The Managers Role in Safety

Managers: Expanding Their Leadership Role in Safety
Rosa-Antonia Simon Carrillo

Published 6/98 Professional Safety Magazine

Most managers do care about the safety of their organizations, but some of
them are at a loss about what to do to show that concern and manage safety
effectively. For example, a group of high ranking managers from a Fortune 500
company gathered to hear the results of an employee survey and extensive audit of
their internal safety management practices. They were surprised by employee
perceptions that management was invisible, did not walk the talk in safety, was
unresponsive to safety concerns, and had unclear goals and expectations for safety
performance. Upon hearing this feedback, they looked at each other and said,
Weve done everything we can think of to show our concern and demonstrate that
safety is important. We dont know what to do anymore.
Managers facing this dilemma can find new direction by examining and
changing their own beliefs about what works in safety and taking a leadership
position in creating a new safety culture.
Safety Management Approaches that Dont Work
American management is discovering that traditional approaches to safety
performance no longer suffice. We will examine five of them in this section,
beginning with the three most frequently used--focusing on operator error, spending
large sums on technical solutions, or using injury-related statistics as the only way to
measure performance.
Accident investigations that focus on operator error are viewed as blame-
fixing by employees and often fail to take into account systemic root causes.
Technical solutions only take the organization so far. Installing new guards or
equipment helps reduce some injuries, but cannot prevent some of the most common
accidents. What guard or procedure will make people pick up a 2 x 4 in the
middle a walkway or hold a handrail going down stairs? Finally, the single minded
use of safety numbers as a performance indicator has created a backlash among
1997 Rosa-Antonia Carrillo
employees who believe that Management doesnt care about us. They only care
about the numbers.
There are no simple solutions to this quandary. Let us look at two more
common approaches to improving safety where results are less than satisfactory. One
is mandated compliance and the other is the use of incentives.
Mandated compliance, if it is going to work, must be backed by tight
policies, procedures and discipline. Without consistent enforcement this approach is
doomed to failure in most worksites because production deadlines are stronger
influences on behavior than policy and procedure. A successful example of
mandated compliance exists in the US nuclear industry. There have been no new
incidents since Three Mile Island. Control has been achieved at a high cost,
however; in order to comply with regulations. The ratio of administrators to
operators is about 100 to 4 and plants found in violation have been shut down, at a
cost of millions of dollars. Outside of the nuclear industry, businesses cannot remain
competitive with that kind of overhead, but that is what it takes to rule effectively by
bureaucracy.
Another frequent remedy is installing rewards and incentives to modify
safety behavior. There are no known correlations between typical awards such as
gift certificates, t-shirts and jackets and safety performance.
1
Some companies have
installed profit sharing and substantial bonuses related to incident rates which do
lower statistics, but the jury is still out on whether or not it actually improves safety,
since people may not be reporting injuries. Peter Drucker also observed, Economic
incentives are becoming rights rather than rewards. Merit raises are always
introduced as rewards for exceptional performance. In no time at all they become a
right. The increasing demand for material rewards is rapidly destroying their
usefulness as incentives and managerial tools.
2
At best award and incentive

1
Simon, Rosa Antonia, An Open Systems Approach to Managing Safety Performance,
Unpublished Thesis, Pepperdine University, 1993.
2
Drucker, Peter, Management Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, Harper and Row, p.
239.
1997 Rosa Antonia Carrillo 2
programs give temporary boosts to safety programs. Experience has shown they are
not sustainable.
It is very difficult to get beyond these traditional approaches. Most
managers were raised to believe that the way to manage for excellence was to tell
people exactly what to do and then follow up. Re-engineering came about and we
thought we could engineer people into perfect performance. Behaviorists arrived
and they told us we could modify employee behaviors. But you can not direct or
modify people into perfection; you can only engage them and influence them to want
to do perfect work. That is why the answer to achieving safety excellence lies in
leadership and employee empowerment.

