S11Ep6 Enhancing Safety Leadership: The Power of Soft Skills

What if you could supercharge your ability as a safety professional by refining your soft skills? That's what we're dissecting in this episode of SafeTalk with SafeStart. We're laying out the red carpet for empathy, storytelling, and consistency, taking apart what these skills entail, their significance, and practical ways to fine-tune them. 

Host: Tim Page-Bottorff

https://safestart.com/guides/soft-skills/

Chapters

• 0:08 Developing Soft Skills for Safety Leaders
• 14:47 Safe Start, Consistent Communication

Transcript

Tim Page-Bottorff: 0:08

Hey, welcome back to Safe Talk with Safe Start. I'm Tim Page-Bottorff and just about a year ago I was kind of toying with the idea of delivering a soft skills presentation, kind of the idea that storytelling and empathy were some of the most important things that safety professionals should know. So I reached out to a couple of colleagues at Safe Start and Shazam. We came up with a presentation. Even better, we developed a third soft skill. So I want to give a special shout- out to Rachel Daniels and Andrew Faulkner and maybe even our good friend Jamie, who's been helping us with podcasts in terms of editing. But I got to say there's also now a guide to even more soft skills that are available, seven to be exact. So I do want to spend some time on the first three in this podcast and maybe later in a podcast we'll break down the last four. So those first three that we put together and have certainly warrants a deeper dive here on the podcast today. So how did this come about? I just got to say most safety leaders in fact all leaders are in their position partially, or maybe even supposedly, because of their technical prowess. However, some are lacking the soft skills needed to be a great coach, and if you've ever had a boss that lack people skills, I think you know what I'm talking about. So I'm going to place a link to that guide that I was mentioning in the show notes because, frankly, there are too many great points in there but we can't cover them all just in the time that we have today. So instead, we're going to focus on three of the key takeaways, and I'd like to zoom in on the importance of the challenges of soft skills and then, of course, the importance of soft skills. So first of all, we got to define the difference between both hard and soft skills, and hard skills are technical in nature and I want you to think of them as doing things yourself. In an example would be, you know, knowing the proper lockout procedure, whereas soft skills could be interpersonal, like influencing someone to actually go get their locks and tags, or explaining the reasons of why locks and tags are important, and that gets you engagement. So the first three I want to focus on today is literally explaining why they matter, how they look in action and some ways that you can improve. And so soft skills I believe they can be developed and improved with practice. They also will improve your organizational capacity by changing the climate or maybe even, in turn, your culture over time. With soft skills, they do come with their own challenges and so they are challenges like soft skills. They're actually contextual and soft skills. If you are trying to track the metrics or using metrics for progress, they're kind of hard to measure.

Tim Page-Bottorff: 2:59

Soft skills, also in leadership, require the right mindset, and if you don't have the right mindset, moving into or developing a soft skill you know you lack, then maybe you won't even identify in the first place. In habit building it does take time and that could be a drawback, because some folks like to see immediate action when it comes to habits and sometimes it could be discomfort. It's just uncomfortable for some people just to say I've got a problem with this skill and it could be uncomfortable to try to tackle that skill, and I'll give you some examples of that. So let's turn our attention to the three of the soft skills that I told you about. Let's start working on how to change maybe the climate or maybe even in long-term safety culture. Now remember there's more detail and four more soft skills in the link that's provided in the show notes down below, but the three I wanna talk about in this podcast today are essential soft skills for safety folks.

Tim Page-Bottorff: 3:58

The first one is empathy. Then there's storytelling and then the next is consistency. Now I can break those down for you in just a moment, but I didn't think of consistency in the very beginning, and I'm grateful for the conversations that I had with Rachel and Andrew. But when it came down to it, all golfers I don't care if you're playing professionally or in an amateur rank you always try to aim for consistency, and then something breaks or something happens in your swing, and then you try to come back to that, but then maybe you've developed a hitch in your swing. You know how it goes. So to me, having consistency as part of these top three was extremely important. I'm grateful for them to bring that up. And so now let's talk about the first one.

