The Process Enneagram© | Safety Excellence For Business

The Things Every Manager Wants from Employees…

February 10, 2021 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

But What Does Every Employee Want from their Managers/Leaders? And, How Do We Get These, Together?

In a 2017 article in INC online magazine, the desired universal list of what every manager looks for in an employee was highlighted:

Predictable results (get stuff done – be counted on to deliver!)
Drama-free collaboration (play well in the sandbox; don’t cause interpersonal issues)
Spontaneous initiative (don’t expect to be told exactly what to do every time)
Truth-telling (candid about issues; willing to speak up, diplomatic)
Enthusiasm (show your positive engagement)
Continuous growth (treat your job as part of career)

But what does every employee (universally-speaking) want as traits in their managers/leaders (excerpts from the SESCO Survey report)?:

Honesty. 90% say they want honesty and integrity from their manager. Lies and secrets are the biggest killers to credibility.
Fairness. 89% want their manager to be fair and to hold all employees accountable to the same standards.
Trust. More than 86% want to trust-and be trusted by-their manager.
Respect. 84% want to respect-and be respected by-their manager.
Dependability. 81% say they want to be able to count on their manager when needed.
Collaboration. 77% want to be a part of their manager’s team and be asked to contribute ideas and solutions. Shutting employees out will shut them up-and send them shipping out.
Genuineness. 76% want their manager to be a genuine person. Employees sometimes spend more time with their boss than with their families-they don’t want a phony.
Appreciation. 74% want their manager to appreciate them for who they are and what they do. When was the last time you handed out a “Thank you!” or “Great job!” to employees?
Responsiveness. 74% want their manager to listen, understand and respond. Be a sponge, not a brick wall.

I share all this because, if you follow my work with the Process Enneagram©, you can pick up very quickly that there are certain things that are integral to each point of that framework – especially the pattern for excellence that I call Partner-centered Leadership©.

Particularly, the qualities that employees want from their managers (and their coworkers) fall into the Building of Relationships by living by agreed-to Principles and Standards – essential ingredients: Honesty, Fairness, Trust, Respect, Dependability, Collaboration, Genuineness, Appreciation and Responsiveness. This is how we choose to behave with and treat each other!

Employees want sufficient information to be able to do their jobs and to understand how they fit in the big picture. Each cog in the wheel is essential. Yet they also need to understand where that wheel is rolling, what direction, and how fast. They do not want to be jerked around.

Information-sharing & Identity/Frame of Reference: Employees want the truth about the business…where does it stand? What is needed to move forward? What is required performance-wise for the next quarter? What is in it for me? How can I grow as the business succeeds? These are valid questions. How do I fit in to our success (likened to the stonecutter who was building a cathedral!)?

Leaders / Managers / Employees …Yes, you can get it all…together! Call me at 716-622-6467 and I’ll share the process with you. We teach Leaders and Managers how to do this, and we train-the-trainers too – so that you can have sustainability.

These three legs on the 3-legged stool are essential: Living by a set of Principles and Standards so that you can Build Relationships, Sharing Information, and Ensuring a Sense of Identity. Why? Because all things get done through people. And People Matter! And these are the ingredients for a successful business.

The key features for leaders/managers to remember in Partner-Centered Leadership are:

Valuing people, change and the future
Seeing organizations as if they are living systems
Recognizing organizations as complex, adapting, self-organizing networks of people
Focusing on the open flow of information, building respect and trust
Helping people to find meaning in the work itself

Partner-centered Leadership | Safety Excellence For Business

Highly Participative Leadership produces the best results

August 10, 2020 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

A 19-Year Case Study

On Tuesday, August 18, 2020, from 4:15 to 4:45 PM, I will be making a virtual presentation at the AiCHE 16th Global Congress on Process Safety. The paper is a 19-year case study demonstrating a successful plant leadership transition that improved process safety performance.

When I was transferred to the DuPont Belle, West Virginia plant in 1987, the Total Recordable Injury Case Rate (TRC) was about 5.8 and emissions to air, water and ground, as reported in the EPA Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) annual report, was over 6,000,000 pounds/year. Within three years, both of these had dropped by about 95% to a TRC of about 0.3 and a TRI of about 275,000 pounds/year. Emissions to the environment is one way to measure how well the process safety is working; the better the process safety work, the lower the emissions to the environment.