Empowerment: A Positive Experience
There are plants that have achieved OSHA Star status under the
Voluntary Protection Program with near perfect safety records for years at a time.
They achieve those results initially because leadership guides and provides resources
during a three-to-five year process that empower workers to take responsibility for
safety, making it a personal mission. There are regulations, policies and procedures,
but those elements are not different from those found at poorly performing plants.
Good performance comes from the hundreds of workers who understand their role in
safety, the whys of safety and that safety is up to them.
Achieving this level of excellence takes a lot of work. Tom Moeller, an oil
refinery manager, talked about his experience in bringing a refinery into the STAR
program.
When I came to Beaumont this plant was in serious trouble.
We had lost 90 million dollars. Our expenses were in the fourth quartile
on the Solomon survey which basically said we were at the bottom of the
heap of all the refineries in the United States. We are today, 1996, in the
first quartile of the Solomon Index. We have the lowest cost structure of
all the refineries in the world. We have one of the best safety records of
all the Mobil refineries in the world. At the same time we downsized
400 people. Our culture is far better today than it was in 1992. When I
came down here I only knew one program to do and that was the
Voluntary Protection Program (VPP).
If you improve safety the whole organization improves, but if
you leave out the safety part, the rest of the organization wont stay
improved. We did it by setting up a lot of teams among our employees.
There is a team there that worries about sling inspections, inspections of
our cranes, making sure that we meet all the OSHA standards, making
sure that the repairs are made when they should be made, and that
preventative maintenance is done. There is a team in the weld shop and
there is a team pretty much everywhere that says to the hourly folks and
supervisors, This is the OSHA standard. We also give them the
freedom to spend the money to do what you have to do and to set people
aside to get the job done.
We spent a fair amount of money. The other side of the coin is
our heavy equipment reliability is way up. There are big pieces of
equipment that might cost a million or half a million dollars so you dont
want them out of service much of the time or you have to replace them
by renting a piece of equipment. There arent any injures. While we
spend a lot of money to train people, the workers now have
responsibility for it. They spend money for the appropriate repairs. I
think we probably made it back several times over.
Im not trying to make it sound easy. We spent a lot of time
establishing a relationship with the workmans committee. We took
away some of things that really bothered people a lot. When I came
down here we had hundreds of grievances, some 15 years old. So we set
up a couple of junior employees and a couple of management employees
(front line employees) in a room and said, you all develop
recommendations to resolve these grievances. We paid people
sometimes for a grievance that was ten years old. It might have been
$200 or $300, but we paid them and just got rid of it. We set out to build
trust. It doesnt mean we didnt have hard negotiations. We had very
hard negotiations and at one point I thought we were going to have a
strike. We fired the president of the union along the way. So its not like
it was peaches and cream, it wasnt.

In these plants each time an unscripted event comes up--a leak, a storm, a
customer demanding faster service--it is up to the individual to make the right
choice. The examples of these plants confirm that ultimately, we cannot rely on
procedure manuals. We can rely on peoples intelligence and their commitment to
doing the right thing, but people have to know what right means. They have to
know what safe really means. This can only be achieved through education,
training and dialogue.
Establishing Common Values, Goals and Standards
A culture where people can be relied on to make the right choice is one
where each person in the organization holds the same high standard for safe work
habits, orderliness and accountability. Once these standards are internalized, they
direct behavior, creating a culture that is self enforcing and supports safety
excellence. Creating such an organization begins with two steps: First, is the
involvement of the total employee population. The second is exploring the current
beliefs and assumptions guiding peoples behavior, and the organizational systems
that perpetuate those beliefs. This is necessary because eradicating accidents from
the workplace represents a fundamentally different way of thinking about work. For
centuries accidents have been an accepted cost of doing business. Changing that
assumption requires upsetting the status quo and success does not come easily. There
is great personal risk of failure.
We know that most plant managers or corporate executives would not
sacrifice the health of their employees in exchange for production. They would never
say, Do the job unsafely to meet this deadline. Yet, often accident investigations
reveal that employees work off the assumption that it is more acceptable in their
organization to take a safety shortcut than it is to miss a deadline. Employees often
state that they feel implied pressures to meet deadlines while logistic planners and
supervisors scratch their head wondering how a casual comment that it would be
good to get something done by a certain time got translated into a rush job. Their
surprise shows a lack of cultural awareness. They do not understand the power of
their position and the long-standing expectations that unconsciously drive peoples
behavior.
If we are going to commit to eliminating job injuries as a normal part of
work, we are going to have to change peoples basic assumptions about what it
means to do the job right. We will have to add the word safe to the current
expectation of on time and meeting specs. To do this we have to turn to the
people who do the work. We have to engage them in setting up new standards that
challenge the status quo. We have to create a new safety culture.

