Senior leadership site safety visits: four keys for success
About a third of the way into my 24 years with a large integrated energy company, I had the privilege of progressing my career as a business leader with a variety of challenges in a diversity of settings. I understood from the beginning that I needed to develop myself as a leader of safe and efficient operations, so I started my managerial career by getting trained, certified and then serving as an Offshore Installation Manger in the North Sea. During that period I was the host for several senior leadership visits to the platform. In the roles succeeding my time as an OIM, I then experienced the visit challenge from the perspective of the visitor, rather than the visited. In this article I share four ingredients which I believe make for a successful site visit a senior/executive leader - someone is one or more organizational tiers removed from the site leader who is hosting the visit. These four aren't an exhaustive list, but they are high on my learning points. There are a large number of people to whom I am grateful for both encouraging me when I was doing well, and providing feedback when I wasn't quite as effective!
1. Being there
The very first key success is turning up at the work place in the first place! Most organizations I have encountered understand this notion, but fewer make it happen as a regular and constant habit. The best make it a requirement and build much support, training and a cultural bias into visible and felt leadership (e.g. Dupont). Fundamentally, regular visits to the operational site, interacting with as many people, is the best way for a non-site leader to demonstrate that he/she is interested in what's going on. More than that, what a leader talks about, acts on and the manner in which these conversations are conducted, give workers an insight to what the leader really cares about. A larger degree of self-awareness is required for these shorter interactions with key employees. A throw-away comment, easily understood by a direct report who knows you well, can easily mislead a person with a different context. In my experience it requires a determination and discipline to stick to a regular routine of scheduled visits, particularly when it involves remote or offshore sites. The visits are also demanding because you need to be on your game, demonstrating authentically in most every minute you care. By the way, don't bother turning up if you actually don't care about the message you're trying to deliver - the front line has an uncanny knack of seeing through such fronts.
2. Mindful inquiry on risk priorities
My visits to site are typically about safety and risk. Through the years I learnt that it is very useful to have a prioritized framework for risk and a deliberate and achievable plan for what I was going to look at or the tone/messages I would get across. So town hall style meetings were scheduled to get over context, directions and priority; site tours with the site manager and his reports to test aspects of the safety management system and, more importantly, to observe and provide coaching to the site leaders; and one-on-ones with key thought leaders or people with formal roles like safety representatives. A useful frame for prioritizing inquiries on the safety management system came from Paul Everest. Paul coached me to think first about major accident hazards that could result in multiple fatalities and serious impact to the company. This is the domain of process safety. Then about hazards such as confined space entry or working at height that if not properly managed could likely result in one, possibly more, fatalities. Finally there is everything else, slips trips and falls that might cause serious injury but would be lesser impact than the other two. This last one is the arena of personal safety.
While dialogue is key to any inquiry, probing into risk on a site is best placed in the context of components of the safety management system. So for example, process safety inquiries should test aspects ranging from maintenance of safety critical equipment and inspection of pressure vessels and pipework, through operating procedures and safe systems of work, to the control of inhibits/overrides and monitoring of safe operating limits. All inquiries will have questions with prefaces such as "tell me how...", "what is your role in...", "how to you know..." and perhaps most importantly "what would happen if..." This last one is about practicing "chronic unease", discussing the worst thing that credibly could happen, imagining the impact of such an incident, and bringing out the "barriers" or "layers of protection" that protect everyone from such an event. Organizations that are good at managing high hazard operations are well versed in "mindfulness", sensitive to weak signals and astute in joining the dots within the system to identify the bigger issue that needs addressing. Said another way: site visits are a leader's opportunity to observe the business end of the operation, and look for defects that may be symptoms of bigger system issue that needs fixing.
3. Getting to the root of the issue
If a defect, problem or issue comes up the inquiry then explore further with the people on the site. Follow a simple causation inquiry like the "5 Whys" to uncover system failings that have led to the issue. Be wary of just concluding that it is lack of compliance or error by the workers involved. In my experience, the majority of people are well intended and want to do what they believe the company desires. Workarounds often result from having to put up with defects and system failings, not laziness or negligence. Inquire to discover why the behaviors are so: what is the context of individual intent and organizational culture. Be prepared to have the causation come back to you! The more senior you are in the organization the more you are accountable for the effective operation of work processes in your business and hence you will be responsible for fixing the system issue that has led to the problem. While site visits are absolutely an opportunity to set or raise standards of practice, particularly as they relate to safety, they are also an opportunity to test the systems and learn about opportunities for improvement. With respect to safety, you could be proactively preventing an incident or injury by quickly and methodically fixing the system gap you have identified in the inquiry.
4. Feed back and follow up
It's critical for your reputation as a leader to both explicitly provide feedback and to follow up on issues you have observed. Discuss your observations and conclusions with the senior-most person on site before you leave. Make sure that is the very same feedback you are going to provide with her boss. Be clear about what actions you believe she needs to take, but also explicitly commit to what you are going to do as a result of the visit. Then make sure you do follow through on the actions, both completing yours and checking on your next visit. From visible felt leadership comes culture change. From reliability and a track record of completing on your commitments comes trust. From attention to and improvement of system issues comes performance improvement.