking at things through the lens of trust. So it makes sense that after a serious incident, everyone feels vulnerable after a serious incident and so trust would be at risk at that time, right?
- Especially depending on how that was dealt with.
- I'd like to shift a little bit.
- Sorry, Mary.
- Yes. We've got a bit of a delay, folks. So yeah. I wanted to shift actually and talk a little bit about behaviorism. So, in the book, you describe it as extremely common. You say that while the field of psychology has moved on from this approach, you don't find that the field of management has moved on from the approach.
And do you think that's still the case? And, you know, what's wrong with behaviorism and...? Yeah. What do you see when you get out there?
- All right. This is a big topic. I could well get hate mail from this. I often get trolled on LinkedIn when I even dare suggest that there may be better ways. Look, let me put it this way. As psychologists, particularly when we're trained in the clinical aspects of psychology, we, of course, go through all the various modalities that are available and have been available in psychology over the years right back, if you'll to Freudian psychology, the psychodynamic approach, right up to really, really modern things like EMDR and so forth.
So, what we learned...I went through uni by the way, in the '90s, the early '90s, been doing this a long time, Mary. And even then, even back in the '90s, behaviorism was largely dead. And there are reasons for that. And behaviorism, again, was purely based on only studying observable behaviors.
People were not interested...and Skinner himself, the father of behaviorism openly stated, not remotely interested in cognition, and especially those emotions. Not interested. All we want to do is look at observable behaviors and seek to change those three conditioning, usually based on reward and punishment mentality.
And so first up, you know, just hearing that, I could understand why maybe psychology had moved on from that. The very things that tend to drive behaviors are cognition and emotions, and behaviorism just is not interested. And so to me, behaviorism never really worked with humans. It barely works when you're training your dog, right?
If you've got a really smart dog...we've got a Kelpie, Australian sheph dog, essentially. They are smart as a whip, sharp as a whip. And even some behavior, they see through it. They see through it. They're just interested in getting the reward. And if they can get away having the reward without going through the behavior, they'll do it.
And that's dogs. And most of the research and behaviorism was done on dogs and pigeons. Humans are just a tad more complex than that. So, behaviorism for me was out. Most psychologists, in fact, all psychologists that I know would not choose to use behaviorism as a modality of choice.
They just would not because we've evolved, we've moved past that. We've got much better ways to look at that. But we still use it in safety in the form of BBS, behavior-based safety. BBS is based on behaviorism. And so, again, what we're missing in BBS is what actually drives those behaviors in the first place. And, unfortunately, BBS lent itself to a lot of those sort of rules.
If you follow the rules, you know, you get rewarded. If you don't, well, you get punished. And so all we learn to do as human beings is we'll just avoid the punishment, but we just don't talk about it. We just won't admit a mistake. Or when we did sort of move away from the policy, we just don't let management know that. So, it's really fixing nothing.
It's also, again, the unfortunate consequences...don't get me wrong, well intended. I don't mean to attack people who run behavior by safety things as I believe most companies that brought BBS in did so with a good intent. I really believe that. But look at the unintended consequences, right? Still to this day, what we'll do is when our people have been good...and listen to the language here, right?
You can't get away from this. When people have been good, done the right thing, okay? Reward that. And what does this look like in safety? We've been that magical a million hours LTI-free. See that on LinkedIn every day, right? There's those self-congratulatory posts.
We've got a million hours LTI-free. What do we do? Well, reward maybe a cash bonus for that. And what does that literally do? It incentivizes non-reporting. It's an unintended consequence. Plus, think about it, Mary, when we talk about behavior-based safety, whose behavior are we talking about?
It's not the board's behavior, it's not the SLTs behavior, it's the workforce behavior. You cannot hold that position effectively without coming to the conclusion that why do we have incidents because of them, because of the workforce? And again, think culturally, what we're doing is blaming the workforce. You can only have that at level 1 and 2.
And I've found over these, it's incredibly challenging for companies to move from a level 2 to level 3 with BBS. Because even with the best of intent, it comes back to a blame-the-worker approach. So, for all of those and many more reasons, Mary, yeah, I'm not a big advocate for BBS. I believe it's well-intended, but I do get a lot of, not hate mail, but I do get a lot of very angry people when I actually even dare to suggest that they may be better ways.
Most of them just happen to run BBS consultancies, but anyway.
- Well, we're not trying to court controversy here, but I am interested, over the course of your career, have you seen a change in the field of management? So, you say, some people haven't caught up, but has that changed?
