Session No.

560

Motivating Leadership of Safety Excellence:

What Really Works

Thomas R. Krause, Ph.D.

Chairman of the Board
BST
Ojai, California

The role and influence of leadership have come into sharp focus for safety professionals. How
leaders think about safety, the behaviors they engage in, the safety messages they send, and the
decisions they make enable and invigorate the achievement of safety excellence. So, what
motivates a leader to achieve safety excellence in the first place? Leaders are charged with an
array of complex tasks, demands, and responsibilities; how well we understand and engage a
leader’s intrinsic motivations largely drives how likely we are to achieve our safety goals.

In the author’s experience, most leaders are already inherently motivated to improve safety:
chiefly, leaders are driven by a sense that safety is the right thing to do. Secondarily, leaders also
see safety as a way to build a performance platform, solidify the culture, and support profitability.
This intrinsic motivation, however, fulfills only a precondition for safety leadership; it does not
assure that the right things will happen. The reality of organizational life is that many leaders are
poorly engaged in driving safety functioning, despite their good intentions. For these
organizations, the question is not, how do we motivate leaders to improve safety, but, how can we
tap into our leaders’ inherent motivation to achieve excellence in safety?

This article examines the problem of leadership motivation, identifies the reasons that intrinsic
motivations remain untapped, and develops an approach for engaging leaders in a way that
demonstrably influences safety outcomes.

The Motivation Question

The safety community has long debated the right way to motivate employees at any level to
improve safety. The discussion has centered largely on two questions: What constitutes
meaningful, as against superficial, involvement in safety activities? And what methods best
generate genuine participation in safety? We acknowledge that participation in activities in
themselves does not confirm motivation: I can “go through the motions” of attending a safety
meeting, for instance, without actually contributing to the advancement of safety objectives. What
workers, supervisors, and leaders usually mean when they talk about creating motivation around
safety is that they want to promote interest and participation in safety on a personal level. That is,
whether I’m a leader or a front-line employee, safety is personally important to me, and I act
within the organization because of, and on behalf of, that interest.

How then, do we generate or reinforce such motivation? The many approaches sort generally into
two categories: transactional and transformational. Transactional approaches seek to generate
motivation by offering something in exchange for a person’s work and interest in safety
improvement. Activities in this category include bonuses or awards for group performance,
incentives for the performance of safety activities, and including safety as a metric in a leader’s
performance management and compensation. The second approach, transformational, seeks to
engender motivation by engaging the person in the work itself.

At the front-line level, transactional motivation has mixed results at best. When the contingency
is incident frequency, transactional motivation can reward (or punish) employees for things over
which they have little control, such as the practices of a workgroup on another shift. At the senior
level, safety incentives appear somewhat more effective; leaders are more often in control of the
means to achieve outcomes and bear ultimately responsibility for them. Even here, transactional
motivation can become a distraction from the larger issues of what it takes to be an effective
safety leader. A leader measured and compensated on a specific metric, for instance recordable
rates or workers’ compensation cases, more likely focuses on that area to the exclusion of the
bigger picture. While it is desirable to hold leaders accountable to specific outcomes (and
therefore send the message that their leadership in safety is needed), relying on these measures
alone misses an important opportunity to motivate leaders at an intrinsic level.

Our experience suggests that transactional motivation proves ultimately unsatisfactory because it
fails to address the fundamental motives that drive engagement in any work activity. As pointed
out by Herzberg and others, the most important work-related motivating factors do not have to do
with pay, benefits, or other external elements. These things are important, but providing them at
best brings the organization to a neutral position. What’s more important to driving interest in
work performance is achievement, recognition, and the satisfaction of the work itself. Financial
and other tangible incentives, while potentially compelling in the short term, do not appeal to the
underlying drive for the long term – they do not generate motivation on a personal level.

Intrinsic Motivations
Intrinsic motivation connects people on multiple levels — the intellectual, the emotional, the
creative, and the psychological — with the work they do. This connection is predicated on what
each person brings to safety: what safety means to him, what prompts him to become involved in
it, and what he would like to get out of it. We begin below with a look at what safety means to the
person we are trying to engage; the meanings vary from level to level, just as the experience of
safety – and its outcomes – differ at each organizational level. With this understanding, we can
define activities and interactions that capitalize on these intrinsic motivations and make them
active.
Concerns of Senior-Most Leaders
In the safety arena, senior-most leaders (often called “C-level”) worry about fatalities first and
foremost. While some worry more than others, and some care from experience, which is a hard
teacher, senior leaders as a group are moved by fatalities in their organizations. Most find
unacceptable that fatal accidents are preventable and continue to occur in their organizations. For
those who aren't yet motivated to prevent fatalities the key question is, Is it necessary that a life
be lost? In other words, Are fatal accidents a part of doing business, or can they be prevented?

