This week, I talk about my own leadership journey and some of my own personal biases. There have been some key moments in my career and life that led to how I react. The good news is understanding leads to real change
This week, I talk about my own leadership journey and some of my own personal biases. There have been some key moments in my career and life that led to how I react. The good news is understanding leads to real change
Welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. Your host is Dr. Mark French marks passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork, and safety. Nothing is more important than protecting your people. Safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation, and empowerment. Together, we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode. And now, here is Dr. Mark French.
Mark French:Welcome to this episode of the leading and learning to safety podcast. Hey, I'm your host Mark. And I am so happy you've joined me. For those in the US. I hope you had a very safe Thanksgiving and Black Friday. I hope as per my last podcast that you were careful. And you were conscious of others as you went and found those amazing deals. So let's jump on into the podcast as I'm calling to take a little bit different direction. For this episode, as I've been doing a lot of thinking about me, as a safety professional, I've been thinking about me a lot about leadership. And instead of me just holding this into myself and going oh, well, that was that was perfectly it's like everyone under like, understood it. But me, I want to share my experience. And it's something that affected me throughout the years. And I want to share that experience because it's part of being someone that's in the realm of what I would call the conscience of an organization, HR, safety, even finance quality, those that have to maintain some legal relation. And especially in safety because we're caring for our people. We're looking out for our people, this can be a big thing, and it can happen very easily. It happened to me, it doesn't mean it's gonna happen to you. I hope it doesn't. But what I've found myself over the years is losing my energy to fight. I'll choose the big one. So I'll give you an example. So when I first got into the safety world, I was probably over zealous, like everything was serious. Earplugs out serious safety glasses on your head. When you're not at your workstation, maybe returning to your workstation. Aw, I was all over it. Standing in the I always ready to rock and a bit overzealous. But as time went on, I realized that there was a lot of fights not I don't mean fights, like huge, but there were discussions arguments in a lot of them became so repetitive to me over time. And I start to fade like I give you the advice once, take it or leave it fade away. And maybe come back to reiterate it when something goes wrong and go Well, I told you so. Not didn't do it a lot. I not like I was doing this as a career path. But I'm doing it more than I'm proud of. That's for sure. And it took someone saying something to me, actually a coach. I'm a big believer, sidenote, big believer in coaching. I believe that having that sounding board even if it's only so often that you kind of recap what's been happening in your life, what's been happening in your work life and giving that litmus test getting someone to give you an honest assessment and opinion of how that went in asking those deep questions to get you to think about what it is you wanted to accomplish and how well you got there a little bit of a side note there, but that was it has been exceptionally helpful in not fading it out. That's actually what she called it was fading away. Like you stand up strong, and then you fade out. So the Simpsons episode where Homer comes through the bush and greets Flanders and then he fades back in. That was me. I'd come in, give my opinion. See if anybody was accepting it. If they're accepting it I stuck around. I'd make sure that we hashed it out. But if it seemed like I wasn't getting anywhere, I'd fade away especially for small things. Now, if we're talking serious injury, if we're talking breach of ethics, if we're talking In the law, I can't back down from those. There's no backing down there. And that takes courage. It takes courage to stand there and say, I know what I'm talking about. And we can't do it that way. And I think the safety profession especially has to have that style of courage has to have that style, we'll call it self esteem. Courage, you can call it a lot of things that allow us as leaders, as safety leaders, as conscience leaders, even, like I said, HR quality finance, we're upholding some standard, we have to have that courage to always find a point. Now, I'm not saying it's argument. Of course not. There's a lot of ways to make a point. Without having to get into an argument. Sometimes you have to, but over the years, and this wasn't something that just suddenly happened. And I'm doing it all the time, because I'm not. I know no one does. But naturally over time, you years over the years, I've heard the same things over and over again. I've heard things like cost cutting. And then I know that the person who said it did not mean safety. But everyone else in the room here is