I was using a highly, participative leadership process I called Partner-Centered Leadership for Occupational Injuries and Health, as well as for Process Safety; this was a highly integrated process with just about everyone involved, and consciously working together to make our plant safer and have less impact on the environment. When I was transferred by DuPont in 1995 and replaced by a traditional plant manager using a top-down driven management process, things changed.

The process safety work was pulled away from the occupational safety and health effort and taken over by the managers. The occupational safety and health work continued to be led by the first and second level supervisors using the Partner-Centered Leadership approach. The highly participative leadership approach and the top-down management approach were running in parallel (the same business conditions, the same regulatory pressures, the same people, the same community). The occupational safety and health performance stayed at a rate of 0.3 or better for the next 15 years.

But the five different plant managers who came in during that period gradually cut back the process safety management resources and effort. They cut back on the manpower, allowed work-orders to pile up, stretched out the inspection intervals, ignored feedback from the operators and mechanics about the deteriorating conditions, etc. The TRI emissions rose by about ten-fold to over 2,500,000 pounds/year.

The process safety management collapsed in January of 2010 with major, accidental releases to the air and river and they had a man get killed with a phosgene release. When the US Chemical Safety Board investigated in late 2010, they reported that while the occupational safety and health performance was the best in the DuPont Company, the process safety management had fallen apart and the plant was not even using the DuPont standard procedures. This was a sad commentary about how far things had fallen.

This 19-year case study clearly shows that a highly participative leadership process produces much better results that the top-down management process.

An Online Course Offering

Beginning August 24th, I will be presenting a six-week course on Leadership and Using the Process Enneagram©. The Process Enneagram© was a key leadership tool I used when I was at Belle. I have used this tool successfully around the world with people in all sorts of organizations and businesses in the 25 years since I retired from DuPont. Wherever I have used it in my consulting, safety and total performance has improved.

This Online course is the first in a series to teach about leading and using the Process Enneagram©.

If you are interested in taking the course, please go to my web site, RNKnowles and associates.com, and sign up. Or, call me and I’ll answer your questions. I’ll be using Zoom for the calls. This is important work.

Filed Under: Safety Leadership Process, Safety Partnership, The Process Enneagram© Tagged With: business safety, employee engagement, engage employees in workplace safety, improved process safety performance, lprotect employees in the workplace, online safety course, participative leadership, Process Enneagram, safety issues at work, safety issues in businesses, self-awareness at work, well-being of others at work, workplace safety

As the World Turns…

January 10, 2020 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

We are coming to the end of another decade of change, turmoil and uncertainty.

Artificial intelligence and robots, block chains and bitcoins, the opioid epidemic, political strife, and workplace violence, international worries and potential conflicts are some of the challenges facing all of us. There is a critical need for people, in all walks of life, to come together to openly and honestly talk about our challenges, share our thinking and learn together. We do not have to be blindly swept along. We can make decisions and do the things that we need to do to help to make the world a better place.

We can make a marked difference!

One important challenge that we can do something about is in improving the safety performance in our own organizations.

For the last 4-5 years, the number of people getting killed at work has been holding steady at around 5,300-5,500 people. Lots of safety professionals and other people are working to improve safety in many ways, but we are stuck at the level of safety compliance. We have to shift our thinking in order to break out of this box and significantly cut the numbers of people getting hurt and killed.

This is not about blaming the people and seeking root cause. It is not about just working on safety. In our complex world, there is so much more going on and there is no single root cause. Organizations are complex, adapting, self-organizing networks of people so our thinking has to shift to fully grasp this complexity and do the things we need to do.

Partner-Centered Leadership

The best way to improve the organization’s safety performance, beyond compliance, is in using Partner-Centered Leadership©, which I have been developing for over 3 decades. I used this approach when I was a Plant Manager for many years and together, the people cut our injury rate by 97%, our emissions dropped by 95% and earning rose by 300%. I further developed this approach in my consulting work over the last two decades. Everywhere this approach is used has resulted in rapid, significant improvements in the organization’s total performance.

