Episode 160: Standing in the Crossroads

In this episode of the "Leading and Learning Through Safety" podcast, Dr. Mark French reflects on his experience at the Kentucky Safety Conference, focusing on the critical intersection of physical and psychological safety in the workplace. He highlights the importance of safety professionals not only in ensuring a physically safe environment but also in fostering psychological safety, where team members feel secure enough to voice their concerns and ideas without fear of shame or degradation. French argues that physical safety lays the groundwork for psychological safety, which in turn promotes trust, creativity, and overall organizational effectiveness.

French also explores the challenges of leadership in safety roles, particularly the tension between organizational goals and the need to protect employees. He emphasizes the necessity of balancing the enforcement of safety procedures with the encouragement of open communication, allowing team members to report when processes are ineffective. This, according to French, is essential for creating a learning organization that continuously improves its safety culture.

The podcast also discusses the concept of the "crossroads of safety," where physical and psychological safety intersect. French identifies four scenarios based on the levels of these two aspects, ranging from environments where both are lacking, termed "fiction," to those where both are strong, termed "flourish." He stresses the importance of continuous improvement and the role of leadership in bridging gaps between management's perception and employees' reality, particularly in how safety efforts are communicated and implemented.

Transcript

Mark French: 0:01

This week on the leading and learning through safety podcast, I'm recapping the Kentucky safety conference. A great time, great energy, some great talks, and I want to kind of go through some of my learnings from that this week on the podcast. You

Announcer: 0:35

Music. Welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. Your host is Dr Mark French. Mark's 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. You

