leadership in the workplace | Safety Excellence For Business

Leaders: You Must Understand This in the Workplace!

September 12, 2022 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

I’m presenting at the New York State SHRM Conference in Verona, New York, this coming weekend.

That is the state-wide gathering of Human Resource Managers – it is good to be able to return to this big conference (post covid). I’ve also spoken in the near past at Safety Professional gatherings around the fact that it matters what Leaders do or don’t do!

Whether we are HR Managers, Safety Leaders, CEO’s, Supervisors or Managers – the same message applies.

Notes:

I am amazed by how few Safety Leaders understand that the Cultural side of Workplace Violence (which can negatively manifest into bullying, harassment, incivilities, and dysfunction) is part of Safety – having a workplace free of intimidation and abuse is how we eliminate psychological and emotional injuries and incidents.
I am concerned how many Human Resource managers (many of them siloed into various positions, like “I only deal with Benefits; or I only deal with Talent Recruitment; or I only deal with onboarding”), have shunned their responsibility for behavioral dysfunctions within the larger organization. Yet, they do consider themselves Leaders.

Consider this: A Supervisor/Leader walks by an obvious Safety hazard/condition in the workplace, that if not corrected, will likely lead to a physical injury to someone. When that Leader walks by, ignoring it, he/she is telegraphing to the organization what their standard is – it doesn’t matter enough to him/her to take action – it’s okay if someone gets physically hurt.

Similarly, when a supervisor or leader observes or overhears harassment or bullying or disrespectful things being said, or gestures being made, and does nothing to stop it – he or she, again, conveys to the organization that it doesn’t matter – in other words, it is okay if someone is being hurt emotionally / psychologically – in effect, the Supervisor by not stepping up, allows the disrespectful dysfunctional behaviors – and because they go unchecked, these behaviors continue.

This begs the question: Why are Leaders timid? Afraid to step in? Lack the managerial courage? Is it lack of skill? Lack of will? Fearful of how they may be seen? Afraid of not being liked? Afraid of not being supported? There is always something underneath that every leader needs to understand about their own Leadership. How about YOU?

At Nagele and Knowles, we teach Leaders HOW TO LEAD. It is about stepping up, stepping in, and staying in the heat. The heat is hottest in the nosecone of the rocket. Do you need to learn more about handling conflict, engaging, and being better at confrontation skills?

Call us at 716-622-6467. We teach Leaders how to Lead effectively.

Workplace Stress

June 10, 2022 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

There is a lot of stress all around us – in our personal and workplace lives.

The war in the Ukraine, inflation, gas prices, groceries, apartment rents, and the mass shootings are a few examples. This stress affects us all in one way or another. It feels as if everything is under some sort of threat. Do we have to make churches, schools, grocery stores, playgrounds, offices, factories and even homes hard targets to try to protect ourselves? Stressors are many – negativity is high.

In previous posts I have talked about the need for situational awareness. This is so important for all of us. It is a first line of defense. We also need to take basic precautions around our homes being sure that we have taken reasonable precautions like having bright, outside lighting, keeping doors locked, picking up packages from our front porches, etc. When we go out to mix in big groups like bars and night clubs, or events, or any gathering, we need to ask ourselves if this is the right thing for us at that time.

When we are at work, we need to be cognizant of everyone that is feeling stress and preoccupied. Things we say or do may be taken in the wrong way. People may have short tempers. Some will be hurrying and careless. We each need to avoid contributing more stress to the situations.

All this stress and preoccupation makes us vulnerable to our own mistakes and errors. I tend to make poorer judgements when I am stressed like another driver and I did recently – we had a fender bender. Fortunately, there were no injuries other than egos being beat up. Preoccupation like this at work can lead to injuries and incidents as well. Perhaps the biggest threat we face is our own impatience and anxiousness.

For me, I need to slow down a little and ask myself what I am doing to be able to do the next task correctly. Do I need to take a deep breath to clear my mind before I do the next thing? Am I centered before starting the next conversation? Am I paying enough attention to what is going on around me so I do not cause problems and get someone hurt? Am I trying to select the correct words for the next conversation so I do not cause unnecessary troubles? Is one of my friends or coworkers feeling stress and do they need some extra kindness from me?

The number of road rage incidents is going up as well as the severity of the violence in these incidents. I need to be more aware of my own behavior. Small things I do may cause someone else to get angry. I need to keep my phone put away. I do not want to be caught up in one of these road rage incidents, so I need to be sure that my speed is appropriate, and I am not driving aggressively. I need to be sure to leave plenty of space between me and other cars and not to crowd people as I give way to my stress and start hurrying.

