The Emerging Role of the Safety Professional, Part 4
Practicing transformational leadership provides your roadmap to success.
- By Donald R. Groover, CIH, CSP, Jim Spigener
- Jul 21, 2008
In this series, we have laid out the emerging challenges
that safety professionals are experiencing,
the new skills we must possess to operate in this
new era, and the challenges we will face if we decide
to remain stagnant. Safety is taking a much more
central role in the emerging world, but safety professionals
who remain rooted in their past successes and
approaches may find themselves become less and less
relevant. So what is the pathway to success? How do we
increase our relevancy? In addition to new skills and
knowledge, safety professionals also must become
change leaders. To complete this series, we look at how
leadership style can help safety professionals become
more effective influencers of safety -- and organizational --
performance.
Transformational Leadership Style
Fundamentally, a safety professional must have sound
management skills. He or she must be able to outline
staffing requirements, select the right people into the department
or organization, know where to get answers to
technical and regulatory questions, and be able to lay out
a project plan for a new initiative.Yet, in a business landscape
of increasing complexity and diversity of demands,
safety professionals also must become change leaders.
A change leader generates great enthusiasm and energy
within his or her direct reports and those around
them and acts in a way that makes others want to listen
and take heed. This is not to say the safety professional
must become a self-centered egomaniac; in fact, he
must become just the opposite. Leadership is about a
person’s ability to give people a sense of purpose and
understanding regarding the work they do and move
people to action.
James Macgregor Burns coined the phrase “transformational
leadership” in 1978 to describe just these qualities.
Burns defined this leadership style as “inducing followers
to act for certain goals that represent the values
and the motivations, the wants and needs, the aspirations
and expectations—of both leaders and followers.” Since
then, transformational leadership has become a wellstudied
and documented leadership style. Transformational
leaders have been shown to:
• Lead work groups that are consistently rated as
more productive and flexible
• Contribute more leaders into the pipeline
• Attract and retain desirable people to the organization
• Score higher in safety leadership best practice scores
Transformational leadership can be understood as
having four defining characteristics or dimensions.
They are:
Challenging: The leader provides subordinates with
a flow of challenging new ideas aimed at stimulating
them to rethink old ways of doing things.He or she challenges
dysfunctional paradigms and promotes rationality
and careful problem solving. Behavioral examples of
intellectual stimulation include: encouraging followers
not to think like him, creating a “readiness” for changes
in thinking, encouraging a broad range of interests, and
putting forth or entertaining seemingly foolish ideas.
Engaging: The leader helps others commit to the desired
direction. She coaches, mentors, provides feedback
and personal attention as needed, and links the individual’s
needs to the organization’s mission. Behavioral examples
include: creating strategies for continuous improvement,
promoting self-development, encouraging
others to take initiative, and coaching and counseling.
Inspiring: The leader sets high standards and communicates
about objectives enthusiastically. He articulates
a compelling vision and communicates confidence
about achieving the vision.Behavioral examples include:
helping followers achieve levels of performance beyond
what they felt possible,demonstrating self-determination
and commitment to reaching goals, expressing optimism
about goal attainment, and arousing in followers emotional
acceptance of challenges.
Influencing: The leader builds a sense of “missionbeyond-
self-interest” and a commitment to the vision.
She gains the confidence, respect, and trust of others;
considers the ethical consequences of her decisions;
appeals to others’ most important values and beliefs;
and instills pride. Behavioral examples of influence include:
engendering trust in the leader’s ability to overcome
a crisis, acting as a role model, sacrificing selfgain
for the gain of others, and creating a sense of joint
mission and ownership.
Transformational leadership is not mysterious. It is
comprised of observable behaviors, and its effect can be measured through discussions with people
who are in contact with the leader.
Becoming a Transformational Leader
Transformational leadership creates a will to
go above and beyond self-interest within the
organization. The challenge for safety professionals
is learning how to direct that will toward
an investment in safety—in other words,
learning how to tie a transformational style to
safety practices. To illustrate how leadership
style can influence best practices, let’s use examples
of two well-known leadership best
practices: credibility and collaboration.
Transformational credibility.Credibility as
a safety leadership practice describes a person’s
willingness to admit mistakes to self and
others, give honest information about safety
performance even if it is not well received,
and follow through on safety-related commitments,
among other elements. To illustrate
how to leverage credibility behaviors
using a transformational style,we will look at
the credibility behavior of giving honest safety
performance information.
Many organizations suffer from spending
too much time on low energy/low potential
events. Leaders will discuss every OSHA
recordable equally, and an incident with high
potential for severe injury (such as a near miss
associated with a failure in the lockout/tagout
system) will get the same level of attention as
an incident with low potential for serious injury
(such as dust in the eye).While someone’s
getting dust in an eye is important, its
potential for life-altering injury is extremely
low. A safety professional who points out this
apparent inconsistency and advocates for a
change in how events are prioritized adds to
her credibility.
One could approach this task in a number
of different ways, but the most powerful
and influential way would be to use the challenge
dimension of transformational style.
For example, you could set up a group discussion
with the people you want to influence
and ask them to consider why events are handled
the way they are. Instead of telling people
how they need to think about the issue, a
transformational safety professional would
engage others in a conversation, posing questions
such as: What message are we sending
when senior leaders spend as much of their time
on low energy and low potential events as high
potential events?
Transformational collaboration. Collaboration
as a safety leadership practice is about
promoting cooperation and teamwork, asking
for and encouraging input from people
on safety issues that will affect them, and
seeking out and listening to diverse points of
view regarding safety. Collaboration behaviors
are often most called for in changing direction.
Change is difficult, and people are
generally comfortable with the status quo unless
there is an extremely compelling reason
for change.New directions are made easier if
people are engaged in the process and contributing
to decisions along the way. The safety professional who gets into the field and
seeks input and feedback from the people he
depends on to implement the change is more
successful and sets the stage for success.
Collaboration in decision-making should
not be confused with consensus, which is a
process by which a group comes to a joint decision.
With collaboration, the leader still
owns the responsibility for making the decision
but seeks others’ input before deciding.
Practicing collaboration behaviors using a
transformational style might take the form of
using the engaging dimension mentioned
earlier.When a decision or initiative allows
time for input, the safety professional can approach
the decision by soliciting input in a
way that encourages others to take initiative
in identifying solutions, rather than providing
a set of options for them to choose from.
The safety professional might also coach others
to take on new roles within the new initiative,
thereby giving people a more personal
way to buy in to and support the change.
Exciting Times
An increasingly large body of research shows
that excellence in safety performance correlates
with excellence in other performance
metrics, such as productivity, profitability,
quality, and customer service.Workplace demographics
are changing, with employee
populations growing more diverse in background,
belief, and geography. So, too, are
business practices and norms.A focus on culture
and safety climate, and on developing
safety leadership skills at all levels, can provide
a surer path to success and sustainability than
any single new program.
These truly are exciting and changing
times. For safety professionals who grab the
reins and develop transformational leadership
skills and continue to personally challenge
their level of understanding and beliefs,
there will be greater opportunities and, with
them, a much more rewarding job. Finally, by
working on these attributes and skills, the
safety professional will remain a relevant and
welcome member at the table with other senior
executives.
Read the entire "Emerging Role" series: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
This article originally appeared in the July 2008 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.