Do the leaders at your foundry fully understand how they contribute to the overall culture and safety performance within your company? The truth is, the trust leaders build among their teams is absolutely critical for achieving safety excellence. 

Of course, every foundry must comply with rules and regulations, and that requires significant commitment, time and energy. While rules, standards, policies, and written procedures are required, they are not enough for an organization to achieve a culture where each team member takes ownership for safety. Organizations must create an atmosphere in which each team member feels they are valued and then strives for excellence. 

The creation of the desired culture starts with leadership. Leaders must understand how strongly they can influence the culture that drives individual and team behaviors. Without a mutual understanding between management, safety professionals, and team members, safety procedures can seem burdensome, unreasonable, and something that can be used to punish workers, rather than a mission-critical part of the business in which all three have a stake. 

Understanding Safety 

To really understand safety together, we must first establish the premise that culture begins with trust. 

Leaders have to trust that people do not want to get injured at work. It may seem like some team members intentionally do things that lead to injuries, but that’s possibly because a small percentage of your people may not be ready to be in their roles. This should not be the norm, and leaders need to understand that if they merely put rules, procedures, and policies together to manage those people, those jobs will be end up as a revolving door. 

There must be an element of accountability, and the leader must create an environment where people hold themselves accountable. Trust that most people want to do a good job, feel valued, make an impact, and live a meaningful life. We as leaders need to create an environment that allows people to be successful in their roles. Safety involves humans, and we humans are not perfect. All of us make mistakes and we can all learn from each other––together. It’s a fool’s errand to make perfect what was never meant to be perfect: human performance.

(1)Managing safety can be challenging, and you can frequently feel like you are not making progress or an impact. You have to recognize that safety means different things to different people. All of these things contribute to how people feel about safety:

A team member’s lived experience
How they have been trained or taught about safety
Observed behaviors and actions of other people
Their risk acceptance
Their perceived expectations from their supervisors
The value they place on keeping themselves and others safe

Ask yourself how many times you or another leader receive good news regarding safety. Receiving good news about safety seems to be a rare occurrence for most safety leaders. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, this can actually cloud perspective and could make it harder to see the progress the team is making. 

Building a safety culture is not the same as stepping back and looking at a construction project being completed. You can step back and enjoy your yard when you replace your landscaping, install a fence, or pour a new concrete patio, but safety progress and overall company culture can be hard to measure and very hard to visualize. 

While people successfully complete their daily tasks without being injured, many leaders only hear or talk about safety when something bad happens. It usually starts with the “What did that person do this time?” type of questions. Sometimes the question is said out loud and other times it just swirls around in leaders’ or coworkers’ heads without being spoken. To achieve excellence in safety or any other element of manufacturing (quality, efficiency, production, overall culture, etc.), you may need to take pieces from several ideas and meld them together. 

The process of being a safety leader and driving to excellence really starts with trust! The way a leader reacts to success and failure drives the culture and can build or break trust. 

Here’s a great mental model of trust: an egg. It is used to combine ingredients in many meals. An egg is fragile. If you tap an egg, it cracks. If you drop an egg, it breaks. When we cook, we use the egg to bind ingredients together.(2) Trust is necessary to combine many aspects of the business to achieve excellence, but trust is delicate and can be lost if any of those various business aspects are disregarded or regarded as less valuable than another.

Management Commitment

Organizations that want to achieve safety excellence need to reflect upon their approach and their conversations around safety. Management commitment must be more than solely establishing clear safety policies and allocating sufficient time, funds, and resources for safety. Organizations with the strongest safety cultures have leaders that are leading, mentoring, and coaching instead of supervising. The leaders spend a great deal of time on the floor asking questions instead of merely telling team members what to do. 

Management commitment is strongest when management is visible, and commitment can be displayed through deliberate gathering of information from people closest to the work. Senior leaders are accountable for setting the vision. They reinforce with their words and their actions. 

Leaders must actively participate in safety initiatives, attend safety meetings, and model safe behavior. Management commitment involves holding all levels of the organization accountable for maintaining safety standards while regularly reviewing and improving safety performance. 

Organizations with strongest cultures have also made the paradigm shift from “compliance” to “care” with shared ownership. The “be in compliance and follow the rules” approach does not build a strong safety culture and is not safety leadership. Organizations must position safety as a critical component of achieving operational excellence, along with quality and sustainability goals. This demonstrates to all team members how safety contributes to long-term organizational success. 