The Dynamics that Shape Culture
In guiding a culture change effort, managers have to understand the
importance of leadership in creating, changing and shaping culture. In
Organizational Culture and Leadership, Edgar Schein goes so far as to say that,
Without leadership, groups would not be able to adapt to changing environmental
conditions.
3
When leaders understand culture, they can use it or surmount it. If
leaders do not understand culture, it will manage them.
The most powerful cultural forces are invisible: They are the norms, beliefs
and assumptions that influence safety behavior much more than guards, policies and
procedures. We will begin by defining norms and then move on to the deeper, more
complex assumptions that rule culture.
Research on the importance of norms (defined as any uniformity of attitude,
opinion, feeling, or action shared by two or more people) in determining attitudes
towards production is well documented. The same phenomena, convergence and

3
Schein, Edgar. Organizational Culture and Leadership, Jossey Bass: San Francisco,
1991. p. 317.
cohesion, which shape attitudes and/or norms towards productivity, also apply to
safety.
Briefly, convergence is the tendency of human beings to adopt the point of
view of people whom they perceive as part of their group. Studies show that even if
a group member initially disagrees with the group, given enough time he or she will
adopt the groups point of view (or leave the group). The second force, cohesion, is
our tendency to form groups with people we like and who hold opinions, attitudes,
and ideas similar to our own.
This research on norms has deep implications for understanding how safety
attitudes form and what one has to do to change them. Currently, supervisors and
managers rely on training and rewards to change people. However, change does not
take hold when the newly trained individual returns to a group with unchanged
norms. He or she will revert to the former behavior. An example would be someone
attending a clinic to stop smoking, then returning to a home and work place where
everyone smokes. There is a high probability that that individual would resume
smoking. Thus, to change organizational behavior supervisors and managers must
learn to shape group norms as well as offer individual training.
If it is difficult to change an assumption where medical evidence is
abundantly available, as is the case with smoking, imagine the difficulty in changing
to an assumption that is counter intuitive. One such example is changing the belief
that safety is the safety coordinators responsibility. Because safety professionals
are the experts, they are commonly viewed as the most likely people to enforce
safety and correct hazards. In reality, line management holds the authority and
resources to enforce safety and line workers are the most likely to spot hazards, but
the old belief is held in place by years of experience and tradition.
An organizations safety culture, then, is mostly made up of what people
believe is importantthe norms, assumptions and beliefs that effect that peoples
choices and actions. Should we rush to meet this deadline, or is it okay to stop and
take safety precautions? Is it okay to remind someone to wear their hard-hat or will I
be told to mind my own business? The answers are influenced by the safety culture
of the organization.
The following section presents certain principles and dynamics confirmed
through experience, research and observation of effective culture change leadership.