In building on the base of safety compliance, the focus of our work is on developing more effective leadership and improving the total performance of the organization. Safety performance is just one aspect of the organization’s performance so when the entire organization improves, safety improves as well.

When I talk about safety. my thinking goes well beyond the traditional safety numbers, training and procedures. It includes ideas about respect and how everyone has agreed to work together. It includes ideas about personal responsibility, integrity and dedication to helping everyone improve. It includes openness, honesty and sharing information abundantly. It includes ideas about the deeper, often hidden patterns of behavior which have a profound impact on the work environment and drive much of the behavior. It includes the fact that the managers and leaders have the largest impact on their organization’s performance. It includes the understanding that managers focus on reliability, stability, predictability and control as they try to maintain the status quo and that leaders focus on the people, change and the future sharing information abundantly, treating people with respect and helping people find meaning in their work. Both good leaders and managers are needed.

It includes spending a significant amount of time in the workplace with the people holding both casual and formal conversations about how the people are doing, asking them how I can help to improve their job, looking for feedback on my own performance, seeking better ways to do things as well as talking about the things that are important for the business to succeed and prosper. It also includes the need to maintain high standards and operating discipline. I spent five hours a day in the plant when I was the Plant Manager, every day for 5 years.

Keeping the Continuous Conversation Going is Key

These conversations are a very important part of building the metaphorical container that holds the organization together and provides guidance for everyone. Sometimes these conversations can get quite intense as we all are searching for the truth and better ways to do things. When people have a good understanding, the vision, the mission, the expectations, the standards of behavior and performance, and their own role in building the success of the whole organization, they have a sense of this container, and they are able to make the decisions they need to make regarding the details about how they can best improve their own work as well as the business. The container, which I call the BOWL, provides the order and focus for the organization and the freedom for the people within the BOWL to learn, grow and improve.

Improvement and change come one conversation at a time. As we talk together, listen and learn, everyone gains new insights and a better understanding of how things are going. As this thinking swirls around the ideas begin to synthesize into concrete pictures and new possibilities emerge. The people co-create their shared future. Everyone is growing and learning together.

Partner-Centered Leadership is the best approach that I know about that is proven to help us break out of compliance and move into much better levels of total organizational performance. Call me to learn more about this way of working and the central tool we use which is the Process Enneagram©. If you really want to make a difference then call us at 716-622-6467.

(We are on the cusp of a New Year, so as you draw up your strategies for improvement in 2020, know that the old way of doing things won’t get you to where you want to be…Give us a call…We’ll get you moving forward to better safety performance.)

Filed Under: Safety Leadership, Safety Partnership, The Process Enneagram© Tagged With: business safety, engage employees in workplace safety, make a difference in safety, Partner-centered Leadership, Process Enneagram, safety compliance, safety performance, workplace injuries and incidents, workplace safety

A Wicked Question

February 12, 2018 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

A wicked question is one where it is so complex that there is no final answer. We work to the best solution we can, which works for some period of time, then we have to revisit it again as conditions change. (The wicked question keeps repeating, sometimes reminding us of a bad penny – that keeps showing up at inopportune times!)

A wicked question requires that we articulate the paradoxical challenges that a group must confront to succeed. Here are some quick examples:

How can we dramatically improve safety and quality while drastically reducing costs?
How do we work together as a team when we all have competing agendas?
How can we commit ourselves to be accountable to measuring results while being open to the possibility that we may not be measuring the right outcomes?

Let me pose this wicked question – one that many of you, as Leaders, may be facing: The question of how to deal with marijuana in the work place, treat all stakeholders fairly, reduce injury rates, better protect the environment and our neighbors, honor the responsibility of our employers for providing a safe workplace, meet OSHA requirements and improve the competitive strength of our businesses? – This is a wicked question!

There is no doubt that marijuana has an impact on our brains. But how much, how long does it last, how much does it impact our ability to think clearly, react appropriately to situations as they change and work safely for ourselves and those around us?

All the stakeholders have ideas about what they see as fair. How do we resolve all the competing demands? We all need safe workplaces and strong, competitive businesses. We need to protect the environment and our neighbors. Those who drive and travel also need to be sharp and alert.