When management commitment is authentic and visible, it fosters trust and accountability while creating a safer, more productive work environment in which team members take pride. 

Elevated Safety Leadership 

There is a lot more to elevated safety leadership than meets the eye. Many people believe safety leadership consists solely of completing inspections and audits, crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s, training and enforcing the rules. Instead, true safety leadership consists of building trust, collaborating effectively with other disciplines, leading by example, influencing culture, and helping teams balance priorities––while maintaining compliance with sustainable safe outcomes. Creating a mental model of people first enables safety to drive the desired safe outcomes. 

Elevated leaders will go from “what does the regulation say” to “how can someone get injured.” They will also go from an immediate reaction of “who” to “how” when something fails. Empowering people and building a desired culture takes time for the many conversations that are necessary. Conversations should not always be about rules, procedures or failure, and they cannot be a one-sided mini-lecture. Long-term trusting relationships are built through these types of healthy conversations. Unfortunately, the “wisdom of the crowd” is rarely accessed. Failure to engage input from employees is a waste of a wonderful resource and a missed opportunity to build trust, engagement, connection and ownership.

(3) The real influencers who can help management foster the desired culture of shared ownership are the opinion leaders. Opinion leaders are respected by a majority of their peers and are connected to many of the team members. It is vital that management identifies opinion leaders in the workforce. Leadership should ask team members who they would seek out for advice if they were having an issue. Team members will provide you with people they trust and respect. Organizations that deliberately get opinion leaders on board have a greater likelihood of achieving a sustainable culture. 

On many occasions, I have witnessed an opinion leader lead the way on safety initiatives after senior management involved them in the conversation. Opinion leaders can have a positive or negative effect on any change, so it is paramount for leadership to deliberately include them in dialogue. Initiating safety improvements with opinion leaders increases the long-term capacity within the organization because they are the catalyst for other positive conversations to occur in the future. 

Safety Conversations 

Most conversations about safety begin with someone telling another person to put on their personal protective equipment (PPE) or with a proactive toolbox talk before their shift that may not have anything to do with the work happening that day. We should include other aspects of safety in the conversation while also introducing a healthy unease regarding inherent risks. You can promote a healthy unease and impactful dialogue by asking questions about how incidents could happen and how they can prevent incidents.

The safety conversation shouldn’t start with talking about safety, and it most certainly shouldn’t start after something bad has happened. The conversation should start before something happens and involve anything that helps team members realize their full potential while also letting them know they are valued. All human beings share two basic needs: the need to be valued and the need to make sense of things.(1) Once team members feel they are valued and trusted, they will be able to learn critical components that may be missing in their overall journey to safety excellence. And collaboratively then, they may likely fill in some safety-related insight gaps that leaders may be missing. 

When people are unacknowledged or feel they are giving more than they are getting out of conversations, or when they feel talked down to, they feel agitated, disrespected, offended, even humiliated.(4) Going out among the front-line employees doing the work, empathetic listening, getting to know them, building relationships, and deliberately learning the challenges team members face each day will help leaders create the culture they most desire. If the conversation is deliberate and purposeful, each participant will learn from one another. 

Conversations are also a great way to ensure messages and expectations are clear. Sometimes team members receive mixed messages with competing priorities. Team members may simultaneously hear “safety first” and “we are behind and need more product” all in one meeting. A healthy conversation between leaders and team members can set the record straight where people are first, and safety is always the top priority. Product must go out, but not at the expense of cutting corners, increasing risk, or jeopardizing any team member’s safety. 

There are many ways a leader can approach conversations with team members. Asking open-ended questions can initiate healthy dialogue as opposed to disengaging monologue where there is no learning. Leaders must realize their front-line team members may have the right answers if the leader asks pertinent questions. Once the leader models this behavior, the organization will begin seeing peer-to-peer interactions about safety begin to blossom. Conversations are a catalyst to achieving the desired culture and everyone feels they have ownership. Leaders must engage in conversations like this frequently to build and maintain trust.

Most importantly, safety conversations aren’t meant to be an attempt to catch people doing something wrong. The leader must genuinely want to build trust, understand how the facility really operates, and visibly show that the goal is for everyone to go home safely every day. 