Mark French: 1:31

Music. Welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. I am your host, Dr Mark French, and I am so happy that you're joining me this week. So last week in particular, I was at the Kentucky safety conference. Had a wonderful time. I love State Safety conferences. I love meeting up with people, similar fields, similar background. We're all in it for one thing, and that's to protect people, to prevent harm, to make our workplace a better place, through engaging people, through protecting people, through making sure we don't harm our team. It's sometimes in this field, it can feel a little bit lonely, because it feels like we're always in our spot in an organization, sometimes always advocating or saying no, or being that one for the organization all the time. And then when we get around our peers and we have real conversations, vulnerable conversations, about the real life, we're living together. We're not alone in that. We're working together somewhere in different stages. We've all seen so many different things, but the themes, the leadership themes, the safety themes, all come back together. We feel that. We feel that, that that rightfully so, some of the tension between the company and protecting the people, we feel that tension of making sure that our team is motivated to follow the rules and safety procedures of the organization. There's always that tension back and forth. How do we get in the middle of it? How do we get into that very center spot and really help be the influencer in the organization. How do we be that place where we have a lot of knowledge? We've been out there, we've seen it. How do we share it? How do we motivate it? How do we create that? And that, of course, has been the very middle of what I work on. My life's passion. I guess that led me to do research that I did to look into how we do this and then to share that knowledge. So the presentation that I had such an honor of presenting this year at the conference was called safety, the crossroads of physical and psychological. Not to put too much more pressure on the shoulders of a safety professional. But it's unbelievable when I think about the fact of the responsibility we carry from a fundamental human need to be able to carry that process of behavioral psychological safety and physical safety, because they are linked together and cannot be separated. It happens. We we provide the safe environment, but we also have to provide, not only that physically safe environment, the psychologically safe environment. And that's where I walk through in the presentation, more about that. And this group in particular at the Kentucky safety conference had a lot of good questions, really challenged me on some of the thinking that I wasn't actually making the presentation board, but took it to a new level. And I want to walk a little bit through that, because to me, it's a very interesting idea. It's a very interesting process, especially in hindsight of some of the more neg. Positive processes that I walk through on the podcast. Similarly, most of the time I'm finding a news story that's just horrible and building that into a leadership story. This time, I'm actually going to go positive. We're going to look at how do we take what's out there and really start looking at where we are and getting vulnerable about talking about where we are as a people, as an organization, as a culture. And so let me take that step back of what is the crossroads of physical and psychological. What does that mean to stand in the Crossroads as we as safety professionals and as we as leaders should stand there. We should first focus on safety, because everything comes after that. So the crossroads, in my research, what I found some general themes there is it's the crossroads of people and process that we have a process that needs to be followed to keep them safe, but we need the people to follow the process and also let us know when the process is not working. That's vulnerability, that's the ability to be a learning organization, an organization that will hear the people talking, that will hear our team members giving us advice on what needs to be improved. That's psychological safety, fundamentally, the ability to feel like your voice will be heard. The physical safety is where we have the rules and the policies. It's risk and it's reward. The risk is where the company wants to avoid or has an appetite for a certain level of risk. The reward is, is that our team sees our effort in trying to create a safer place, and are willing to engage, are willing to be better team members. And this is goes back to Maslow's hierarchy of once food, water and shelter is established, the next phase is safety, physical and psychological has to be established. Usually physical first physical leads right into psychological because once I feel physically safe, I begin to psychologically trust what's around me that builds into teamwork, that builds into wanting recognition and doing more than it's expected, that leads to creative problem solving, all the things we want for better cost, better productivity, better quality, covering all of the safety, quality, delivery cost metrics. It's mind and it's body. We stand in the Crossroads as leaders and safety professionals, especially those who are lovers of safety that care and fundamentally understand that leading that way is important. We control where the mind and the body, we protect the body, and therefore the mind is free to begin to trust. I'm going deep, I know, but I'll get there, I promise. And it's also one of the most powerful items that we have to realize it is hard to always keep this in the forefront, is that we are both home and work. We see it both. We see how the workplace engages with that human, with that individual person, every day when we're out there in the field, seeing the things we see, we also see how the home is brought into the workplace. It cannot be helped. There is no way to separate the human experience outside of work to the human experience inside of work. They blend together. They work together. They are a piece of the whole person. No way to separate it. There's no way you can put it down and bring you can focus on reducing that impact. When you're aware of it, you can't get rid of it. If I've had a tough morning coming into work, it may show for a little bit. It may bleed through occasionally. If I've had a wonderful day, I may come to work with a different outlook or attitude. Yeah, I can choose that. That requires quite a bit of self actualization, though, and again, I have to feel safe vulnerable, like I trust my team to even let that come through in an effective way. It's very powerful. It's a it's a little daunting when we think about how connected we are as a good leader. Let me just go to being a good leader of how connected you have to be with your team, with your people, how connected you have to be not that you again, there's always the exception. There's always a little bit of argument on how this works. But we have to be connected in some form or fashion to create the motivation, to create the vulnerability, to create the systems that need to be in place for. Highly effective, highly successful culture and workplace. Let's continue this conversation on the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast,

Stinger: 10:13

humanizing the workplace it is the leading and learning through safety podcast,

Commercial: 10:20

dsda Consulting, learn you lead others. The Myers Briggs Type Indicator is an amazing tool. Problem is that it can be easily misinterpreted. Dr Mark French is MBTI certified and ready to help you discover your inner strengths. The MBTI assessment can help with team building, stress management, communication, conflict management, and so much more, individual and group sessions are available to help you discover what makes you great. For more information, visit us on the web at tsda consulting.com

