S1Ep3 Leadership and Managing Change

In this episode, guest and SafeStart Consultant Chris Ross discusses how Leadership Support is integral to a SafeStart implementation.  Chris will also discuss management of change.


Host: Tim Page-Bottorff
Guest: Chris Ross

Transcript

Tim: 0:14

Welcome back to the podcast on Safe Talk with Safestart. I'm one of your hosts, Tim Page-Bottorff. Your other host is Danny Smith. In this podcast, we'll have a conversation with Chris Ross in regards to leadership and management of change. If you need any more information about this podcast or any other podcast, you can find more information at safestart.com or go to Apple Podcasts or any podcast listening station. Let's check out this one. Welcome back to Safe Talk with Safestart. I'm your host, Tim Page Bottorff, and joining us today is Chris Ross. A quick dive into Chris's bio, not only are you recognized as a thought leader in leadership and engagement, which we'll jump to here in a moment, but you're also a valued member of our Safestart team. Chris has trained over 50,000 employees in Safestart alone since 2006. And Chris, you're a certified professional in learning and performance, a certified safety professional, CSP, as well as well as a master trainer for Development Dimensions International, DDI, and FranklinCovey. You also own a consulting company working with clients on performance improvement, employee engagement, leadership development, change management, and strategic planning. Chris has consulted with nearly a thousand organizations in such diverse industries as healthcare, manufacturing, any level of government, oil and gas, the chemical industry, aerospace, defense, and so much more. We're excited you're here. Chris, thank you for joining us today.

Chris: 1:48

Hey, Tim, it's great to be with you. Hope you are well and surviving in these crazy days.

Tim: 1:54

Yes, same as you. I know you're in Alaska and I'm in Arizona. From a weather perspective, I have to say it's 100 degrees here today. So what is it there?

Chris: 2:02

Yeah, well, it snowed in the mountains today.

Tim: 2:06

We invited Chris to join us today to tap his brain a bit on how exactly you engage leadership in anything, but especially in safety and save start. So let's just jump right in. We all know leadership engagement is critical to any successful venture, but for our audience, Chris, talk about just how essential that leadership component is to save start.

Chris: 2:28

Well, it's a great question, . And, you know, you preface the question with leadership engagement critical to any successful venture. And that is absolutely right. In every change initiative, the anecdotal data shows that without leadership support, it's pretty much doomed to fail. And the data shows this over and over and over again. One of the statistics I like, and I use it a lot when I teach change management is for large-scale organizational change, and SafeStart may not be the largest organizational change an organization will pursue, but in successful change efforts, senior leaders are spending 40% of their time on the change effort. So it's critical. And in SafeStart, I can't tell you how many places I've been where there has been just the one champion in place, whoever it might be. But without widespread leadership support, it's really tough to keep something like that going. The most successful I've seen is where 100% of the leadership is engaged. The CEO, the site manager, the operations managers, every one of them engaged in part of the process doing their role. But that's nothing that everybody doesn't already know. Everybody knows knows in successful change and implementations, the leadership is engaged. That's just a must.

Tim: 4:06

Yeah, no, I agree. I get that. I just, seeing somebody and an individual run a SafeStart implementation that's just by themselves can be overwhelming. And I totally agree that you need that village of

Chris: 4:18

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Tim: 4:19

And that leadership from an experience perspective, you've got a lot of that. So let's mine your experience a bit, in particular with implementing SafeStart. I think it's vital that leadership participate along with the employees, just as you eloquently put. We see a lot of just checking the box or maybe even flavor of the day syndrome, but it's important for leadership to lead even before stepping into a SafeStart class. Would you agree?

Chris: 4:45

Well, absolutely. And there's a couple of components of that. First of all, leaders need to know what they're going to be leading. And in SafeStart, we have a component called Leading SafeStart 24-7 for Leaders. And we really impress upon them that Leading SafeStart is really about walking the talk and leading 24-7. So they need to know what to lead, and they need to know how to lead it. And I have never, never been in an organization where leaders don't care about safety. They absolutely do, but they don't always know what it is that they need to do to effectively lead safety. So that's a part of it is just making sure that they understand what to do and how to do it. The other thing I think is really critical is there needs to be a pretty robust change management strategy. And leaving an organizational initiative to chance without a change management strategy, I don't think works well. And part of that is creating a vision. And that vision... is something that catalyzes people, that people understand why we're doing it, and it has to appeal to them. And I'll talk more about that a little bit later. Another important role is developing an effective implementation strategy. And I think of all the pillars that are involved with a robust implementation strategy, and we'll talk about that a little bit. And the other piece of this is understanding that in order to achieve desired results. And I would assume any organization implementing SafeStart or 5S or Lean or Six Sigma or anything else has some desired organizational results. And those results won't come without changing and doing something different. The classic phrase is we expect different results by doing the same things over and over again. And SafeStart, like anything else, requires people to change. And there has to be a catalyst for people to change. So that's all in the leadership wheelhouse, I think.