Tim Page-Bottorff: 4:48

Empathy is the ability to convey to your employees that you care about them as people. This one here can be empowering rather than commanding. In other words, there's no command control. It's empowering people, and sometimes, if we do command and control, they end up feeling entitled. So I'm gonna leave this up to you, but I want you to just. If you got entitled people, then maybe we can switch that to empowered people. And empathy is connected with life outside of work, like knowing that you've got an employee that have children or, even better, knowing that you've got employees that have grandchildren. This one soft skill here it does bridge the gap for me in workplace hierarchy. Having a manager know that their employees have children or, even more importantly, when they've got doctor's appointments where they might miss their employee. That's huge. This one here, empathy, it cannot be faked. Trust is a rare and precious commodity and it's been said that trust is earned in drops and poured out in buckets. So when you're trying to use the skill of empathy you gotta be authentic.

Tim Page-Bottorff: 6:08

One of the approaches that I take and it's happened to me a couple of times and it's happened one of the things that Kevin Cobb pointed out to me is that there's several different ways you can approach people and you know what part of Safe Track has 83 questions in there when you start talking about communication, and if you aren't developing that skill of communication which, more along the lines, is a hard skill, but sometimes how you talk to people can be that soft skill, and if you pierce it with empathy, then you're gonna actually have better, deeper, richer conversations. You can ask somebody that you don't know or somebody that you do know. I see you got a family photo. Who do you have there? Whether that's on their toolbox or on their computer screen? And if you're trying to find information at the job, specifically about risks and hazards, then you can ask that individual who just introduced you to their family. How would you explain the hazards of your job to those people in the photograph? Now, that's not the only way.

Tim Page-Bottorff: 7:12

There's several different ways of approaching, but you could talk about your own life. For those of you that have attended any of my presentations, you know that the first thing that I do is, somewhere along the way every presentation I do, you're going to see my family. What's important to me, like for you. You could talk about your spouse, your partner, your kids, your grandkids. Maybe you could discuss your family through safety, even safety training, or even in Boo-Boo Bandit's training, and I think you get the idea.

Tim Page-Bottorff: 7:42

And remember, when it comes to empathy, talk people, not numbers, not metrics. I know that sometimes, when you go to a safety class, that's all you hear is statistics and you're trying to drop this, trying to bring this down. Now we all got numbers to hit, but while that discussion to me is fine at the corporate headquarters, it has little, if any impact on the floor. It's not the best motivational tool. No one's going to go home high-fiving their spouse because they hit their quarterly goal for reducing injuries by 25%. Instead, talk about the real impact on victims of an accident, or maybe lost wages or hardship on the family. I think you get the idea. I really hope you never have to experience an employee's serious injury or fatality. For those of you that have, my heart sincerely goes out to you. I know what it takes. I had to deal with one of Motorola when I was over there. But I think you all know that all too well, that generational pain it comes too with an accident, and you see it when a SIF is produced at the workplace.

Tim Page-Bottorff: 8:51

So when investigating an accident or incident, try to avoid blame, try to kind of filter in a little bit of empathy and see where people are coming from. I got a chance to investigate a car accident the other day. This lady ran a red light, ran into a T-boned another car beautiful car and she was crying. She didn't care about the pain, she was crying and when the officer asked her she just got off the phone with her mother and said that her father had passed away, and so immediately the cop was just empathizing with her and didn't want to write her a ticket. She admitted to the accident and didn't see the red light, and you know what? It's kind of hard to have to hear a story like that, but empathy is huge, and so I just want you to know that when you're investigating accidents, try not to lead to blame. And then I want you to all know that humans are susceptible to these types of things and your role is a safety coach, not a safety cop, or at least a safety friend.