- I believe so, Mary. I believe it is changing. I believe it's been becoming increasingly untenable to take that old behavior-based pointy-finger approach. The punishment and reward mentality I believe is changing because awareness is changing. There's ample research now to demonstrate that things like trust and psychological safety are not just nice-to-haves, they're not just these esoteric concepts.
Project Aristotle demonstrated that psychological safety, for example, is the number one predictor of high-performing teams. I'm yet to find in the safety field a stronger predictor of safety performance than trust and psychological safety. So, if for no other reason that, you know, the bottom line will improve, I think there's this movement away from the old command-control approach, if you will.
I think command-control leadership is well past its use by day and I do see that changing. Again, many large companies, many large corporations, they're not that agile. And if that's the way they've been taught to lead and that is part of their indeed culture, it's slow to change, but I believe there is quite a significant shift going on right now.
In the safety field that is definitely happening. As we talk about the new view of safety, which most people now are familiar with that I believe has gained a significant momentum is making changes. Again, with the new view, there is the danger that there are so many of these different models, a bit like psychology, right?
In psychology, we've got, yeah, behaviorism, cognitive psychology, humanistic psychology, positive psych, all these different models that we can use. And we tend to be eclectic in our approach, drawing from what we believe is best in safety. What have you got? You've got safety II. You got safety differently. You got HOP.
You got resilience engineering. And what I find is, for the most part, safety leaders out there don't really care what you call it. They just want to know what's going to help. And so for me, in my workshops, in my training, I tend to avoid talking about the models because it's not the model and there's ample research around that. But what is central to the new view models really is bringing our people in, engaging our people, building trust.
And, you know, you can have the best of intent. You want to, you know, just change to doing safety II or safety differently. That will only work if you first overcome the mistrust of the workforce. Otherwise, regardless of its merit, any new change, the workforce going to sit there saying, here we go again.
So, trust is central, but to me there's definitely a shift on here.
- I think there's a common perception that leaders in...I say dysfunctional organizations. Organizations that are not high on trust, let's say, there's a perception that the leaders don't want to invest in trust. But you've stated that when they fail to invest in trust, it's not usually because they don't want to, it's because they don't know how to.
They don't know how to cultivate it. You know, tell me more about that, and then let's talk a bit about how leaders, how listeners can start to work on building trust.
- Yeah. Look, and then that is my experience over the last 20 years. I really believe most leaders it's not that they don't want trust or are against trust, I don't think anybody is when they're being rational, they see it as a nice to have, but again, they've got their own demands. This is why I'm not about blaming leaders. They've got their own demands.
They've got their own KPIs. And for them, again, if we go back to that language that you raised at the start, Mary, these soft skills, sure, nice. They would be really nice to have. And we have these KPIs and we need to deliver and this therefore is important. And it's this whole notion we've only got so much time, we've only got so many resources. Sure, if we can build trust in the meantime, do it.
But I also need this, this, this, this, and this doing. And it's often only when we've gone through some of the research with our clients to talk about that this, this, this, and this are actually incredibly assisted by having a culture that's high on trust and psychological safety. Everything works better. Pointing out that the number one predictor of high-performing teams is psychological safety.
And so it's making the case for change. And to be fair, they need that. You know, trust is not going to be necessarily high on their agenda if they feel it's not going to impact the bottom line. And so I believe it's not that they don't want it, I think most of them do, but then there's the notion, how do we do that?
And I actually think it's just seen as difficult and maybe related to if we frame what we're talking about here as soft skills, well, you know, those are esoteric, kind of they're soft, they're not very tangible. And so they actually can't imagine that this can be very easy to do. And there's the irony, right?
It's hard, not soft. And so it's interesting. I honestly believe most companies...yeah, yeah, it's all great. We want that. We want a trusting team. But gee, how do we do that? How do we get our leaders to create...
It seems to be incredibly challenging, arduous, perhaps a very long journey. And those facts alone are enough for many leaders to say, look, we'll come back to that.
- Before we get into some specific ways to talk about building trust, I do want to ask you about some ways that safety leaders might inadvertently be undermining trust. Can you think of a few examples?
- Yeah. And I like the fact, Mary, that you've got that word inadvertently there again because often the things they're doing are very well intended, but again, often with unintended consequences and unintended negative consequences. Let me rattle through a few because there's a lot. for example, a goal of zero harm. a goal of zero harm.