Leadership Roles
A change leader uses both his person and position to create change. It is not
possible to change an organizational culture without first changing yourself. Culture
change requires letting go of some of your deepest beliefs about how the world
should and does operate. Willingness to enter into unknown areas and lead others
requires a personal commitment to examining and correcting assumptions or beliefs.
Leaders need the ability to raise and question beliefs that everyone else
takes for granted. We need to look ahead and assess when these beliefs are wrong
and will hurt their organization. Then we need to articulate new assumptions and
sell them. An example of leaderships failure to do this is the US car manufacturing
industry. Leaders failed to see customer needs for gasoline economy and higher
quality. They did not change their long-held assumption that US cars would
continue to dominate the market. Only when US auto makers acknowledged the
need for change and began to close the gap in quality and cost-effectiveness, did they
begin to regain market share.
Once you have changed your own assumptions, if you choose to influence
others to change, you are assuming a leadership position. The confusion that usually
follows the surrender of old assumptions is a form of energy that can be channeled to
take the organization to the next stage. People are looking for a new path, making it
possible for leaders to influence their direct reports via their clear vision and
emotional certainty. The transition is completed when leaderships vision is
translated to reality by the rest of the organization.
Leaders in formal positions of authority are responsible for organizing the
activities around the change process. Grassroots leaders influence the level and
speed of acceptance of change. Senior managers characteristically assume
sponsorship roles and typically are the ones who sanction as well as provide
financial and moral support for change efforts.
Top management support is not enough to drive a culture change. One
division manager was appalled to get feedback that the universal belief among his
technicians was that deadlines took precedence over safety concerns. As division
manager he personally attended safety committee meetings and made safety an
important issue at his staff meetings. What was wrong? While he personally acted
in accordance with his beliefs, he had no structures that held his direct reports or
those under them accountable for communicating or enforcing a common set of
safety standards.
Part of the answer is revealed in a nine-year study tracking change
implementation efforts. Production units within the same facility experienced wide
variances in the successful implementation of change efforts supported by top
management. The study showed clearly that first-line supervisors and mid-level
managers were essential to making the changes work. Successful units had frequent
dialogue forums to discuss the change and more efforts to learn from the units
experiences with the changed approaches..
4

Change cannot be implemented without first-line and mid-level
management buy-in. They are the ones who cope with the changes initiated higher
up. Their skills as change managers often make the difference between successful
and unsuccessful change. Traditionally, their job is to guide, harness and control the
chaos and distress brought about by change, but there is a better way to manage
change: gain employee buy-in for the change through the use of grassroots
leadership.
Developing grassroots leaders through participation and empowerment
smoothes out and speeds up the culture change. As illustrated in Moellers
experience described earlier in this article, employees need a lot of training and
education to be successfully empowered in safety. By utilizing grassroots leaders, a
managers role can change from controlling chaos and distress to guiding and
supporting the knowledge, creativity and efforts of the people doing the work to

4
Tenkasi, Mohrman, S.A. & Mohrman,A.M. Jr. Accelerated Learning During
Transition. In Mohrman, S.A., Galbraith, J.R., Lawler, E.E. III & Associates. Tomorrows
meet organizational goals. Access to the grassroots culture makes the difference
between success and failure in adapting to a quickly changing environment.
To manage a grassroots culture change effort, managers must be able to
question, listen, experiment, tolerate ambiguity and convince people to examine
options that might require painful choices without a guaranteed solution. Getting
others to enter into unknown areas requires a personal commitment on your part to
engage in examining and correcting your own assumptions. A change leader
assumes the responsibility to influence, guide and support others to see the world
differently. There is no way to do that unless you have adapted to the change
yourself.
The leadership assumptions in the next section will assist you in clarifying
your own position on the culture change path.