Tim Page-Bottorff: 9:54

So the second skill on the list is storytelling, and I know you all in Safe Start have heard this before, but to me, it's one of those skills that some people either have it or they don't, while true for the most part. I want to challenge all of us to try to get better at this one vital skill, storytelling, and it can be done by convincing, using relatable narratives, something that's vicarious I just want you to remember. People are more likely to remember stories than statistics, and it's easier to context-specific. Especially if that's a challenge and soft skills, there are also opportunities to make this a two-way street. You can show them you're just as human as they are. And again, remember vicarious learning. If you're doing that, you put people in your shoes at that moment and they can actually see. Now, I know that sounds kind of funny and it's a soft skill, still, still they can see where you're coming from. Whether it's at a red light that you ran, they probably. If you tell them it was at this corner of such and such street, they're gonna. I've been there, I've seen it before. That relationship is a skill that cannot be gained in a university hard skill class.

Tim Page-Bottorff: 11:09

And finally, don't remember we've harped on this throughout the podcast but always, always, always. If there's a story that involves potentially a near miss or even an injury, but you're still standing there to tell the story, make sure you finish that story with could it have been worse? So the last skill we're gonna talk about today is consistency. And, of course, consistency is the ability to improve communication and set expectations with steady, predictable behavior. Now, I know a lot of you just cringed when I said the word behavior, but understand this we're not trying to catch people doing things wrong. We're trying to catch people doing things right and, believe it or not, there is a statistic. Not trying to kill you with statistics, but 95% of the people that are working out there are actually doing the job right.

Tim Page-Bottorff: 12:02

And so I was working with a client years and years ago. He was so proud of a Yeti-type tumbler that he received with the letters that were printed on it IGCBS, that's Indigo Golf, Charlie, Bravo, Sierra and he gave me a moment to figure out what the acronym stood for. I had no idea that. He spelled it out right in front of me. I got caught being safe. He then went on to explain that when he caught someone, he rewarded them with that same type of tumbler, only with the caveat, though, that they were there to tell no one what the acronym stood for or how they earned the tumbler, other than it came from safety people. As you can imagine, that sparked a lot of conversation around safety, and I'm going to tell you right now that's good coaching. If you want, you can send an email to Kevin, our producer, and ask him to tell you what Scooby-Doo fishing pole is that coaching right there in terms of consistency and trying to gain constant return on investment with safety. Have Kevin tell you. That's, by the way, Kevin@SafeStart. com.

Tim Page-Bottorff: 13:14

So coaching good coaching looks like intervening in the same way, or uniformity, consistency, enforcing rules and standards evenly throughout the organization, fostering a common safety language. As you well know, in Safe Start, even in Safe Lead, there's a common safety language. Safe Lead, I can remember specifically pause, think, respond, trust and engagements. Safe Start state to error pattern all common safety languages and, of course, consistently produce a predictable environment that actually leads. For you and me as a safety professional, that hard skill. We always get predictable, leading or even lagging indicators and actions. So maybe we might want to talk a little bit about what a predictable environment might look like. You might gain stable expectations or, god forbid, you predict the future in regards to an injury. If you're able to do that, that skill it's not easily transferable, but that's consistency because you're always looking for those things out in the field.

Tim Page-Bottorff: 14:15

Positive and consistent interventions you know interventions are sometimes a hard thing for people to do. Remember I talked about discomfort. When it comes to empathy mostly comes with judgment instead, think about that friend that you had. Trip over an extension cord. They fall to the ground. The reason why they get up so quickly to look around is they automatically know how they would react if they saw their friend trip over the same extension cord. So, with empathy, we might be able to drop the judgment just a little bit. In that regular communication we spoke about earlier.

Tim Page-Bottorff: 14:47

Common language like using Safe Start huge and consistency. Use that language exclusively at your facility, but don't forget to include people in the language at the same time. That keeps everybody on the same page, which will help you with the soft skill of consistency. Alright, folks, it's my time for today and maybe later we might even jump on another podcast and talk about the next four. I want to thank you and yours. Don't forget that link in the show notes. Again, I owe a big shout out to Andrew Faulkner, Rachel Daniels, Jillian Bauer and the entire marketing or creative services team for that guide on soft skills. They did most of the heavy lifting, so kudos to you, team. I lift a glass to you Now. Please share the guide and any other episodes that might kind of hint at soft skills and share those with other folks. Thank you for spending some time with me today and, on behalf of Safe Talk with Safe Start, I'm Tim Page-Bottorff. I will see you down the road.