It would make sense philosophically. I mean, let's face it. We don't want a goal of a little bit of harm, right? Let's just have a little bit of harm. Let's just hurt three people. How about Nigel, Phillip, and Terry? That makes no sense at all.
But the thing is psychologically, a goal of zero harm we know from the research is actually quite harmful. It's a binary goal. It's zero or it's not zero. Now, unfortunately, again, the unintended consequence is some organizations have become a little bit overzealous. And then, for example, they become intolerant of incidents, intolerant.
Now, because when that happens, we send messages out, and the message often received by the workforce is just keep quiet. And so we find reporting tends to go underground. Now, again, we can't fix a secret. Well-intended. And again, there's some fairly current research from 2018, I think it's called the Zero Paradox now that found that organizations with that zero goal tend to have more life-changing incidents and fatalities.
Not less, more. And that is often a function of the fact that reporting goes down. We tend to be reluctant to, you know, report incidents or report near misses. So, again, really well-intended, but just doesn't tend to work out. Over here in the mining industry, for example, organizations proudly display these things on their shirts, you know, zero harm, zero incidents.
And I was at a site recently, they had beyond zero. I'm thinking, what? Beyond zero. Are they going to reincarnate people now? It all gets a little bit...
- Negative numbers.
- Negative numbers. We're going to start reincarnating people and get...it's gotten a little bit silly. And so these are what I would refer to often in organizations as the safety platitudes. Often may be meant with sincerity, but they're viewed by the workforce as platitudes. The other big ones, of course, safety is our number one priority. Well, no, it's not or it is until it isn't.
You know, priorities change and the workforce know this. Here's a recent case study. A company I was working with, they had a lost time injury, and quite a nasty one. But what they did, they brought this fellow back who'd been injured, they brought him back on light duties. Now, again, sometimes that works for both parties. It can be good to get people back to work and so forth.
On this occasion, it was done purely for metrics. In other words, so it did not count as a lost time injury because, hey, zero harm, right? I don't want to spoil that. So, that's happened, everybody knows that's happened. And then the general manager just days after this was doing a state of the nation address. And first words out of his mouth to the workforce was, I just wish to remind everybody that your safety is our highest priority.
And you could hear a pin drop. I know in their heads they're thinking, "Yeah, right." But think about the damage that is doing...well-intended, sounds nice, but what's increasing here is cynicism. What's decreasing is integrity and trust. So, in other words, we're actually just kneecapping the culture from doing these well-intended things. I don't know how long we've got, I got all the rest of these, things like safety walks, Mary, which most companies do.
Now, unfortunately, the way they do their safety walks is been sort of polluted by BBS, if you will. So, their idea of a safety walk is all managers, and they usually have KPIs around this, by the way, they'll don the hard hat, they'll put the high vest on, and they're out there with a pad and the pen and they're looking for bad stuff, right? They're looking for violations.
And so first up, it shouldn't be called a safety walk, it should be called an unsafety walk because let's face it, that's what they're looking for. Now, the KPI often is managers need to do eight safety walks a month, effectively, two a week. Now, very few of these leaders enjoy doing them for obvious reasons. They're not pleasant.
So, what they tend to do is leave it to the end of the month, right? And then you get these swarms of leaders across sites all looking for bad stuff. And it's not like the workforce don't know they're coming because they do this every month. And so their supervisors will be saying, "They'll be out soon. You know, go and have a tidy-up." So, leaders, number one, they're not seeing things as they actually are anyway. And where there's fear, you get bad data.
It's just a tourism. And so think about that. What is that doing for trust? They're out there looking for bad stuff. That's not helping trust, that's creating fear. They're not seeing things as they really are anyway because people have already tidied it up. That's what I would refer to effectively as safety clutter.
But we keep doing it. And what we're doing is we're not helping... Now, all I say to the leaders is if you really believe you need a KPI around this, and by the way, you don't. If you really want to wreck safety quickly, just have lots of KPIs on it. How about this, rather than a KPI of these alleged safety walks, how about this as a KPI? I've said this to one leader.
What percentage of your people's children's names do you know? And let's say that was 40%. What would that also infer that I've been doing? Well, I've been out there, I've been having conversations, God forbid about not even work or safety, just conversations, building relationships, building trust.
Now, before your people have a go at me, I know it probably wouldn't work in practice because you get some leaders going out, "Right, you, what are your kids' names? Got them. What are your kids' names? Got them." I know that would happen. But the spirit of what I'm saying remains true, just go for a walk. You know, you don't need to label it. Just go for a walk.