In addition to precluding fatalities, senior leaders are also concerned with getting things done
competently. When safety managers say they have trouble getting “management support,” they
often have failed to demonstrate their competency in making a difference. The senior leader holds
back support more from fear that resources will be used ineffectively than from a lack of interest
in prevention.

On a personal level, senior leaders are motivated to improve safety because somewhere deep
down they realize it’s the right thing to do. Safety also complements the charge a leader has to
promote sustainability: creating an organization that is responsible and that cultivates its
resources. Engaging senior leaders, and therefore motivating them, means showing them how
they can influence safety outcomes, and enhance the wellbeing of the organization, directly
through their actions, decisions, and beliefs, and indirectly through their support.

Concerns of Hourly Employees

Front-line employees are concerned with their own wellbeing in the present day-to-day activity of
their jobs. They have seen other people hurt, sometimes seriously, and they see the potential for
injury, as well as the exposure to risk, on a daily basis. For them, safety is personal. Safety means
not getting injured personally and not seeing friends and coworkers get injured. Hourly workers
understand from their day-to-day experiences how the company views safety. Does the
organization respond promptly to known hazards? Are safety suggestions appreciated and
valued? Are safety meetings conducted well or perfunctorily? Do new employees receive
adequate safety training? Do first-line supervisors model safe behavior? The list goes on, but the
point is that safety isn’t about what people say, it’s about what they do.

What does this insight tell us about how to engage the hourly employees in safety, and thereby
how to motivate them? It says that we should look for opportunities to have hourly employees
participate in safety improvement activities, that participation in itself will be motivating. Lead a
safety meeting, do a safety observation, fix a safety problem, make a suggestion, give feedback to
another employee. Involvement generates motivation.

Concerns of the First-Line Supervisor

To a first-line supervisor or team leader, safety means keeping people from getting hurt. To this
level of leader, an injured employee is an individual, not a statistic. Given this proximity to
exposure and injury, supervisors should be among the strongest natural allies of safety efforts.
But supervisors often do not have the skills they need to be effective in this role. Employees are
often promoted to supervisory positions because of technical proficiency rather than management
skill, and, even within the same organization, we see great variation among supervisors in their
safety skills and motivation.
To engage supervisors and team leaders, it is essential to develop their leadership skills, to foster
awareness of this group’s importance to safety performance, and to reveal points of influence that
supervisors and team leaders can leverage for safety. Engagement for this level takes the form of
talking to employees, observing how work is done, observing exposures, and responding to
identified hazards.

Concerns of the Plant Manager

Much like the senior leader, plant managers are concerned with fatalities and with ensuring that
resources are well used. But, unless the plant is large and the work hazardous, the number of
fatalities will remain low even if the workplace is unsafe. Plant managers must understand the
relationship of exposure events to injury events. And to do that, they need to understand leading
indicators: measures of variables that can be shown to have a statistically valid, predictive
relationship to the frequency of injury.

Engaging plant managers means giving them the leading indicators that tell them where
exposures are occurring, charging them with the active oversight of the site’s safety systems and
mechanisms, and immersing them in finding solutions to safety issues.

Concerns of Labor Representatives

Labor leaders want to keep their members safe. The imperative of assuring worker safety
commands the labor leader’s interest and guides union leaders’ actions. Labor representatives are
also interested in finding common ground with management on the quality of working conditions.
Engaging these leaders means giving them a role to play in safety activities, soliciting their input
on safety decisions, and finding joint safety issues on which to collaborate.

Connecting Senior Leaders to Safety Performance

Most senior leaders come to the challenge of safety with a history of competence and a track
record of success. They bring to this challenge either inbred or well developed motivation to
promote safety throughout the organization. That is the good news. The bad news is that leaders
have little slack in time and resources with which to add additional activities. Effective
engagement at this level requires that we seize existing opportunities to influence safety, which
for senior leaders means their day-to-day interactions, tasks, and decisions.