Some Ideas to Consider

We need to approach this from the whole systems perspective since everything is connected to everything else. Experience shows that if we try to just fix one part of the system or another, we will wind up making other parts worse.

We need to work together in a way that will bring all our strengths and energy to developing the best solutions we can and not bring the sort of conflict we see in Washington into our workplaces. We need to search for the truth and the best solutions as we can.

Developing some agreed-upon basis for the work is critical. For me the mantra was, “I don’t have a right to make my living where it is okay for you to get hurt. We have to make money as well so let’s figure it out and do it.” The key word in this statement is “okay”. It does not mean that bad things may happen. It does mean that we have the courage and determination to relentlessly work together in the pursuit of excellence together – so that bad things will likely not happen.

Having developed our foundation, we next need to bring the people together in tough, focused, serious conversations to best address all the various issues, fairness and demands – developing the best solutions we can for our particular situation. This highly complex, wicked problem needs us all to work with a deep respect for each other, listening, learning and caring.

Simple training programs are insufficient. Edicts from OSHA or top management tend to address only a part of the problem. We all need to work together, engaging in deep conversations with respect and consideration.

A Complexity Tool

A highly effective tool to use to have the critical conversations is the Process Enneagram©, which enables everyone to see the whole, the parts and the interaction of the parts. Using this we can develop a living strategic plan which you can modify as you go forward and conditions change, around the wicked problem and all its tentacles. You can learn more about this tool at RNKnowlesAssociates.com. Please give us a call at 716-622-6467 if you want to learn more about the effectiveness of this way of addressing wicked problems.

Workplace Violence Prevention – (Another Wicked Problem)

All of us, at one time or another, have had to struggle with dysfunctional behaviors in our organizations. Sexual harassment and bullying are examples of this. These sorts of behaviors left unaddressed lead to poor safety performance and eventually to violence. In having worked in a wide variety of organizations we have come to realize that waste caused by these behaviors is very large. The human and financial costs of serious injuries and violence (across the spectrum) can be in the millions of dollars.

There are also large, but often hidden, costs that result from the shut-down of communications and decent social interaction that interfere with the work. In a few situations where we have had the ability to make before and after comparisons in the time to do specific work, like a change and re-setup between production campaigns or the time to do large powerhouse maintenance shutdowns, we have seen 2-3 fold reductions in the time required for the work as a result of the people putting aside the dysfunctional behaviors and working together much more effectively – willingly addressing the wicked problem.

Think about your own organization and the amount of wasted time in poorly run or unnecessary meetings. Think about the time wasted in trying to resolve grievances and other misunderstandings. Think about the waste of having to rework something because the communications were not clear and it was not safe to ask the proper questions.

All these wasted costs build up and can amount to as much as 25% of the cost of the payroll. The hidden costs are often larger than the ones everyone knows about.

In 2016, the payroll for the US workforce was about 16 trillion dollars. That would mean that all this waste could amount to about 4 trillion dollars. That represents a “gold mine” of opportunity for our businesses to become more profitable. Much of this could be saved by treating each other with real respect, listening and learning together and stopping the dysfunctional junk that is going on in so many places. You can learn more about effectively addressing all this at RNKnowlesAssociates.com.*

*Note that this is an older website of ours – yet the homepage information remains pointedly clear; it needs no revisions. Check out this more current website too: SafetyExcellenceForBusiness.com for more about Leadership and Safety – and dealing with workplace concerns.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership, The Process Enneagram© Tagged With: prevent workplace violence, safety improvement, safety investigations

AKEPT Leadership Series

June 5, 2017 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

On May 24 and 25, 2017, Claire and Dick Knowles were invited to lead a workshop on the theory and use of the Process Enneagram© for the Higher Education Leadership Academy of the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education.

The Academy has a series of training programs for University Administrators and Professors from all over Malaysia. Dick talked about the theory and use of the Process Enneagram© and Claire talked about applications (for example, how she had used it for helping the Western New York Women in Higher Education to improve the effectiveness of their networking events and mentoring). Our round trip from Tampa to Chicago to Tokyo to Kuala Lumpur was quite an experience and went well.