Tim: 7:12

That's good that you said that. So you defined insanity without even saying the word insanity.

Chris: 7:17

Exactly. Exactly.

Tim: 7:18

That's good. And all the things that you listed from change management to implementation scheduling, that would mean that the leaders would have some experience going into this. Would you say that?

Chris: 7:29

One of the big deficits I've seen over and over again is not having a change management strategy. Some organizations manage change really well. Some organizations don't do it well. So I think one of the underpinnings is to have an effective change management strategy underpinning it, an implementation planning strategy, whether they have some project management or change management piece. And also making sure that the leaders are on board with what some of the key elements and pieces of implementation are.

Tim: 8:09

Yeah, totally, totally agree. As far as the experience is concerned, I agree. So I think it was having a discussion with leaders and just finding out what they're doing. And if they don't necessarily know how to implement something, they're going to look to our expertise. But getting those people in the same room to talk about that schedule, as long as they can grasp the change that you're mentioning, that's exactly what we're talking about. So getting everybody in the room together and having that little conversation about what to expect, mostly primarily stakeholders. So thanks for that. Informal.

Chris: 8:44

Tim, you You mentioned something, and I think it's really critical, and that is they sometimes expect us to make the change in the organization. And as a consultant, I'm an external consultant, so I come in on all kinds of consulting gigs. And when I come into a gig and the client expects me to make the change, I politely and respectfully decline that because I can't make that change. I can give them the tool set. I can give them the skill set. But they're the ones that have to make that change. So they're the ones that have to embrace this and lead it. So that was a great point.

Tim: 9:27

Yeah, thank you for that. I would have to ask, though, do you think that there's informal leaders on the floor? I mean, do you think they get overlooked in certain things like this?

Chris: 9:34

Absolutely. Drawing on leaders of all part of the organization is really critical. I think of organizational change SafeStart implementation as a tiered event with different pillars that support it. So the job of senior leadership is to create the vision, provide the resources, provide the and then you need those change agents. And those change agents are often those informal leaders out on the shop floor. I'll give you a quick story. A gal named Wanda I met a couple was selected to come to my train the trainer session as a trainer. And Wanda was just an operator out on the shop floor. She was not a leader in any way, but her supervisor saw something in her. So she came to the train the trainer class. She was very shy. She didn't think she'd do well. Man, she just rocked it. She was a natural presenter and she did really well. I went back to that plant to implement SafeTrack about three or four years later. And Wanda came to my SafeTrack train-the-trainer class. And I was delighted to see her and ask how things were going. And she said, well, they call me the SafeStart Nazi out on the shop floor because I'm always talking about SafeStart. And then she gave me an example. And she said, we were going to make a change to steel-toed boots. And all my coworkers came to me and said, well, they'll be really heavy. And she said, yeah, I shopped around and I found a really light pair that I like. And then they said, well, they'll be really stiff. And she says, I sit in front of the TV for an hour every night and bend them so they won't be so stiff. And then she shows up out on the shop floor two months before the policy wearing her boots. And her coworker said, why are you wearing those boots? And she says, well, I want to break them in so So when it comes time to wear them for eight hours a day, I'll be all ready to go. Wow, what an influencer she is, right? And harnessing those informal leaders and their influence is tremendous. And I know we're going to talk about change in a little bit, but you don't need 100% of the people on board with change. What you need are those change agents, and many of those are the informal leaders, to lead the way. And that's an element of change management is to create a change management team and to recognize those catalysts who are really promoted. Oh,

Tim: 12:20

perfect. Look at you setting me up for the next question. So you've got your team in place and you're all prepped and ready to go. And you're going to move into the classroom and do leadership. What do you do in that leadership? I mean, in other words, you got the people together, the teams put together, you move to the classroom, the leadership has some things to do. What are they going to do? Well,