How then do we connect C-level leaders to safety performance, to leadership behaviors at the
operating levels, and more broadly to company culture? Research has identified a set of
leadership characteristics that predict organizational culture and safety performance – a
framework within which the leader influences safety outcomes. This framework comprises three
categories of leadership characteristics.

1. Personal Safety Ethic

Effective safety leadership starts with who the leader is: his or her value for people, her
personality and her emotional commitment to safety. Culture receives and hosts the effects of a
leader’s values and behavioral standards—what he believes is important, what is acceptable, and
what is not. Of course, what’s important here is not what a leader says he values, but what he
actually values—the ethics manifested in his personal behavior. These elements influence safety
decision-making, interactions with subordinates, the priority the leader places on safety, and how
the leader drives success.

2. How the Leader Influences

Good research reveals the relationship between leadership style and safety results (e.g. Hoffman
& Morgeson, 1999; Zohar, 2002). Leadership style consists of four dimensions that describe how
a leader motivates and inspires people to go above and beyond the letter of their jobs. The
Influencing dimension establishes the basic credibility and principled action so critical to
forming relationships. The Engaging dimension creates relationships that are based on mutual
respect and understanding. The Inspiring dimension propels these relationships toward an
improved future, while the Challenging dimension helps break paradigms that get in the way.

3. What Leaders Do
Creating a culture in which safety is a driving value (or isn’t) arises from leaders’ day-to-day
actions. In the most effective safety leaders, certain behaviors are seen to recur (Krause 2005).
We find it helpful to view these practices sequentially, one building upon the other.

Vision–The leader envisions what safety performance excellence would look like and conveys
that vision in a compelling way throughout the organization. He or she acts in a way that
communicates high personal standards in safety, helps others question and rethink their own
assumptions about safety, and describes a compelling picture of what the future can be in terms of
recurring behaviors at every level of the organization.

Credibility–The leader commands trustworthiness among other people in the organization, and
fosters a high level of trust in his or her peers and reports. The leader is willing to admit mistakes
with others, “goes to bat” for direct reports, supports the interests of the group, and gives honest
information about safety even it if is unwelcome.

Collaboration–The leader works well with other people, promotes cooperation and collaboration
in fostering safety, actively seeks input from people on issues that affect them, and encourages
others to implement their decisions and solutions for reducing exposures to hazard.

Communication–The leader is a great communicator. He or she encourages people to give

honest and complete information about safety, even (or especially) when the information is
unfavorable. The leader keeps people informed about the big picture in safety, and communicates
frequently and effectively up, down, and across the organization.

Action-Orientation–The leader is proactive rather than reactive in addressing safety issues. The
leader gives timely, considered responses to safety concerns, demonstrates a sense of personal
urgency to achieve safety results, and demonstrates a performance-driven energy by delivering
results with speed and excellence.

Feedback & Recognition–The leader is good at providing feedback and recognizing people for
their accomplishments, publicly recognizes the contributions of others, uses praise more often
than criticism, gives positive feedback and recognition for good performance, and finds ways to
celebrate accomplishments in safety.
Accountability–Finally, the leader clearly communicates people’s roles in the safety effort, gives
people a fair appraisal of their efforts and results in safety, and fosters the sense that every person
is responsible for safety outcomes in their work unit. This practice comes last: accountability,
absent the other practices, can be counterproductive. When integrated into the other six practices,
accountability complements the work undertaken.

Exhibit 1. A sample leadership diagnostic report

showing best practices expressed as percentiles.

The safety leadership best practices defined here, along with the four leadership styles, can be
measured through 360 degree feedback and interviews with the leader’s peers, reports, and
superiors. Results can be shown as percentiles comparing the individual leader to the scores of
leaders in a large comparative database. Exhibit 1 illustrates a case (true but disguised) of a leader
frequently seen as giving effective recognition and feedback, but not perceived as prone to act to
address and resolve issues in the safety arena. In this instance, the leader might work with a coach
to develop an action plan that would enhance his ability to support the activities of others in order
to execute critical safety tasks.

