Values and Behavior:
Building a Culture that
Promotes Safety

The Special Role of Leaders

Leaders have two special roles in creating a culture that values safety. First, in their personal actions, they must demonstrate value for safety through what they do and say. They must consistently both make statements that support safety and exhibit behavior consistent with those statements. This aspect of the leaders' responsibility is represented by “Values” and related value-related behavior in the right half of the Figure 1 diagram. Second, leadership is responsible for the formal processes that support safety (the “Process” and process related behaviors shown the left half of the Figure 1 diagram). By fulfilling these two roles, leadership can invariably achieve a balanced emphasis on each of the elements in Figure 1.

Leaders communicate what they value through what they say and do (often referred to as “Say/Do” correspondence). The matrix in Table 1 graphically represents this correspondence.

Table 1 - The “Say/Do” matrix shows the possible correspondence
between safety talk and safety actions.

While important for all employees, this correspondence is even more critical for those in a leadership role. A manager in an organization can talk about the importance of safety or not, and the manager can act in a safe manner or not. If the organization has a strong value safety, it will respond as indicated in each of the cells represented in Table 1. Effective leaders on all work levels who both verbalize the importance of safety and act in ways that support safety should be recognized, rewarded, and ultimately promoted (assuming that they are performing well in other areas). If a leader is not talking with employees about safety, promoting safety practices, providing feedback, discussing its importance in safety meetings, and verbally supporting safety in other ways, an organization that values safety will ensure that the leader gets training and coaching that encourages additional active verbal support of safety. Conversely, if a leader is not acting in ways that demonstrate the importance of safety through personal actions such as paying attention to safe and unsafe work practices, consistently following safety procedures, following up on safety-related work orders, ensuring that employees have the time to participate in safety meetings, and the like, again, the organization that values safety will ensure that the leader receives the requisite training and coaching to help them “show the way” through their personal actions. Employees who do not express support for safety or demonstrate its importance through personal actions would best be screened out during the selection or even the hiring process. If a leader falls into this cell of the matrix, an organization with an effective safety culture would promptly address the lacking through training and coaching or, in extreme cases, termination.

Leadership's second role is to take responsibility for the formal systems illustrated on the left side of the Figure 1 diagram. Management is responsible for ensuring that formal systems establish responsibility and accountability for safety. This responsibility requires that they ensure that formal management systems and processes are well-designed and effectively implemented, and that they continue to be supported until formally dropped, modified, or replaced.

One of the largest dangers is “systems drift,” referring to changes that occur gradually over time without consideration of their impact on performance. Sometimes effective safety systems deteriorate so gradually that no one recognizes the changes until the system routinely allows shortcuts that ultimately result in serious injury. A few years ago, a major utility had an effective observation process that required each team leader to observe the activity whenever a lineman was working on a utility pole. The company's safety process was very effective in minimizing incidents and the organization became one of the best in safety in the utility industry. Over several years, the organization went through a series of changes that increased the emphasis on productivity, which combined with the lack of serious injuries created an environment in which team leaders began to get involved in tasks that took them away from the observations so that jobs could be completed more quickly. Other safety practices also began to lapse, until the organization experienced seven very serious injuries in a single year. Predictably, the initial response to the first incident was to consider discipline for the team leaders who had failed to conduct the required observations. On closer examination, the organization recognized that the entire system had been allowed to fail. Over the years, managers had become caught up at fighting brushfires instead of regularly monitoring the team leaders, who had stopped observing linemen, while the linemen had also grown complacent in their attention to safety. Typically, too, these changes occurred so gradually that no one noticed the degradation of the safety process until the serious injuries suddenly occurred.

Notice that this story illustrates drift in both the formal monitoring systems and the behavior of managers, supervisors, and working employees. The stated values did not change, but the behavior of personnel working in this system did. The complacency was in part a result of the organization's success; it came about because neither managers nor employees saw anyone getting injured. No one recognized that behavior was no longer aligned with the formal procedures. Nor did anyone recognize that employees had grown too comfortable with shortcuts that placed them at risk of serious injury. Behavior was no longer aligned with either the formal process or with the stated values.

Published in Proceedings of ASSE's Professional Development Conference, American Society of Safety Engineers. Nashville, TX, June 2002, and also presented at the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) meeting April 11, 2005.

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