Professor Kamal, AKEPT Director, and others at the Academy are interested in using the Process Enneagram© as a tool to help them plan for and develop better succession planning processes for several Universities in Malaysia. This is a complex problem with many interacting variables so the Process Enneagram© is an ideal tool to enable them to solve this complex task.

Richard N. Knowles &
Prof. Dr. Mohamad Kamal, Director

Dick & Claire

About 75 deans, provosts and professors from all over Malaysia attended the two-day workshop with us. They connected well with the Process Enneagram© and sees its power in helping them to solve complex problems.

The Process Enneagram©, which we created over 25 years ago and have used in hundreds of workshops around the world, is the only known tool that bridges complexity theory and practical applications. The challenge of developing a better succession planning process involves many people in a changing, dynamical environment.

Richard N. Knowles talking at the AKEPT Conference
Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, May 25, 2017

Malaysia is a highly-diverse society where people have learned to get along well together. About 55% of the people in Malaysia are Muslim. There are Hindu, Christian and Buddhist people, as well. Everyone treated us very well – helping us at every opportunity. Our stay was terrific. We will continue our work with the AKEPT people using virtual tools to communicate and share information.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, The Process Enneagram© Tagged With: AKEPT, Malaysia, The Process Enneagram

Working with Multi-Generations in our Workplaces – Safely!

October 10, 2016 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

Historical context:
Consider the Golden Gate Suspension Bridge (San Francisco) built between 1933 and 1937, an architectural marvel, thought to be impossible because in order to bridge that 6,700 ft. strait, in the middle of the bay channel, against strong tides, fierce winds, and thick fog, meant overcoming almost impossible odds. But it was built, with a grand opening in May of 1937, deemed, at the time of its completion, to be the tallest suspension bridge in the world as well as the longest. A man named Joseph Strauss engineered many new ideas, including developing safety devices such as movable netting, which saved 19 lives; though in all, there were 11 men lost during this construction. Thousands of men – workers of varying ages and from varied ethnic groups – came together to complete this project. (They had to listen and learn to be successful together.)

Consider the feat of building the monumental Hoover Dam (1931-1936) – a miracle of technology and engineering. No dam project of this scale had ever been attempted before. There were 21,000 people working at that site with approximately 100 industrial deaths. The walls for this structure – that would uphold the weight of the dam – required workers called “high-scalers” who excavated the cliffs, dangling on ropes from the rim of the canyon. Can you even fathom this?

Consider the great Niagara Power Project (1957-1961). During construction, over 12 million cubic yards of rock were excavated. A total of 20 workers died. When it opened in 1961, it was the Western world’s largest hydropower facility. Many people, including from the “greatest generation” and the “traditionalist generation,” worked together on this project. It was a 24/7, multi-year project.

Note that the Niagara Power Project, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Hoover Dam construction (detailed above) all occurred before OSHA was in existence – the protections were sparse so people (young and old) had to especially look out for each other! Each of these great projects, nonetheless, took lives – workers that did not come home to their loved ones.

Today’s multigenerational Workplace – with Greater Safety Emphasis and Engagement

Fast forward to today…to your workplace…a different time and place…where people of multi-generations also come together for a purpose – to complete the work of your respective business (safely). Managing multi-generational workforces is an art in itself.

Young workers want to contribute and make a quick impact, valuing inclusion
The middle generation needs to believe in the mission – it has to make sense – they have to see the “why” of it
The older employees don’t like ambivalence; they’re looking for clarity, straight-forwardness, and no wishy-washy explanations

Does that make success (together) impossible? Absolutely not. The common denominator is that all people, regardless of their labeled generation, want to be accepted for who they are, to have their contribution valued, and to feel a part of the team/business endeavor. All want to go home from work safe. The need for their brother’s/sister’s keeper remains paramount.

In today’s workplaces, we often have a co-worker population that can represent age ranges of forty-plus years. With that range comes a host of different experiences, expectations and perspectives, and technology prowess. (All good; all offer ways to learn from each other.)