Six Steps Towards Change in the Management Culture
For those leaders who have not addressed the fundamental assumptions that
affect safety in their organization, we offer the following six-step action plan to be
implemented through a series of dialogues. A summary of the process is shown in
Figure 1 followed by a rationale for each phase.
1. Articulate the assumptions that managers/supervisors work under when
making decisions about safety. Leadership must be aware of changing conditions
and determine whether or not assumptions continue to be valid. When an
assumption ceases to be valid, leadership must search for new answers and embed
new assumptions into the culture. This principle applies to both the business and
interpersonal arenas.
In business the global economy is driving many paradigm shifts that require
major changes in how people and work are managed. Figure 2 lists past assumptions
and the future assumptions that are driving business leaders today. Our safety
management assumptions must adapt to these same forces to maintain alignment

Organization: Crafting Organizations for a Dynamic World. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. In
Press. 1997
with business practices. Figure 3 lists some of the past safety assumptions and what
they need to become to support new business directions.
Figure 1
Leadership Assumption Dialogues

Step Activity Purpose
1. Articulate the assumptions that
managers/supervisors work under when making
decisions about safety . Some of these beliefs are
never articulated but carried in the culture as
implied . (i.e., They never say put production
ahead of safety, but if you dont meet a deadline you
never hear the end of it.)
Bring out covert
beliefs that drive
individuals to take
unnecessary risks.
2. Prioritize the invalid assumptions according to their
negative impact on the safety culture.
Leverage your
resources
3. Analyze each invalid assumption to determine
causes:
1. How did the old assumption become part of the
culture?
2. Is it still valid?
3. What would leadership have to do differently to
embed the new safety assumptions?
Acknowledge those
assumptions that
use to be valid and
managements
contribution to
keeping them in
place.
4. Articulate the new assumption and the driver or
motivation for change.
Identify new
direction and
business case for
making the change.
5. Group agreement on meaning and intended
consequence of new assumption
Establish
foundation for new
culture
6. Action planning and implementation Going from idea to
application

Figure 2
Past and Future Business Assumptions
Past Business Assumptions Future Business Assumptions
Hierarchical organization Flat Organization
Profit Margin Profit and Customer Satisfaction
Power = Capital Power = Knowledge
National Scope Global Marketplace
Focus on Individual-Based Skills Focus on Team-Based Skills

Figure 3

Safety Leadership Assumptions Must be Aligned with Changes in
Organizations
Past Safety Assumptions New Safety Assumptions
Safety manager as doer Safety professional is a facilitator/consultant
Safety is an expense Safety is as integral to profit as quality and
production
Monocultural training materials and
approaches
Cultural diversity affects approach to safety
management
The safety department is responsible for
safety
Trained and educated employees perform
safety functions previously performed by
"experts"