you know what, get rid of safety first, because that gets in the way of us getting it done. And I have to go through and explain now it's not what we man, here's what you should be doing. arguments about PPE, arguments about what is a confined space? And let me throw this out here. And I am sure if you are in charge of the OSHA 300 or 300, a log, you've had the argument over, is it recordable or is it last time. And those arguments especially are draining, because we know as safety people as leaders, not just safety, but as leaders. We know that once it's at the point that we need to make an OSHA decision, we've missed a lot of opportunity to make it right to fix it to be the to do something before it even happens. And I think that's where I started to fade. The I would just do a lot of times what I would call, I call it the backdoor approach that I would listen to them. I wouldn't agree to anything, I'll listen, listen, not just do whatever I want. Because I knew it was the right thing to do. So I just go do the right thing. And either take some sort of like usually verbal, like why did you do that? Or something later and take the punishment that comes with it and just do it because I always felt like there's going to be punishment verbally one way or the other, whether I say here and argue, or whether I just go do the right thing and then get talk to it. Not necessarily but just like why did that happen? What went on? The argument may happen either way. But I know that it's going to happen if I start now. But if I just go do it, then I might or might not have to endure it later, depending on if they catch it. That's not the right way to do it. Let me start there that that approach works. But I'm not proud of how I've done that at times. I mean, people go, Oh, man, that guy right there, oh my god. times I have found myself to especially when I'm tired, when I'm mentally fatigued, emotionally fatigued. When those things are happening in my life, even out like outside of work inside of work, all of it takes its toll. Our willpower is limited. It is a limited finite resource. And if we use it all is gone. Can we build it up like any other muscle? Yeah, it's not easy. It's a very cognitive thing that we have to deal with. And I find that especially in these types of soft skill industries, and skill sets that it's tough to do that. And so I found myself fading, and it was addressed. And I've been really thinking about why have I done that? Why have I develop into that? Over the course of my career, why have I started defaulting, or not really defaulting eyelift that's all the time. And again, it's not but it's more than I'm proud of. And I'm sure that if it's if it's happening, and we see it, and it makes it so comfortable to do that sometimes to sit back and go, You know what, I'll just, you know, they're gonna, they're gonna make their masks, they're gonna have to clean it up, and I'm gonna be here to help. But they're gonna have to learn. And I've done that a few times. And I think there's more I should have done as a leader as a proactive engage leader. I should have had more courage. I should have built up that stamina. Now I shouldn't have been afraid to back down but there's some reasons I've been here's where I've been really exploring is Why is it that I back down? Why is it that I decided to make the Fade? Why is it that I just kind of washed away in all the information that came at me, there was a few reasons for that. And they're probably very specific to me, but I want to share them in hopes that maybe you can find that courage to and learn from it because this is about leading through safety. Let's take a quick break, I want to come back and talk a little bit more about the science behind what I experienced and how I dug a little deeper to find that in the next half of the leading and learning through safety podcast, you
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Mark French:Welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast. So the first half, really what I was trying to say is that I have been doing some personal searching about my own leadership skills. And maybe I'm teaching things I'm not necessarily performing in my own life. And I wanted to find out why is that there occasion? And what are the what are the triggers? Number one that let me move into that? What are maybe it's the personal factors, the fatigue factors, the time factors that lead me to fade. And secondly, what is it that I can do to overcome it. So I've been doing some reading on things like self confidence, and it's not necessarily self confidence, but it's the belief that you can stand up, and you may be the person who stands up, but you got to stand up, because there may be other people watching you. And seeing that if you stand up for what they know, like, I gotta be standing up for that. And you do it, they feel empowered to do the same. So I started looking at like cognitive biases, where, what cognitive biases, what cognitive items are pushing me towards that, and allowing that to happen with me. And the one that hit me, the first is the one that's called curse of knowledge or curse of expertise. And what it says that once you understand something, you then go, you know, I probably was the last one to learn