Everyone in the workplace came to there because of the employment opportunity – the opportunity to make a living – in order to provide for themselves and their families. (That’s a collective no-brainer…and the place to start in safety-mindedness – so we can all keep earning a living with all our parts, hands, toes, eyes, ears, etc. all in-tact, every day, regardless of what generation we touch.)

Granted, there are some differences in how teamwork is viewed, loyalty to the job and dealing with change, work-life balance, diversity, rewards and recognition, decision-making, personal growth and development – yet all of these differences are surmountable. Consider too, that all of these differences pale in comparison to the generations that went before, who demonstrated that when working together, toward a clear purpose, were able to complete the type of monumental projects described earlier in this article. To do what they did, required extraordinary teamwork.

I’m reminded of the (illustrative) story of four people going gulf fishing in a boat – a Traditionalist, a Boomer, an X-er, and a Millennial. All of a sudden the boat’s captain fell over dead with a heart attack and, in that process, did something destructive to the boat’s motor key mechanism as he fell over, as well as hitting the radio – breaking its channel mechanism. The boat stalled – dead in the water. Fully adrift.

So the combination of four people had to figure out how they’d get back to shore. Each of them devised a workable plan and got to work. The Traditionalist quickly determined what he could salvage from the boat to make more workable oars for paddling back to the shoreline and readied safety flares for expected overhead helicopters or airplanes; he also knew, instinctively, their directional status, fully understanding the sun’s position in the sky.

The Boomer hunted for and found the boat’s engine manual and was troubleshooting the starting mechanism, and how to bypass it – to restart the engine – plus was troubleshooting the boat’s radio, etc.

The X-er immediately used his phone’s GPS coordinates and was preparing to call in to the Coast Guard for help. The Millennial quickly text messaged an SOS to the Coast Guard with emphasis for HELP!

We often resort to solving problems with the technology to which we are most accustomed. In this illustration, each method had value. Each had potential to solve the problem and return the group to shore! Each person, regardless of his/her generational label, has something important to offer – a way of thinking about things. We each have ideas to offer for solving problems in our workplace; we are each other’s brother/sister in the workplace. We are all in the same boat!

We all can learn from each other, especially in safety. We all can listen to each other. History teaches good lessons. We all can share our concerns, our expectations, our perspectives, our technologies…for the betterment of the success of whatever it is that we came together to do (together).

We, at R.N. Knowles & Associates, work with leaders, teams, organizations, and businesses, helping them to solve their complex problems (together). We know that complex situations require new ways of thinking and being. We also are keen on the use of the Process Enneagram© because it is the proven “tool of complexity” that helps leaders and their teams resolve their complex issues (together and quickly). It allows for extensive input, ideas, perspectives, realities, understanding, and acceptance of various ideas, sharing and learning…so that we bridge perception differences and viewpoint gaps around any complex issue that you are facing. When we learn from our individual talents and work as a team, there is no limit to our potential achievements – including our collective safety!

Call us at 716-622-6467and we’ll show you how it can work for your organization, too.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership Process, The Process Enneagram© Tagged With: safety culture, safety education, Safety Leadership Process, The Process Enneagram

Breaking the Pattern – Allowing the New to Emerge…via The Partner-Centered Safety Leadership Workshop

September 12, 2016 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

In many of our newsletters, I have talked about helping organizations co-create their safety future using the Process Enneagram© complexity tool in our Partner-Centered Safety Leadership Workshops. This is a powerful tool to help bring the people together around their safety challenges – breaking the old patterns, and co-creating a better, safer future (together).

Here is a brief description about how our Partner-Centered Safety Leadership Workshop takes place:

In a recent workshop, a cross-section of the people, including their manager, came together for a day. There were about 19 people present. We began with the question, “How do we improve our safety performance?” With this as our central focus, we engaged the people with the Process Enneagram©. Everyone participated in developing their living, strategic safety plan over the next four hours in an interactive dialogue in which everyone participated, including delving into the issues and behavioral patterns that keep recurring.

Together, the group determined what new commitments needed to be made (by all of the team) in order to get where they wanted to be, together – to achieve the best results for a safe workplace.