Rarely do two or more leaders display identical profiles of relative frequency in the employment
of best practices. Differences in skill, experience, and even motivation tend to produce wide
variations, even within the same company. Exhibit 2 illustrates this point, showing both the mean
percentile score (the bar heights) for the senior leadership team of a medium-sized global
company, but also displaying the individual percentiles of each member of senior leadership (the
triangles within and above each bar).
 Exhibit 2. There can be wide variations in best practices scores within a leadership team.

This diagnostic work provides leaders with tangible information about how they shape
organizational culture. A study of relationships between the top site-level leader’s best practices
and site-level culture (Exhibit 3), shows strong positive correlations between ratings of each best
practice and overall ratings of each dimension of organizational culture. The leadership’s overall
score (the aggregate of the seven best practices) predicts culture overall. By “culture,” we mean
the relative frequency of the perception of both good organizational functioning (e.g., perceived
organizational support) and strong safety climate, among other factors.
 Exhibit 3. Leaders’ best practices predict culture.

Engaging the Senior Leader: Coaching and Development

Diagnostic tools provide an ideal medium through which to create active motivation among
leaders. These tools allow leaders to see in tangible terms how they are affecting safety outcomes,
and the wellbeing of the organization, directly through their actions, decisions, and beliefs, and
indirectly through their support. These tools also provide a starting point for individual leaders to
develop their own safety best practices and strengthen their leadership style. While leaders vary
in their abilities and skills, safety leadership behaviors can be learned and developed.

Specifically, a coach can be invaluable in guiding the individual leader’s development and
fostering active motivation. Moreover, coaching no longer represents just a remedial task for the
inconsistent or weak performer: it now regularly provides needed development for leaders who
want to move from good leadership performance to sustained excellence in safety leadership,
from “B+” or “A-” performance to the rarefied company of the solid and consistent “A”
performer.

The goal is to help leaders understand how their behaviors affect reports, peers, and managers,
and to influence their ability to meet personal and organizational goals. A coach reviews with the
leader the consequences that result from a specific behavior (or pattern of behaviors) and provides
a clear perspective on how these behaviors either support or impede the achievement of goals.
The leader and coach then develop a plan to close any gaps and leverage existing strengths. The
plan doesn’t have to be complicated — in fact, the simpler is the plan, the better. Focusing on
three or four main issues, the plan should include a concise description of the action steps (the
specific behaviors) the leader will employ, the gap the actions are intended to address, who will
do what and when, and how the coach and leader will measure the impact.

The coach’s role is to support, suggest, measure, cajole, nag, and provide input. It is the leader’s
job to “do” — to make the changes that will ensure the objectives established in the plan are met.
An additional role for the coach might include observing leaders in situations in which they apply
the new behaviors and providing both corrective suggestions and positive feedback. The coach
can also help leaders to think through methodologies, techniques, meeting agendas, and
communication tools that will help them achieve the desired outcomes, plus, of course, providing
a “sympathetic ear and a little advice” when needed.

The use of such an approach has been shown to be effective at improving downstream results
(Exhibit 4). Individual leaders who go through the development process often gain new insights
into performance issues that they have struggled with for years. Many are also pleasantly
surprised to find that drastic adjustments to their behaviors are not needed to assure a measurable
impact. The pattern of improvement in Exhibit 4, moreover, is common: Leadership coaching
helps organizations boost employee engagement and lower injury rates.
 Exhibit 4. Occupational injury rates for one site shown
before and after leadership coaching.

Conclusion
The motivation that drives leaders to engage in safety differs fundamentally from other business
motives. The leader’s motivation to get safety right requires compassion more than profit
improvement or personal success. Connecting this inherent drive with concrete, actionable
behaviors appeals to the individual leader’s need to produce results and achieve what is
personally important. It also allows organizations to develop effective safety leaders throughout
the organization, setting the stage for sustainable safety excellence.

Overall, the leader’s primary safety role is to build a culture in which safety is a driving value. In
this environment enabling safety systems thrive, sustaining systems are held in place, and the
working interface is continually made safer through the reduction of exposure to hazards. Both
our client research and the research literature confirm that leaders’ behaviors shape culture, that
culture predisposes organizations to safe (or unsafe) behaviors, and that best safety practices at
every level determine the frequency of unacceptable exposures and predict whether safety
outcomes continue to improve. What’s new in our client research is the practicality and pervasive
effect of coaching on the behaviors of leaders who stand at the first link in this chain of influence
for safety excellence.

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