Many organisations talk about the creation of an appropriate safety culture, but in practice, how is this addressed? Safety culture is fundamentally a subset of the organisational culture or ‘how we do things round here’. At Legitimate Leadership we believe that this is determined by how leaders within the organisation are motivated and behave.
Wendy Lambourne, director of Legitimate Leadership, was recently interviewed by Christian Hunt for the HumanRisk podcast. Hunt founded UK-based HumanRisk (www.human-risk.com) to ‘bring behavioural science to ethics and compliance’ in helping organisations to understand and minimize human risk.
Linear games are won by working harder than others. And the harder other people work, the higher the bar. You need to work harder and harder, just to stay in the same relative position.
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Question of the Month
By Joolz Lewis, Associate, Legitimate Leadership.
Question: How can leaders hold their people appropriately accountable without fear of being held up for bullying or harassment?
Answer: This question frequently crops up with Legitimate Leadership consultants. As organisations rightfully focus on how to create safe environments for their people to work without fear of discrimination, it is also important to ensure that leaders can censure and discipline their people when needed.
The issue at stake for individual leaders is courage.
Leaders are not leaders unless and until they have a relationship of trust with their people. That trust is built on a personal relationship which requires the leader to put the employees’ interests first, to care for them as human beings – not just as human resources – and to grow them not just to be better, but excellent. This cannot be done without setting standards – behavioural and performance.
When employees do a good job, it is good manners to say thank you and give praise. When employees go above and beyond to make an exceptional contribution it is only right that they should be rewarded for doing so.
So what happens when standards are not met? Ignoring this for fear of retribution is effectively saying ‘it doesn’t matter’, and over time the inevitable decline leads to mediocrity or worse. This is reason enough to censure or discipline when needed.
But it’s not the core reason. Read the full answer by clicking here clicking here .
Vignette Case Study: Being Methodical About Empowerment
By Rachael Cowin, Associate, Legitimate Leadership.
In the Legitimate Leadership Framework there are five steps to guide managers in effectively handing over control. In a recent discussion with managers, they pointed out two instances in which following the five steps methodically prevented them from rushing through and endangering the success of the process.
The five steps in the Legitimate Leadership Framework are: 1, decide on the next incremental handover; 2, teach people the why and how; 3, test for ability (know-how and know-why); 4, hand over the means, including decision-making authority; and 5, hold the person accountable.
In the discussion with managers about situations in which empowerment had failed, the conclusion was that this had commonly been because they had rushed through teaching people and testing for ability (steps 2 and 3 above). The conclusion was they had rushed because they had acted expediently and wanted to assume that they could move on in one step.
Two leaders in the group shared specific examples in which using the Legitimate Leadership five-step process made them more methodical and incremental.
Podcast: Legitimate Leadership’s Roots In Workplace Safety
Wendy Lambourne, director of Legitimate Leadership, was recently interviewed by Christian Hunt for the HumanRisk podcast. Hunt founded UK-based HumanRisk (www.human-risk.com) to ‘bring behavioural science to ethics and compliance’ in helping organisations to understand and minimize human risk.
In the podcast Wendy set out the origins and basic tenets of Legitimate Leadership. Below is our summary of what she said.
Legitimate Leadership was virtually born in the world’s largest explosive factory, near Johannesburg, South Africa.
In the early 1990s, things were not going well in this factory. It had suffered two explosions, resulting in 14 fatalities. The explosives company had shortly before this been taken over by UK chemicals company ICI. ICI told the management of the explosives factory, ‘We don’t care that you have 87% of the explosives market in South Africa, we don’t kill people. So fix the problem or we will close you down.’
Management realised that if you have a safety problem, you have a people problem. If you have a people problem, you have a leadership problem. In other words, management itself was the problem.
So management looked for something that would be a golden thread to which they could revert for guidance on leadership. They found the framework upon which Legitimate Leadership is based.
Three years later the factory was acknowledged to be the safest explosives factory in the world.
It was, three years later, approximately the same factory as before (except that it had stopped using nitro-glycerine), and it was staffed by approximately the same people. The factor which had changed was the way leadership was done.
Article: Trusting Team Members Results In Positive Asymmetry
From the Brain Food blog archive.
COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLE BY ANGELA DONNELLY, LEGITIMATE LEADERSHIP CANADA: Fascination with game theory, specifically as it relates to co-operative versus self-interested behaviour and outcomes led me to this article. I enjoyed the parallels to the Legitimate Leadership Framework and specifically the important role trust plays when leaders empower their people. Legitimate Leadership argues that TRUST must precede TRUSTWORTHINESS. Leaders take risks when empowering their people because they are required to suspend their need to control the outcomes. The results are no longer predictable. Trusting team members however results in something called positive asymmetry – a lot of upside and little downside. A low-trust approach reduces positive asymmetry. In an effort to avoid being taken advantage of by the untrustworthy few, managers put unnecessary controls in place, and in doing so forgo the asymmetric upside. Low trust eliminates the upside and results in a mindset of distrust and worry. As the article says, a low trust approach might put a floor on how often you get taken advantage of, but it puts a ceiling on what’s possible!
THE ARTICLE: Linear games are won by working harder than others. And the harder other people work, the higher the bar. You need to work harder and harder, just to stay in the same relative position.
Asymmetry is different. Even people who understand asymmetry consistently underestimate its power.
Positive asymmetry happens when you have a lot of upside and little downside. Negative asymmetry is when you have little upside and high downside. Finding hidden or overlooked asymmetry is the key to an unstoppable advantage. And there is a lot of it hiding in plain sight.
Consider trust. A lot of people are slow to trust. Their default level of trust is about 40% and you earn more.
Very few people understand that a low trust approach reduces positive asymmetry.