Chris: 12:41

assuming they know what to do, They need to do it. That's what we call walking the talk. That's what we call leading by example. Lots of ways, leaders. So again, two tiers, senior leaders, informal leaders. Senior leaders need to show their support for it. I have been in plants and organizations where I spent three weeks at the plant and I never met the plant manager Never saw that person. And, you know, the message there is pretty clear about how much they have in stake to it. As contrasted on the far end of the spectrum, I did an implementation and either, and there's 500 people, so I was doing leadership overviews day and night for weeks. Every session was kicked off by either the HR manager or the plant manager, and they stayed there for half an hour. And I was at a smaller implementation, and I only did 10 overview sessions. And the plan manager sat in every one of them. And I asked him, I said, man, you know, you know, all my jokes, you know, all my lines. I said, this is just extraordinary. And he says, if my people don't see me here, they won't think I'm involved in it. This is what I have to do. Well, there's a wide continuum in that. So organizationally figuring out how to walk the talk, how, how to show their level of support is something that they absolutely.

Tim: 14:23

Thanks for that. I really, I remember talking with Kevin Cobb in his book, Quit Feeding the Monsters. He had an employee that came in with cell phones, but the manager immediately said it was time to collect these phones and that they wouldn't get their phones until afterwards. But you set that tone and that participation mode is, I don't know. We could probably schedule an entire podcast just surrounding that one thing, especially how neuroscience plays a part in SafeStart, getting that in the brain. So leaders need to fully participate in the meetings, but their efforts need beyond the meeting, is that right?

Chris: 14:57

Absolutely. One of my favorite podcasters and TED Talkers is Simon Sinek. And Simon Sinek talks about the limbic brain. And it's the limbic brain that that's responsible for decision-making and deciding who to trust and who not to trust. He's got some great stuff on it. He talks about the why, the how, and the what. And leaders need to create a Simon Sinek-like why. And that is that vision. This is why we're going to do something. Because you talk about the neuroscience of habit change, and it's based on repetition. Safe start is really straightforward. We've got four states. We've got four critical errors. Everybody gets that immediately. We've got the four certs. It seems to take people a little longer to grasp and use those but quite honestly the certs really don't do any good whatsoever unless you practice them so there has to be a motivation to practice and we'll talk about that in a few minutes but that repetition the building the habit is so critical to embed it into the culture to embed it into a new way of doing things and And again, without creating an organizational framework vision for using SafeStart, but more importantly, it's really critical for people to build the limbic why for themselves. Why would I want to use SafeStart? And we have lots of tools to do that. We use SafeStart stories. We talk about using SafeStart language. We talk about using CERT practice cards. But In the climate of the organization, and culture is the way things are around here, I think, climate changes on a dime. Climate changes from every conversation. So I think it's really critical that SafeStart be incorporated into climate change by having constant discussions, reminders. And one example of that is near miss reporting. And I go into organizations, hundreds of organizations every year, And I asked them how many near misses are reported. And I was at a plant the other day. They had like 2,000 employees and they had, I don't know, 12, 15 near misses reported. So I kind of laughed and I asked the leadership team, well, how many near misses do you suppose actually happen? And they kind of laughed and they said, oh, I'll bet there was 50 or 60. I said, seriously, you got a couple thousand employees. You know, people are turning without looking. People are tripping over stuff. All those things are in my mind are near misses. You're having thousands every week, but people aren't talking about them. So you need to create a climate where people can talk about this stuff and the whole value of near miss discussions. And I'm not talking about near miss reporting. I don't think you want 10,000 near misses reported and formalized, but every one of those near misses is worth talking about in a pre-shift huddle, in a safety meeting, in a one-on-one situation. So again, it's creating that climate of open communication. And that allows for practice. It allows to embed the habit. It gets the lexicon embedded into the organization.