We then asked the people to identify what the top four things were that they needed to immediately work on and develop a plan of action. Then, they self-organized into four teams of about equal size to work on their respective topic. After about two hours, each team reported out to the entire workshop group, sharing their ideas and plans to improve safety and to solve their problem. They identified their leader, the team members, their plan of action and when they would be meeting again to do their work.

After the workshop, the participants shared what had happened with all the others in the organization who had not attended, asking for ideas for improvement.

In order to sustain this work, their manager needed to talk with all of them frequently about the progress of their teams. The manager supported each team with the resources and contacts they needed to do their work. About once a month, all the teams came together and reviewed their progress with each of the other teams and the manager. Open communications with the rest of the organization kept everyone informed of the progress.

The manager talked with everyone in the organization about their Safety Strategic Plan, sharing information abundantly, listening carefully, and building credibility. He/she also spent time with each team to understand their work. The manager often helped the teams to contact others in the organization or suppliers so they could make progress. The manager created the environment of open communications and trust to make all this happen and to sustain the work.

When Claire and I returned to this organization after about four months, each team met with us to discuss their progress, frustrations and successes. Every team had made progress and everyone was talking about how to help the organization improve. Several teams had completed their initial project and had begun to work on the next piece of work to help the organization get stronger and safer. Almost everyone in the organization was talking about ways to help to improve the organization’s safety performance. Clearly, the organization had markedly improved, moving forward to a better, safer workplace for everyone. And they co-created that future (together).

Discover how your organization can see safety turnarounds quickly. For more information, contact us at 716-622-6467.

Filed Under: Safety Leadership Process, The Process Enneagram© Tagged With: business safety, safe work environment, safety education in the workplace

Complexity & Change are the New Normal: Leading the Way

June 10, 2016 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

Those organizations that are achieving safety excellence recognize that they must:

Abundantly share all information about their safety, environmental and business performance,
Engage openly and honestly with everyone building trust and interdependence and,
Help everyone to get a sense of their collective whole and see their part in achieving total success.

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) in New Zealand is on the pathway to safety excellence. We worked with Carl Stent, the NIWA National Manager, Safety and Wellbeing, in a series of 7 full-day workshops involving over 100 managers and scientists to develop clarity and focus on the best ways to help their people working remotely, like in the Antarctic, to make the best possible decisions and work safely – every day, every task.

National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research

This (picture above) is their Operations Leadership Team who met with us in Wellington for two days at the beginning of our work with NIWA. We helped them to see that organizations are complex, adapting, self-organizing networks of people. Using the Process Enneagram©, our proprietary complexity tool for having the focused and disciplined conversations, they were able to effectively address their opening question, “How do we build and sustain an effective safety culture across our organization?”

The energy and excitement built during the day as information, ideas and breakthroughs emerged during the workshop. The Process Enneagram© map they created is serving as their living strategic safety plan.

We conducted workshops in six NIWA Centers across New Zealand, giving us an opportunity to meet a lot of outstanding people and to see a lot of their beautiful country. We also conducted one public and one private workshop which were also extremely successful in opening people up to the ideas of complexity and to approaching safety from this perspective. With Carl Stent’s ongoing, excellent support, NIWA is on the road to safety excellence!

Filed Under: Safety Leadership Process, The Process Enneagram© Tagged With: safety excellence process, The Process Enneagram

Shifting the Safety Culture to Excellence

October 3, 2014 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

When we work together with our people, we can shift the safety culture.

self organizing leadership culture The first part of this work is sharing all information and talking together about it. Another part is building trust and interdependence with the people as we openly discuss what is happening, what we are doing and why. The third part of this work is helping people to see the big picture and how important their part is to the success of the whole business.

These are the core elements of Self-Organizing Leadership. When we co-create our Safety Strategic Plan™ using the Process Enneagram©, we produce a living strategic plan that we use going forward. We keep it posted, talk about it weekly and modify it as things change.

We have found that walking around and talking with, rather than at, our people often feels new and awkward for many managers. It takes some practice and persistence.