And while you're out walking, engage in what I often call and what Ed Schein called humble inquiry. That is what is it you need from us to do your job well and safely? Tell me about that new policy. Where does it fit for you? Where maybe have we had to adapt it just to get the job done and so forth? Those really build relationships, they'll create trust, and actually, get us useful data.
So, there's much that is done in the safety field in the name of safety and well-intended that actually has very serious unintended consequences, That loses trust, builds fear, and just really gets in the way. And so part of my role, part of our role as a company is organizations make that shift from, you know, the old BBS fear-based approach, punishment-reward mentality to genuine engagements, to bringing the workforce in, collaborating.
And it just makes all the difference in the world.
- I think when we talk about intention too, there's something you said at the very beginning about the message people get, which reminds me that there can be a gap between what you say, the words that are said, and the message that is received.
- Absolutely.
- And I think that's what you're talking about.
- Absolutely. And again, that's a whole other realm of the safety field, whether it's work as imagined and work as done that most people would be familiar with. But you are right, the message as imagined and the message as received, there is often a very good gap.
- So, let's talk about building trust then. Let's get into something practical. And can you talk about a few ways that listeners can go to work today and just start, make a start at investing in trust?
- Yeah. And look, I've already touched on one in that last story. And that is to get out there. Not in a formalized KPI way, but just that visible, felt leadership that is a bit of cliche. However, there are some downsides sometimes to visible, felt leadership in that it depends...when we're visible, what are people seeing?
And when they're feeling, that's the felt part, what are they feeling? So, it's all right to have visible, felt leadership. You got to wonder what they're feeling, right? And if I'm walking around with a KPI and a pointed finger, what they're feeling is fear and resentment. That's not effective. What we need them to feel from the visible, felt leadership is trust, genuine care, engagement. So, that's a different approach from leadership.
Put your KPIs away. Just get out there, engage in humble inquiry. So, what works in this...I guess, let me flip it around. When I ask the workforce themselves, which we always do, what would be an indicator that your leader actually demonstrates care? What would be an example of that?
I think that's a really valuable question. Now, some of them...you know, they give me numerous things. By far, Mary, the most common response I get is a simple one. And they say, I know they care because they listen to us. That they listen to us. Now, of course, that does infer that once again, I have been out there, maybe I've been engaging in that humble inquiry.
Not only that, I demonstrate that I have listened by coming back to them. Even if there's something that they think would be a good idea that for whatever reason I cannot deliver upon, I will still go back and explain my challenges around doing that. And so just that whole notion of either bringing people in or going out to them is a really important thing.
For my own team, we do this as a company, but I recommend other organizations do this is to structurally embed within the way that we do work an opportunity to bring their people in and to share what we often call the brutal facts.
That's from a tool called the Stockdale Paradox. But in other words, just to share their current challenges. And then, of course, very importantly, we listen to those. We don't judge them. We don't have to agree nor disagree. We just listen. And then we work out together with these challenges.
What we can control, what we can influence, and we come up together with an action plan to resolve those challenges. Now, those should not be hit-and-miss occurrences. When we structurally embed those opportunities into the way that we do work, we are teaching our teams some very, very important things. Number one, our voices are important.
Our voices are important to leadership. Secondly, it is safe to share bad news or allegedly bad news. That's really the essence of psychological safety. When the workforce realize that they can do that without fear of negative consequence, we start, of course, in quite a strong way to build trust. Maybe even start overcoming mistrust because we're demonstrating care.
Before you know it, great things are happening here too because as I mentioned before, we can't fix a secret. Well, maybe now there's no real need to keep secrets. Everything's out there on the table. And when that happens, we pick up on more challenges. We pick up on what we call the pain points.
And if there's one very valuable thing to do in safety as a proactive measure, it's to hear from people about their pain points. And it might just be that a job is overly arduous. It seems uncomfortable, clunky, it doesn't seem to work very well. Those often are predictors of incidents that may happen down the track. If we can get our people to start talking about the pain points, working out what we can control and influence, that I've learned can really offset a lot of potential damage later on.
Not just physical damage, but psychological damage, morale, and all of those things. So, those are really some of the basic things that we can do. The language that we use, of course. I talk a lot in the book about our use of language, making it very intentional, very conscious language. There's a lot of language in safety that is really unhelpful, Mary.