Tim: 18:58

Oh, those are all good. So lexicon is a great word, but I've done some follow-ups as part of a follow-up team and all of our follow-up team members have also found this too and you mentioned certs and you also mentioned some part of the state to error pattern and SafeStart from a lexicon perspective employees struggle with this they really do and they they don't have from a retention perspective they don't carry through they don't carry this out in terms of practice so i have to ask why do you think that is

Chris: 19:29

well again it's not it It's because there hasn't been a climate of communication and embedding it into the way things are done around here. So... Here's a great example. So Rate Your State, really cool program that a lot of our clients have used. I've done, I don't know, maybe 30 implementations of Rate Your State, not a lot. But what's really interesting is is that when I've taken supervisors out on the floor for their practice coaching sessions, and they go out and talk to employees, and they go through the rate your state card, and they ask the employees, so on a scale of one to 10, rate your state today for rushing or for frustration. And they flip the card over, and then they ask the employees. So based on those states, hey, Tim, today you're really really high on rushing and frustration, what could go wrong? And about 95% of the answers have been, oh, yeah, that was just like last night. We were really rushing and frustrated on this project. And I grabbed the wrong tool. And I twisted the nipple off of this jet engine that I was working on. And that set us back eight hours. And so what people bring out is quality and production. Well, why is that? Why do people keep, when you ask them a simple question about states and areas, why Why do they go to quality and production and not safety? Because they make thousands of quality and production errors every day, every week. They don't necessarily make tons of safety mistakes that are life-threatening every week. So if you've got one lexicon that applies to all of that and you can apply it to quality and production and to safety and on the job and off the job, then it really doesn't make any difference what your storyline is, whether it was a quality issue or whether it was a near miss or whether it was driving home, but you've now got that lexicon in place. So it's reinforcing that lexicon for all the stuff that goes on.

Tim: 21:54

That's good. You and I both have experienced a lot of this, but with the white space that we talk about in leadership is that those efforts between modules, those efforts between practice units, those efforts between practice cards are those little conversations, just like you did, share stories. Those stories are big in between, and those spaces can come from leadership. That's why it's so important. So we've talked about the short term. Let's go ahead and switch over to the long term. We often hear flavor of the month is a problem to implementing any kind of strategy. informational management or integration management or even change management. But when it comes to SafeStart, leadership has the primary role here.

Chris: 22:34

Yeah, they're driving the bus. I think of SafeStart as implementation as kind of having three pillars. There's what the trainers do, so they're out there giving people the lessons. So it's the core, the core five, the extended application of critical decisions units, the rate your state training, whatever the training is. So people need the training and the skill set Then it's the leaders who are driving the white space. And so the white space is that place between trainings where things happen. And then there's the execution of the timeline, which is kind of a combination of leaders and trainers to make things happen. So that white space plan has to be continuous. And what I see in less successful implementations of SafeStart is that people go through the training and they come out of, you know, unit number two and they go out on the shop floor for a month and they never hear anything about SafeStart. So the message is we're just checking the box. It's flavor of the day. But if you come out of training and somebody's handing you a sort of practice card, you're telling stories, people are talking about near misses, at the end of every near miss story that somebody has, somebody is asking and what certs would have helped out it's it's embedding this into the culture into the climate it's making it the way things are done around here and i'm a huge fan of embedding SafeStart as an example into the way things are done SafeStart should not be separate it shouldn't be a separate thing it's just embedded into the way we do things here so we SafeStart stuff. We add that into our JSAs. We add that into our task orders. We add that into our daily meetings. We add all of this stuff in there. So that's the white space stuff. I think it's important. There's the old axiom, and I'm sure you've heard of it, what gets measured gets done.

Tim: 24:59

And

Chris: 25:02

I'm not in favor of a huge complex scoreboard, but I really would like to see a little scoreboard in a really simple little scoreboard, maybe just measuring three things. How many SafeStart stories do we tell this month? How many cert practice cards? How many near misses? Whatever that might be. And initially, without setting a quota or an expectation, just measure it. And then maybe you can develop some meaningful metrics about how many there ought to be. But have that little scoreboard, because people look at that, and that scoreboard doesn't necessarily indicate if people have bought into it or not, but it would indicate if those activities are being done. And then talk to people about the quality of those activities. So I think those elements are really critical. you have to stay with it. And there's a natural temptation with almost anything. And gosh, you've been in as many plants and locations as I have, where they started out with 5S or 6 Sigma two years ago, and they did all the shine projects and everything else, but they kind of missed that last S, right? They missed that sustainability part. And, you know, you've been to follow-up visits. You We have a lot of data that people jump out of the gate really fast with SafeStart, but they have a tough time sustaining it. We've got a ton of tools for sustainability You know, performance, rate your state, safe lead, safe track. You know, we've got all kinds of things for sustainability. But what needs to happen, and you preface the question, is doesn't leadership need to be involved with that? And heck yes, they need to be involved with it, driving it. John Cotter, when he writes about change, and he's a well-respected Harvard author on change, talks about declaring victory too soon. And I see that over and over again. And gosh, we've seen that in SafeStart implementations. A client will implement SafeStart. They'll go through the five modules. They'll get the 30% decrease in injuries or recordables. And they'll say, yay, we won. We've accomplished our goals. And then they drop it. And that's the typical safety blood cycle. We show a little, and that's the Hawthorne effect. You show somebody a little love, they get a change, you drop it, and then it cycles back up again. So the key to happiness, I think... is to set a course of implementation and activities that's long lasting and sustainable. And you know, those activities are going to be different for every organization. That's the cool thing about SafeStart. Larry Wilson famously said, We've got some clients that get tremendous value out of SafeStart, and we've got some clients who don't get much value out of SafeStart. And it's not like we sell them different books. So it's really up to the organization to figure out how to make it sustainable and long lasting.