Being in dialogue with the people makes us feel exposed and uncertain. Sometimes people ask questions we can’t answer. That is okay – just get the answer and go back to talk some more. This is not a spectator sport. There is a Spanish saying, “It is a lot easier to talk about the bull than be in the ring.” Yet, this walking around and talking and listening together is key to our success. In these conversations we are building the BOWL. This is the container that holds the organization together. It consists of our vision, mission, principles, standards, and expectations. As people learn to function within the BOWL, they find the freedom to create new solutions to problems, taking the lead to solve them and become leaders.

When the culture shifts in this way, the people begin to see other things that they can do to improve the business. Quality problems that were once ignored get solved. Cost problems that lingered get fixed. Customer issues among the plant and their customers, like delivery requirements, get solved. Turn-around times between production campaigns needed to clean and re-pipe the equipment drop from weeks to just days. I have seen all these things happen.

When the safety culture gets right then everything gets right! Moving to safety excellence becomes the leading wave for total cultural change to excellence.

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety for Business, The Process Enneagram© Tagged With: creating a safety culture, safe work environment, safety excellence process, Self-Organizing Leadership

September 19, 2013 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

In my previous Blog on The Complex Systems Leadership Process© I’ve been thinking that it would be better to name it The Complexity Leadership Process© since it really is not a system as in systems thinking.

The Complexity Leadership Process is another name for Self-Organizing Leadership©. These are adjustments to my thinking relating to these ideas.

Self Organizing Leadership This Blog is focused on my new book, The Process Enneagram©: Essays on Theory and Practice. I am the editor for this book that was just published by Emergent Publications. It can be purchased directly from their website.

This book grew out of the call for papers for the Special Issue of Emergence: Complexity and Organization, Volume 15, Number 1, March 2013 on The Process Enneagram. In that call for papers I received 9 papers from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom. Since we could only publish four of them in the Special Issue of Emergence, for space reasons, Kurt Richardson, Director of Emergent Publications suggested that we publish all 9 papers in a book.

The book begins with a brief Introduction by me of the Process Enneagram. The 9 essays include two of an historical and theoretical nature by Tony Blake and Cameron Richards, one describing the use of the Process Enneagram at a Managing and Engineering Complex Situations Workshop to help a group of engineers get a better sense of the complexity paradigm and one paper is about using the Process Enneagram with groups of people in industrial organizations helping them to address their complex issues. There are two papers describing the use of the Process Enneagram with graduate students to help one class design their classroom experience for the semester and the other class to get a better understanding among a class of engineers of the flow of technology developments over the last few years from the perspective of complexity. Another describes the use of the Process Enneagram in helping to develop more cohesive, effective teams over a three-year period. Another paper correlates the energy flows in the Process Enneagram with those in an ancient Chinese cosmological, leadership model. The last paper uses a card trick by a famous magician to illustrate how one feels while moving through the work of the Process Enneagram.

These widely ranging essays open up a broad scope of richness in The Process Enneagram helping people to see and learn more about it from these widely ranging perspectives.

Sometimes I have referred to the Process Enneagram as a tool, but this is misleading in that it is not something like a wrench. I see it more and more as a series of nested processes that help guide important conversations and reveal the patterns and processes that are running within the organization. In using the Process Enneagram with people deeper understanding and better communications develop.

The importance of the Process Enneagram is in its use to help people work with complex, wicked problems, build the social connections they need and build the emotional energy and commitment to do their work.

One area where I have used The Process Enneagram is with people in organizations to help them improve their understanding of all their safety issues and develop a living, strategic plan for them to use going forward to sustain their work. Using The Process Enneagram is the first step in the Complex Leadership Process helping the people to get clear, focused, coherent and energized. As people develop and use The Process Enneagram they experience two levels of transformation. One is their own personal transformation and the other one is the transformation of the organization.

When the leaders from across the organization develop their strategic safety plan, and engaged in the transformations, they can take it to all the others in the organization to share and further develop it. If people are willing to be open to learning and growing The Process Enneagram always works in amazing ways.

In the previous blog I describe the Complexity Leadership Process and you can see the important role at the start of the work that it plays.

Filed Under: Safety Leadership Process, Self-Organizing Leadership, The Process Enneagram© Tagged With: books on self organizing leadership, essays on complexity and organization, strategic safety plan development, The Process Enneagram