These are tough times for all of us. Stress levels impact all areas of our lives. We need to be kind to ourselves and others to help relieve the stresses a little.

Signs of Hope

Many of you reading my posts know how highly I value using really good processes for participation in our workplaces, sharing of information, building trust, and helping people to find meaning in their work. (Having meaning in one’s work helps to lessen work stress!) Over the last 50 years of my work in the field of Leadership, I have gradually seen progress in this participative and meaningful way of working. While there are plenty of bad examples of leadership, I am seeing improvements taking place. More people are talking about working this way. Some recent articles in Professional Safety, the journal of the American Society for Safety Professionals, have begun to talk about this. Other business journals are also talking more and more about this.

There is a growing awareness that our traditional top-down management approach is not up to the rapidly changing and more complex world. I have even seen some recent papers indicating that some of the professionals in government are more aware of the need to recognize and use ideas like Ross Ashby’s Requisite Variety, Complexity and Reflexivity so we can lead, learn, and think more clearly and effectively about how work is being done. It is heartening to me to see this participative progress!

I urge all of you to work on expanding your own leadership thinking so that you can also be more effective in your own work, and as you lead others. It has been extremely important for me in my own journey over the last few generations. I urge you (also) to learn about and practice situational awareness – for your safety and for others. If you have questions, please contact me at 716-622-6467 or send me an email.

Remember, it takes Leadership to improve Safety.
It takes being “aware” to notice what’s happening in your surroundings.
It takes de-stressing measures to bring calm to the moment.

Filed Under: Safety for Business Tagged With: American Society for Safety Professionals, business safety, focused leadership, health and safety in the workplace, leadership handling stress in the workplace, leadership in the workplace, professional safety, safety in the workplace, situational awareness, stress in the workplace, workplace processes

Working Together Makes All the Difference

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

When we are asked to come into an organization to help them improve their safety performance, we do not work on safety in the traditional sense.

We work with them to identify an important, complex problem they want to solve. It needs to be a problem that everyone thinks they know about and wants to solve. While the stated problem is something like, “How do we improve our total safety performance?,” their problems are usually much deeper than this surface level. We help the people to find the deeper problem that is driving a lot of their poor safety performance.

We then gather a group of people together from across the organization, from the top management to people on the floor, and have a focused conversation about their problems. Our workshops usually last 1-2 days, depending on the size of the organization. As the people open up, a lot of important information emerges. Their answers are arranged around a circle (circles indicate wholeness), and they discover who and what they are as a group and how to work together in resolving this concern for the long-term.

This figure illustrates the process:

As they look at their question from these nine perspectives, the collective intelligence of the whole group rises. People often tell us that they did not know that they knew so much.

As they talk together, they discover that their main problem is in how they chose to work together which they describe when they talk about their Principles and Standards. Initially, a lot of dysfunctional behavior surfaces. They see that stuff like bullying, harassment, and lying are really causing their poor performance across the organization. It’s not just in poor safety performance. These poor behaviors contaminate all their work.

Paul Glover of the Forbes Coaches Council reported recently in LinkedIn that 48% of American workers are looking for other work because of dysfunctional behaviors like these, 70% see no reason to speak up about problems because they fear their bosses and co-workers, and only 33% are working at optimal levels. There is little psychological safety for raising and resolving problems together. Many organizations are in denial about problems like these. These dysfunctional behaviors adversely impact all aspects of the organization’s performance, and lots of people want to get out of there. Leadership, unfortunately, is in denial – often because egos are involved, or they don’t know how to turn things around. Yet it doesn’t have to be that way!

Note: This model works, when you decide it is time to make that big difference for your organization, to be intentional about the safety of your people! This model becomes your extraordinary leadership magnet for improved safety performance – because it contains all the critical elements – and because it is collaborative, alignment and effectiveness comes quickly.

Most people want to work in organizations where everyone is working together for the good of the whole. Leaders are seeking better ways for embracing safety. People want to be proud of their place of work and feel good about it. So, in our workshops we help the people to tap into this way of working and everything gets better, quickly. For example, we have seen the safety performance change for the better the very next day. When people decide that they want to change, they do it.

Call me at 716-622-6467 soon and share with me the safety concerns that are happening in your organization. It’s a free consultation. Leaders are looking for answers…I’ll demonstrate for you how quickly your safety issues can be rectified, and your people can be more engaged in the betterment, as well.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership Tagged With: 360 degree collaboration model, business safety, embracing safety in the workplace, leadership in the workplace, organizational safety, organizational success, reducing workplace violence, safety performance, stop workplace violence, teamwork, working together makes a difference, workplace safety, workplace violence