And I discover this 20 years ago when I first started. And how I started, by the way, that brought me in to do counseling after a fatality. So, you know, they brought me in to do this very humanistic work. And I couldn't believe it. As I was doing that, all these other processes had started by the companies. Things like investigations, looking for violators, looking for offenders, breaches of golden rules, and safety officers.
And again, I remember thinking at the time, where else in the organization do we use that language? We used it in safety. I mean, think about it, who doesn't love being investigated by an officer? And we need to move, change our language, get rid of that stuff. There's a chapter in the book about moving away from that language and using more proactive, more conscious, more trust-building language.
So, again, inadvertently, often just through the words that we use, and we're often taught to use those phrases in safety, that's another thing leaders inadvertently can do to actually break trust. Those are a few, Mary.
- Yeah. So, one that I'm interested in because we're talking about developing relationships and trust, and one way to do that is to converse. And one way to converse is to ask questions. But you talk about assumptive questions. And I think that's a good thing to pull out.
- Yeah. Look, I think, by the way, I believe a leader's best friend are questions, not just leaders incidentally, I think parents of adolescent children especially. But parents, partners, friends, questions are really powerful. From a brain perspective, there's various reasons... We tend to steer people's attention by the types of questions that we ask.
They tend to switch our conscious brain on. So, we need to be mindful of that. For example, assumptive questions tend to have an agenda. They tend to start with things like, look, don't you agree that...? In other words, if you don't agree, there's something probably wrong with you and so forth. And again, people often ask these questions totally innocently not realizing the impact of those questions and so forth.
Yeah. Don't you agree that that would be a good idea? There's almost a compulsion to agree, otherwise, oh, geez, I'm wrong here and so forth. So, we need to watch these assumptive questions. They're more manipulative ones. We can ask reasonable assumptive questions. Here's one from a facilitator's point of view.
I often hear rookie facilitators at the end of a section say, "Right, are there any questions?" For example. Now, you know, a nice, easy response from the audience is, well, no. And again, where you can ask useful assumptive questions might be more along the lines of, "Okay, what questions do you have?"
So, I'm making an assumption that there are questions out there. So, things like that can make a difference. I do, though, talk in the book about the difference between above-the-line questions and below-the-line questions. Or do you use psychological jargon internally versus externally locus questions? So, safety particularly with a BBS mindset tend at least historically to have questions like after an incident, who's to blame?
Why did they do that? They're blame-based questions, as opposed to say the new view questions will be more along the lines of what happened. Takes the person out of that. What are we going to learn from this? What will we do differently as a result? And so by shifting the questions that we use, we can shift the focus of...well, we can either fall into blaming or learning.
And again, we can blame or we can learn, we don't get to do both. A lot of that depends on how we actually operate with those questions. And it's all too easy after an incident to fall into that reflexively, why did they do that? This is when I hear a lot, Mary, from leaders after an incident, "What were they thinking?" What were they thinking?
And again, the inference there is either they weren't or they were thinking the wrong thing. Somehow they're bad. You cannot ask questions like that without really digging in with that blame-based mentality. Moving away from that questions that actually serve us and serve learning, what happened? Why did it make sense to do that?
Even if the behavior was seemingly errant or mistaken, it would've made sense. And what I know is if we don't understand why it made sense for that person to take the shortcut, it assuredly will make sense for somebody else to do exactly the same thing later on. Let's understand why it made sense. So, different questions get us to different answers.
And often I say to leaders, if you are not getting the answers you want from your people, don't blame them for that. Ask better questions.
- We're coming up on the end of our time here, but there are a few questions that I like to ask all my guests. So, this is what I'm going to have to adapt for you a little bit. So, normally I ask, what kind of soft/core skill training would you recommend for tomorrow's safety professionals?
And I'm going to guess that you would say trust and caring.
- Yeah, I would.
- So, maybe instead I'll ask you how, yeah, how would you approach sort of teaching these skills to future safety leaders?
- Yeah, great question. And look, if you were to pin me down for one core skill, I would get leaders to invest in, and there's the currency of trust, again, currency of leadership, it would be listening. As a rule, we're not very good at it. As many have said, we listen to respond rather than listening to understand. Active listening is a core skill in itself.
And to me, it's one of the most powerful ones. What we do with organizations with leaders to help them is raise their own self-awareness. Before they start looking at other people, we get them to lift their own awareness. For example, we bring in a tool called transactional analysis where we get them to look and become increasingly aware of the psychological masks that they wear.