On a personal level, some beliefs that hold back the culture are never
articulated but carried in the culture as implied. Examples are, They never say,
Put production ahead of safety, but if you dont meet a deadline you never hear the
end of it. Another manager once said, I dont know why we have so many
accidents since none of the employees ever do any work! Both of these
assumptions almost insure failure in starting any new safety program and must be
addressed before progress can be made.
2. Prioritize the invalid assumptions according to their negative impact on
the safety culture. Pay special attention to the assumptions that separate safety from
the real work. One of the most common complaints from safety committee
members is that, Safety projects take a back seat until we have some free time
Another common issue is the inconsistent definition among managers on the
questions, How safe is safe enough? ; What policies are we going to enforce?;
What do we really mean by safety first?
3. Analyze each invalid assumption to determine causes. Ask how and
why the old assumption became a part of our culture and what would leadership have
to do differently to embed a new a assumption. It is important to acknowledge that
past assumptions may have been built on experience, but may no longer be valid.
Managers have to understand their contribution to the problem before they can
change their behavior and create a new culture. Later they can engage employees in
similar dialogues so that they have an opportunity to air differences of opinion and
realize that they too play a role in keeping work out assumptions in place.
4. Articulate the new assumption and the driver or motivation for change.
Do not accept superficial statements like safety first. Many organizations put
slogans on the walls, but few have leaders at all levels of the organization living up
to them. The new assumption has to be reality driven. You have to know which
business reasons are sufficiently strong to motivate people to adopt higher standards
in safety. If a lasting change in the way people work is the goal, a workable
assumption is, Safety standards are an integral part of production. The latter
statement will spark a number of organizational changes such as defining a common
set of safety standards adhered to by everyone or rewriting production specs to
include safety conditions.
5. Get management agreement on the meaning and intended consequence of
the new assumption. Never assume that writing a station order or procedure
constitutes changing the culture. How many plants have requirements that work
orders have three or more signatures before they are implemented? How many
people read the work order before signing? How many supervisors assign others to
sign for them because they are away in meetings about really important matters
regarding the business? Culture change will take place as managers engage in
meaningful dialogue about the new assumptions, buy into them because they see a
real business need for them, and demonstrate them through their actions. This is
unlikely to happen without an organized, concerted effort to involve all supervisors
and managers in translating the new assumptions into their own work. Once
management is in agreement, they may formulate action plans to gain employee buy-
in for the new assumptions.
6. Put action plans that support the new assumptions into the business
plan. If the business plan is used, this is the most effective place to integrate safety
improvement actions into the business. Organizations with excellent safety cultures
usually empower employees to participate in designing the solutions to safety
problems. Care has to be taken to keep supervisors and middle managers in the
communication loop to prevent disenfranchisement of any group.
These six steps can be implemented through Leadership Assumptions
Dialogues where you assess your current assumptions about safety, and identify the
new, desired assumptions to achieve the next level of safety excellence. Once the
top level of management has completed the process, the next step is to involve the
rest of the managers, supervisors, and eventually employees in similar dialogues.
Conclusion
New assumptions are often met with fear or cynicism: fear because
fundamental changes may threaten job security or loss of power; cynicism because
safety efforts may be viewed as flavor of the month. Nevertheless, leaders need to
be bold and take on difficult challenges.
The safety manager of a 2000-person nuclear power plant took the kinds of
risks we are talking about, challenging his companys traditional practice of setting
measurable and achievable accident goals. By those standards, he argued, they could
meet their .13 (11 loss times) goal and see eleven employees die on the job that year.
Not exactly the kind of value statement they wanted to make to their employees.
Instead, he proposed a goal of zero accidents, facing the doubt and criticism of
management. Ultimately, he won their support; and though they have not yet
reached their ultimate goal, accidents at the plant are down fifty percent and, best of
all, the culture is changing and accidents and injuries are no longer considered
acceptable.
This is one example of risk taking. Culture is local and we cannot replicate
anyone elses exact process for success. Benchmarking and experimentation will
help you find your own way, but this requires eliminating the fear of making
mistakes. With so many paths available, which one to choose? Where should you
spend your resources? Of all the resources, time is the scarcest. Changing the way
people think is time consuming. You and those you invite to engage in these
dialogues might feel it is a waste of time, that other issues seem more immediate. By
what criteria? Customer focus is important, but if you are going to lead, you need to
look ahead, beyond fire fighting. That is the role of the leader; to look into the future
and forecast what will be needed to survive, to adapt. Keep in mind that any
improvements you make in helping people achieve a common understanding of
safety standards for safety will positively affect all areas of your enterprise.
Quickie Safety Culture Assessment

Check off the statements that describe the beliefs/assumptions in your facility
culture:

1. Employees ignore or bypass technical improvements.

2. Employees disregard new policies and procedures.

3. Our accident numbers have been flat.

4. Many workers compensation claims are not legitimate.

5. Employees are often defensive and evasive during accident investigations.

6. Employees file many unnecessary and illegitimate grievances.

7. Employees are resistant to our safety initiatives.

8. Employees do not appreciate the work we are doing to improve our safety
performance.

9. Workers do not believe that we have their best interests at heart.

10. Employees feel we put our business goals ahead of the welfare of our
workers.

If you agree with more than one or two of the above statements, it is
unlikely that a new safety program can succeed without a safety culture change
dialogues, education and training.


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Managers: Expanding Their Leadership Role in Safety

Rosa-Antonia Simon Carrillo

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