Tim: 28:31

That is a great answer. So coming full circle, you actually talked about creating a vision in the very beginning. You talked about change management. You even, through part of the way, said talking about the extended application units, implementing those critical decision units. All of those things go into the makeup of sustainability. So that's extremely important. Well, good. Thank you. That's the last question. You probably know as well as I do, Malcolm Gladwell, he had a book called The Tipping Point. And he talks about if you get enough of the population doing something, whether it be a plant, a city, or even a country, critical mass takes over. And eventually, once you've achieved this, it becomes just the way we do it around here.

Chris: 29:12

Really, that fits into every change model, into ADCAR, into Cotter's Eight Steps, into ATD's change model, is how... do you take a change and embed it and enculturate it so that it becomes the way we do things around here? So again, individually, that's going to change a little bit from organization to organization. But going back around a couple of key points, one is If SafeStart's embedded into the culture and it's the way we do things around here, it's not a separate bolt-on thing. It's been adopted into the culture. And you and I have seen some of our clients do a tremendous job with embedding it into the culture, extending it into quality, extending it into productivity, extending it into 24-7. So again, that lexicon, that white space is a piece of it. of that. The other thing is resisting the urge to declare victory too soon before it's embedded. And the other thing, Cotter talks about this in his change thing, in order to sustain change, It has to be consistent with the culture. And I'll give you an example of that. Jack Welch is one of my management heroes. I'm an old school guy, so I'll admit it. But he had some cool things. And one of the things Jack Welch did was he behavioralized values. So he said, and every organization on the planet, at least most of them, have the value statement on the wall. They're all namby-pamby kind of, who knows what that means. But Jack Welch said, one of our values is globalization. And he had a manager at a high-performing plant, a high-producing top manager, and the guy would not accept an assignment overseas. And Jack Welch fired him and said, one of our values is globalization. is globalization. You need to live our values. You're not living our values. So another example was a guy, again, top producing plant manager. He took credit for all of his subordinates' ideas. Jack Welch found out about it and fired the guy. He says, you're not living our values. So that's the challenge is safety and SafeStart of value. I bristle when I hear safety is number one because safety is never number one. Let's not fool ourselves. Production is number one, but safely is how we do it. Safety is a condition of employment, not a priority. So making it part of the culture means that sometimes you have to make tough decisions. Now, I'm just going to throw this out here. I don't know how many Jack Welch's are listening on the podcast today, but if a plant manager were really serious about that and a plant manager had a department manager who wasn't supporting SafeStart, but that was part of the value and the culture, there'd be repercussions for that, right? That's the whole thing about making this part of the culture and behavioralizing values. So it's not easy, any of this, and it takes work. And that's the other message is, you know, I'll go back to that definition of insanity, but I think it was Malcolm Gladwell that says, you know, what got you here isn't going to get you somewhere else to where you want to be. So it requires change, it requires vision, dedication, sustainability, resources, and most of all,

Tim: 33:12

perseverance. Perfect. That was great. Well, Chris, we were just about out of time and I wanted to say thank you for your leadership insights. That's one thing that we could try to provide leadership in terms of tools, but on the ground when we leave, there's no way that we're going to be able to provide the leadership for them. So that comes internally. So great insights. So that's all the time we have today. And Chris, again, thank you for sharing your time with us. Be sure to catch Danny Smith next time on the Frequently Asked Questions that we get at SafeStart. I'm Tim Page-Botter from on behalf of Safe Talk with SafeStart. Thank you for listening. We'll see you down the road. Thanks for spending some time with us on the podcast, Safe Talk with Safestart. You can find more podcasts and more information at www.safestart.com.