Now, this is a bit deep. I won't go into too much there. It could take a long time, but we all wear psychological masks to a degree. And that is to fit in to reduce anxiety in certain settings. But we go through a few masks that we all develop over time. We call these parent, adult, and child masks.
It's a theory psychology called transactional analysis. And when I wear my parent masks for various reasons, that literally influences the words that come out of my mouth, as well as my thinking. If I'm wearing that parental mask, I will tend to be much more pointy finger in my leadership approach.
I will tend to be us versus them. I will have put downs in my language. When I wear my child mask, I will be avoidant. I don't want conflict. I don't engage in challenge or difficult conversations. I wish to avoid like that and leave all uncomfortable stuff to the big people if you like. And there's what we call operating in an adult ego state, authentic assertions here and now.
And so we raise our leaders' awareness by first up checking in which masks do we wear most frequently at work? How do they impact on how we listen to people, how we speak to people? So, self-awareness to me is the hallmark of great communicators. It helps build empathy, it helps build their listening skills, and their engagement skills.
So, it's not about you in relation to that one right now. Before we even get to that, I like to raise leaders own self-awareness. And that can be done relatively quickly.
- Yeah. I mean, yeah, just giving them different ways to frame ideas, I think is extremely useful. If you could go back in time to the start of your career, what is one piece of advice that you might give to young Clive?
- Oh, gosh. How long have you got, Mary? So, I'm not one of those people, Mary, you know...
- One. Just one.
- I'm often asked, you know, do you have any regrets? And people often say, no because, you know, if I've done things differently, I wouldn't be where I'm at now. I've got loads of regrets. I think I did all the dumb things. I would actually say back myself because for a time there, I just did kind of what everybody else thought I should do.
I followed a trajectory that seemed to be the one that most people take. I often had the idea of...you know, I had my own ideas and, you know, I felt like I wanted to share them and things like that, but I've put constraints on myself because I believe that's what people do, a lot of people do. A lot of this goes back to, again, the masks that I grew up with and my constraints that I developed around myself.
So, yeah, I'd like to go back and say, you know what? Back yourself, it'll work out.
- How can our listeners learn more about the topic? So, obviously, by reading your book.
- Oh, obviously, Mary.
- But are there other resources...and we will link that in the show notes, but are there other resources that are out there that might be useful to look up for listeners?
- Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Let me just look. There's so many...I'm a big reader. I love reading. I often think for the sake of a few bucks, I can get a person's entire wisdom. So, I read a lot.
So, off the top of my head, which will therefore probably be more current, Sam Goodman, "The HOP Nerd." His new book is called "10 Ways to Make Safety Suck Less." I love the title. Recommend any of Sam's book. Todd Conklin. If people in the safety field have not read Todd Conklin, off the top of my head is classic "The 5 Principles of Human Performance."
I recommend too "Pre-Accident Investigation" as a book, but also a podcast that Todd Conklin runs. So, they'd be classics for people who get caught up in KPIs and safety. And, you know, I've got a bit of a challenge with that Mary. And all of the paperwork stuff, thoroughly recommend a book called "Paper Safe" by Greg Smith.
He's actually a lawyer, but it's one of the best books I've read on the whole notion of paperwork, KPIs, policies, procedures in safety. I'd recommend that. I cannot go past Amy Edmondson's book, "The Fearless Organization." I think many of your listeners probably already read that, can't really go past that. Other people like David Provin, Sidney Dekker, all of those people have great books and great reading out there.
There is just a few.
- All right. Well, you've got your homework listeners. There's a lot to read. Where could our listeners...where could they find you on the web should they wish to reach out?
- Sure. So, I'm on LinkedIn a lot. As many people would know, perhaps annoyingly, so I do post regularly on LinkedIn. Feel free to connect. I love chatting on LinkedIn. I learn a lot from LinkedIn. There are some really great people who post frequently and great articles.
Our website for our company is GYST Consultant, gystconsulting.com.au. There's a reading list on that, by the way, suggested reading list. You can get in touch with us that way too.
- Oh, great. Well, that's all the time we have for today. Thanks to our listeners for tuning in. And thanks so much for talking to us about your book and for the book itself.
- My pleasure, Mary. You got me really motivated to talk there. So, thank you.
- That's great. My thanks to the Safety Labs team, "Safety Labs by Slice" team. And don't forget to leave a review and share this podcast with someone you think might enjoy our discussions. Bye for now. 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.
