Safety Leadership:
Challenges and Solutions
(ASSE Professional Development Conference
Orlando Florida
June, 2000)

Effective Monitoring

Terry E. McSween

In discussing the nature of the interactions between leaders and followers, the researchers noted that the monitoring occurred naturally in the flow of the conversation. They also noted that the focus on performance began early in the conversation. The act of monitoring often prompted followers to talk about their own performance. The leader shows an interest in the performance of a subordinate, which provokes the follower to describe what they have been doing. The subordinate's response then allows the leader to continue the discussion of performance, often providing feedback. The resulting flow is a reciprocal interaction between leader and follower.

This process of dialogue seems to be a critical ingredient in a healthy working relationship. Teaching leaders to have this type of interactions should be the primary objective of leadership training, whether such training is in the context of safety or other dimensions of performance.

A key element of the effective monitoring is the ability to ask good questions. Unfortunately, the current research does not examine the nature of the types of questions asked by effective leaders, so the remainder of this article is a theoretical speculation based on our experience and interviews with employees about what their leadership does and its impact on their performance and attitudes.

Paper presented at the American Society of Safety Engineers annual Professional Development Conference in Orlando, in June, 2000. Included in the conference Proceedings.