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The three biggest mistakes managers make
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“Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history
are doomed to repeat them.”
~ Jorge Nicolas de Santayana
Over the course of our careers, the revolution we have witnessed on the industrial landscape and in practice of management has been nothing short of astounding.
When we started out in the 1970s, business was “big” and the world of industry was the place to be. Land a job with a big industrial firm, and then work your way up the corporate ladder, where the opportunities in middle management were enormous.
That scene is gone forever. It has been replaced with the world we now know all too well: the organisation chart’s been flattened; the pace of work frenzied; the demands on performance – production, cost, schedule and quality – unrelenting. The forces of global competition have changed just about everything in our world in industry.
There is one thing that has not changed: the goal of sending people home safely at the end of the day. As managers in industrial operations, safety has always been an important part of our job. Over our careers, we have had the opportunity to experience the highs and lows in managing the safety performance of those entrusted to us. We have celebrated milestones and passed out awards; we have gone to the Emergency Room with people we work with and sat in accident investigations trying to figure out what went wrong.
It has been said that organisations do not have memories, people do. So, before everything we learned is forgotten, we owe the generation moving into the ranks of management the benefit of our experience, good and bad. We did manage to learn a few things about managing safety along the way; regrettably, most of that learning came the hard way.
In this article we will examine a few of The Biggest Mistake Managers Make Managing Safety Performance.
Safety equals execution
Managing safety performance – sending everyone home safe at the end of the day – is fundamentally about execution. No matter how good the plan – policies, procedures and programs – when it comes to bottom line safety performance, the game is won or lost in the field.
If execution is the difference that makes the difference, who manages execution?
In just about every operation, there is an entire level of management that is frequently overlooked and the real story is that these are the folks who are really responsible for managing execution. The organisation’s safety performance is largely determined by how well they perform that duty.
The organisation pyramid
Over four thousand years ago, the Pharos of ancient Egypt commissioned one of history’s greatest construction projects – the Pyramids. We suspect those employed on the project promptly returned the favour by naming the organisation hierarchy in their honour. So was born the Organisation Pyramid.
You know the theory: the higher up the pyramid you go, the more important the manager. Sitting at the pinnacle is the most important manager in the company. The job of the rest of the enterprise is merely to carry out the goals set by the leader.
But, there is another way to think about the question of importance on the management pecking order. It begins by considering where economic value in the enterprise is created. After all the reason an enterprise exists is to create economic value for the benefit of the owners. In that sense, any business can be thought of as a printing press, designed to print money for the owners. Every good business owner knows exactly where the printing press for the business is found. In an industrial business, it is easy to find the printing press: all you have to do is look in operations. That is because industry is defined by making “things” whether the things happen to be steel, cars, or products derived from oil.
Sure, there are plenty of other factors in play, but the ability to make products effectively and efficiently largely determines the financial success of the business. Value is created only when products are made. Cease making the product and there is no revenue; without cash, it is a financial crisis. It is just that simple.
Take the logic back to the organisation pyramid in an industrial business, and it is readily apparent that the value-creating level of the enterprise is found not the top, but right at the bottom. Those building blocks forming the foundation of the enterprise are the people running the printing press – and determining the fate
of everyone else.
The real owners of the business get that. When a company suffers a major production outage, the stock price normally falls the next trading session; when an energy exploration and production company successfully brings a major new well into production, the share price increases. By comparison, announce a business reorganisation, and the market will usually wait and see what the real impact is.
Inverting
the pyramid
Now that we understand that the base of the organisation creates the value, we can appreciate that the role of every one else in the industrial organisation ought to be to help make that happen. Makes perfect sense, but quality guru Phillip Crosby once remarked, “I worked for ten years before I found out that management was supposed to be there to help me.”
Of all those management levels sitting above those who create value, who do you think is in the best position to provide help – on everything from production and quality to working safely? It is the front line supervisor. We need to invert the pyramid to fully appreciate this concept.
Managing safety and the role of the front line supervisor
We can substitute the word safety for value when we consider the pivotal role played by front line supervisors in the work processes that largely determines who goes home safe. The front line supervisor is the member of management most
likely to:
- Set and communicate work standards
- Teach the right way to do the job
- Determine who’s qualified to perform the work
- Observe employees in action
- Provide performance feedback – positive and corrective
- Roll out safety policies and procedures
- Manage safety suggestions
- Run safety meetings
- Deal with injuries and near-misses
Get these management practices right, the odds overwhelmingly favor working safely.