that, I can't believe that I'm just now learning that you've, I'm sure you've seen the internet meme, or maybe have where it says, I was this days old when I learned this simple trick. I feel that way a lot in the world that I work in. And so I don't know why. But I still think of myself as like that entry level guy. Even though I've been in it years, I've done a lot of work to try to build my expertise, to try to build my knowledge base, to be helpful. Not to be boastful, but to be helpful. But I find myself that once I learn it, I can't help but go love it. Everybody else do that. I don't I had to be the last one to learn that one. And that creates in me a conflict in my mind that whenever we're in a discussion, rather than me to present facts that I know to be true. I make the assumption that the person I'm talking to or the group I'm talking to know the same things that me and for some reason, they have come to a different conclusion. Therefore, I must be wrong. Because we all know the same thing. And my logic is leading me to make this decision. And everyone else is or not food not speaking. Or one person who's speaking is saying something different. So I assume, in my mind, and this is weird, that well because they know everything I do, and they have a different opinion. I need to go back and think about my opinion and come back. And that's one thing about a quick plug for like a Myers Briggs style. I love the Myers Briggs. It is complicated, exceptionally complicated. There's some simpler things out there to use. But what I find through that and through exploring myself, is that I need time to think like when an argument breaks out, I really need to do first self reflection of okay, why are we deferring here? or, where's this argument coming from? When I expect it to be maybe just me informing someone like this happened? And then suddenly, there's a disagreement of some form and I go, Oh my gosh, wow, how could I be wrong about this, and I start reevaluating, and I need time, I need to step back out of the moment to reflect on it. And when I don't have that time, it makes me seem like I fade away. And by the time I get what I feel is right, then I talk, rather than not assuming they know what I know. And walking through. Here's how I got to that conclusion. I know this, this, this and this. And if you didn't know these things, you would assume that the other argument is correct. And I find that with a lot of safety things, especially in the safety world where, you know, you hear the word of, it's just common sense. That's why we don't have to do that. I've never, I've never done that anywhere else. That's a great one. I enjoy that one as an argument. Also the Oh, it's just common sense. There's no way it's got to be that complicated. People do this all the time, another logical fallacy with that one. But it makes me reevaluate. It makes me think about well, how could I be wrong here? And let me think about it. Now, I'll preface that, when it comes to serious, serious things, I don't back down. And what I mean by that is, if it's a serious thing that we need, we're not going to do anything. I'm not saying we won't do it. But we're not going to do it right now, until I have a chance to think this through. Or if I know, they'll just say no. So there's a severity matrix there. It's always maybe the smaller things like little things that I fade from but shouldn't be because it sets up the arguments potentially for the bigger things later on. Also, in the safety world, I found that there is another bias, and I don't think I'm gonna have enough time to really get into that. So I may push this one. Over to the next episode, we'll continue this talk about cognitive biases in safety leadership. But this is leadership in general, in that first one, especially that I have found affects me the most is that curse of knowledge, is when I learned something, or I've come to the conclusion that something is right. And I can maybe came to the conclusion years ago, through research and study that I assume then, that everyone knows. And it causes me some dissonance in my mind, it causes me to question what I'm doing. And sometimes I need time to do that. Now everyone thinks through that differently. Because of the way that I'm built because of the way that the nature and nurture that created this person. This this safety dude, setting your dog under you. Because of that, I have that bias. And it affects me strongly. And I have to now that I've recognized the here's the key. And the most important part of any of this now that I've found it and I recognize it in my life. I've got to start pushing myself to change it. Little motivational speech there. Oh, love it. But yeah. Now I this clicked on me. I mean, I was on airplane this past week, quite a bit. Got lost in my thoughts, came away with this. And so I just, wow, you got that all because I was on an airplane, and had a lot of time to think. Anyway, thanks for joining me on this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. I hope we take away a little bit here about leadership and looking at yourself and how you lead how you influence next week. We'll talk a little bit more about it. Until then, though, stay safe.
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