How to ‘Do’ Successful Dialogue

Build rapport and make human connections. This is where the leader builds the most trust by connecting with the team member and getting to know them. The leader can simply ask, “How are you doing?” or anything that isn’t about safety. Be bold and ask, “What do you like about this job?” You would be amazed how many people have said, “You are the first person to ask me that, and I have worked here for X number of years.” 

Learning about challenges and successes the team members face each day. Ask the team member questions like, “What is the best thing about your job?” and “What is the biggest challenge you face or what makes this job difficult?” 

Lean into safety with a question. This could be something like, “What is one of the most important items I would need to know if I was asked to do your job today?” 

Follow up. Then say, “How might I get hurt doing this job?” Listen closely and follow up by asking if they can describe other ways someone might be injured. 

Understand the real risks. You need to appreciate how bad of an injury a team member can experience from their perspective. This is where a leader can create that “healthy unease” that addresses hazards, risks, and how safe people feel. Ask, “How bad might the injury be while doing this job?” or “What kind of injury could happen?” You really want the team members to state how badly they might get hurt doing the job. 

Verifying and validating controls is the next step. This gives the leader an opportunity to verify if people understand the controls that are in place and helps the leader understand if there are adequate controls. Consider controls such as elimination, substitution, engineering, administrative action, and PPE. Reference the hierarchy of controls and explore each kind of control––not just administrative and PPE during the conversation, since they are the least effective. 

Front-line team members have the least amount of influence on what controls are implemented in the hierarchy. They do not have the resources to eliminate, substitute, or integrate engineering controls into the processes; however, they have insight from which management can learn. Learning from the front line on where, when, and how to utilize the hierarchy of controls is critical to achieving excellence. 

Find out the backstory. The next step is essential to building trust, and leaders need to respond to the answer they receive in a positive manner. If there is an unsafe condition or unsafe behavior involved, the leader must ask, “Why hasn’t this been addressed previously?” The leader may hear, “I told my supervisor, or I wrote a work order, etc.” The leader should respond with something like, “Thank you for bringing this to my attention.” 

Many elevated leaders also ask, “If we could provide you the resources to fix this issue, what solution would you suggest?” This is another way to show team members that you value their input and want to collaborate with them on a solution. Another way a leader can initiate collaboration is to explain to team members they should collectively work on a solution or highlight an issue at a safety meeting together. These types of situations provide leaders with a great opportunity to build trust and relationships that can foster future ideas.

 Leaders must realize they are always on stage. Once team members believe the leader cares and wants their input, other team members will see it, hear it, and learn from it. 

Gaining commitment. This is where the leader can establish the desired culture by asking team members if they will talk to their fellow team members about the conversation that just took place. Leaders will be surprised how many team members want to make the commitment because they now feel the leader values them and their input. The leader must also commit to following up with any issues discussed.  

What You Do Says a Lot 

How an organization responds to a significant incident can reveal a lot about its culture and can have a lasting impact on trust. Leaders should deliberately learn by continuing to ask questions instead of lecturing after an incident. Asking questions will help team members think better and indicates that the leader wants their help. Obtaining team members’ perspective and inviting them to share their thoughts and ideas is critical to creating the atmosphere where people want to be part of the solution. Simply asking a team member close to the work following an incident, “What do you think?” or “What is one thing we should do?” could open the door to new revelations not thought of previously. 

Many organizations have yet to create an atmosphere where team members feel comfortable sharing bad news. There are many ways to foster the culture an organization wants to achieve. But again, the most important component is trust. Establishing trust through safety conversations is a great start for fostering the culture. 

Make a habit of asking open-ended questions and rephrasing questions when you do not receive an answer––then listen and pay attention. Taking time from the inception to focus on relationship-building will quickly enhance openness and trust. You will certainly learn a great deal and will organically build trust. Asking questions illustrates humility and shows you want to collaborate with team members, which results in the desired culture. Please remember, to have real influence requires earning the trust of team members. Safety is ultimately about people, their lived experience, and achieving safe outcomes. 

Final thought: Leaders who want to move from a command-and-control compliance culture to a culture of care and learning must make a paradigm shift. They must transition from being on the production floor to be seen and heard by team members to being on the floor to see and hear team members.