Add them all up, and the result amounts to good, old-fashioned execution. The real story is that front line supervisors have more control and influence over execution than any other level of management in the enterprise. When they do their jobs well, the team works safely.
What were
we missing?
Why is it that so many of us failed to appreciate the critical role of the supervisor in determining execution? It seemed like any time we were not happy with safety performance, the last thing we’d ever think about was how to manage execution better. We never thought to ask the supervisors what they were seeing “out on the field.” Instead, we managers would figure the problem out, and then roll out an ad campaign, write letters, call a time out for safety, or round up a few of the usual suspects.
Worse, we often put our best efforts into to undermining or eliminating the role of the supervisor. The very first step in some peer safety observation processes is to invite the front line supervisor out of the process – only to later lament the need for leadership.
Every time a poll is taken of the people doing the work, guess which level of management they always gets voted “most trusted?” It is never any of us in middle or upper management. For over fifty years, in surveys done around the globe, front line supervisors consistently were voted the most trusted members of management.
Hope is not
a method
Very few of us started out our working careers as a manager: we worked our way up to the job. When we finished our education, we found our first job in the business. Whether that job was as an apprentice, operator, draftsman, engineer, or working in the office, the only person we managed in the beginning of our career was our self.
Of all new assignments we encounter in the course of our career, none is bigger than the change from managing yourself to managing others. When our new assignment and responsibilities were described, we were reminded “you are also accountable for the safety of those assigned to you.” In industry, managers are entrusted with the safety of those who report to them.
We all understood that being accountable for the safety of others came as part of the job. Did we really comprehend what that meant? Did we fully appreciate that we became responsible for how other people behaved – whether we were standing next to them or not? That this responsibility could weigh so heavily on us as we stood with the family of an injured worker, not sure whether he would survive his injury? That this responsibility would force us to deal with the people we work with in ways that wouldn’t always make them happy to see us?
The truth turned out to be that managing safety performance was probably the toughest part of our job as manager, and one for which we had the least preparation.
We were given responsibility for managing the safety of others – even though we had no management experience. Someone with the potential to learn a new set of skills – management skills – is put in a situation where they are expected to be able to immediately perform those new skills, and perform them successfully so that no one goes home injured.
We would not send a machinist out to troubleshoot a problem with electrical switchgear. At least not without training and some assurance about his electrical qualifications.
We will promote that same machinist to supervisor, and expect that he will be able to manage the safety performance and behavior of his crew.
“He will do just fine” is what we have all said, probably because that is exactly what happened to us, and we managed to survive the experience.
“Hope is not a method.” Yet, when it comes to the most important role we play as managers in industry, sending people home safe at the end of the day, hope is the method of choice to prepare managers for the assignment.
It is amazing that there were no more failures when we were moving into management. At least back then, we had experienced crews working for us, and the people we worked for seemed to be able to find the time to help and coach us.
What is the situation look like today? What is the experience level of the performing the work in our organisations now? How much time do senior managers have to spend with their new supervisors and managers, providing the coaching and development they need?
The three
big mistakes
In retrospect, the biggest mistake we made managing safety performance began when we overlooked the simple virtues of execution in determining safety results. We confounded our error by failing to take full advantage of the powerful role that front line supervisors could play in managing execution and we failed to give them proper training to teach supervisors and managers how to manage safety performance are the three biggest mistakes managers make.
What we should have done was give them all the help the needed to execute our game plan for safety. We should have spent more our effort to manage safety performance developing the leadership skills of front line supervisors; providing them the support they need, and focusing on enabling their success. Had we done that, we would have even better success managing safety performance – and probably spent a whole lot less effort in the process.
Front line supervisors manage execution, and execution determines success. Get it right, the organisation wins, and people go home safe.
Paul Balmert is a graduate of Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and his career in chemical manufacturing spans 30 years. Paul’s diverse experience includes management responsibility for Environmental, Safety, Health, emergency response, and public relations major manufacturing site.
Paul spent 13 years as a member of the line organisation where he was responsible for plant maintenance,
shift production and distribution operations. In 2000, Paul formed Balmert Consulting, a consulting practice that is principally focused on improving operations execution, including improving the management effectiveness in leading and managing safety performance. He can be reached at pdbalmert@balmert.com. More information about Mr. Balmert and Balmert Consulting can be found at www.balmert.com.
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