Mark French: 10:58

Welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast. Thanks for joining me, and let's continue our discussion on what is the crossroads of safety. This has been my presentation that I gave this year at both the Tennessee and the Kentucky safety conferences, of course, with some updates, with some changes based on some information from the from the audience that was there who I'm always honored to see people show up wanting to hear me talk. That's always a really, just a humbling feeling to know that, and I'm thankful for that as part of the crossroads, the crossroads of safety is physical and psychological, where they meet in the middle. That's where we stand as good leaders. So physical safety is really easy in some ways to define. It's essentially human harm. How do we reduce it, eliminate it, get rid of it. It's all about risk and human harm. How do we get rid of it? Psychological safety is a little bit more mushy. We'll call it. It's a little bit different, but ultimately, the way I defined it, and when I read through different definitions and different theories on it, what I found was that the core part of it, that I think feels most appropriate for what we're talking about, is the first one, is that you can share your ideas, thoughts and opinions without the fear of being degraded or shame. So you're you feel okay going, maybe it's not okay, or you feel okay going, I'm not okay today, but I'll make it through. But just wanted to let you know it's that ability and that feeling that you can say those things and maybe something will happen because of it, but at the very least, you're not ashamed, or you're not degraded, or you don't have fear. It's also a climate. It's characterized by trust and respect, where people can be comfortable being themselves. That means they can be comfortable saying, this is I'm just not feeling it. Don't have to give everything about their home or what they've been going through. Maybe they're just saying, Hey, I'm going through some tough time. Times and my mind's a little wandering. Or they feel perfectly fine going, this doesn't look safe today. I think we need to reevaluate it. So what are kind of the crossroads? There's four blocks, in my opinion, of the crossroads of safety, physical and psychological. And those crossroads have four blocks. You have low physical, low psychological. I call that fiction, because to me, that's just a joke. There's nothing there for you to even stand on. You don't feel physically safe. You don't feel psychologically safe. It just not there. The next one is what I call faith. It's low physical and high psychological. That's good intentions. You have a lot of great intentions, failure to execute, the failure to get things off the ground, to get things going. There's a fear, which is high physical, low psychological. This is one of those where you feel that bullying effect, where it's all one way, the company pushing down, going, you will do this. You will do it exactly the way we say it, or there will be punishment, and there's only punishment kind of the blame, shame, retrain process. And finally, there's high physical and high psychological This is the one we're always driving for. And once you're in that, you have to keep pushing for it. You can't just stay there and be happy where you're at. You have to keep driving. This is continuous improvement. This is a learning organization. This is one where they're working to make it safer and safer every day, reduce the risk, and they're also listening to their team. They're acting on that. And there's a two way communication process that builds trust, builds responsibility, builds accountability, both ways. And when I was doing the research, when I was building the present. The only thing in my mind was I was categor categorizing organizations. I was looking at the total organization. The organization is either high or low. Psychologically, the organization was either high or low in physical safety, the question came up, and this is really where I was trying to go here. I'm three quarters of the way through my podcast, and I'm finally getting to my point. This feels normal, right? The question came up is, what if the management, the staff, the leaders of the organization, or we'll call that, like the company, members, feel that you're in one phase, and the workers, the employees, the culture there, feels like it's another. So for instance, the example was, what if the company feels like they're doing a good job, they're really trying, and they're they have pretty good physical safety. They feel like they've opened up psychological safety, so they're in a flourish phase, and trying to drive improvement. You go out to the let's call it the plant floor, the shop floor, and you start talking to people, and it feels more like faith. It feels more like, yeah, they want to be safer, but yeah, we feel safe, telling you all these things, but nothing are happening like we have very high psychological safety, we don't fear telling you what's wrong, but things just don't seem to be getting safer. And it struck me that I had never thought of categorizing it, not as a total organization, but is there a disconnect between parts of the organization, the parts that are creating the policy, the pieces that need to enact the policy, and the communication that goes in between. And as a practical idea that I came up with thinking along the lines of, how do you address that is getting into the details a little bit individually, and trying to see what, what are the real symptoms of what they're diagnosing. So if, if these types faith flourish fiction, if these are diagnoses, for instance, what are the symptoms? Let's ask about the symptoms and see if it's diagnosed correctly, rather than saying, Hey, I think I have this illness, but the symptoms may say you have something else. So the question would be, in a faith situation, where the employees feel like it's all faith and not a lot of action are flourishing, where we're moving forward, the question would be, why? What is it that that leads you to believe that action isn't being taken? And give me a specific give me an example of when that's happened, or if that's happened, and let's talk through it and understand where the there's evidently a communicational disconnect. And here's where great leadership really comes into play. Is, are we willing to see where the communication breakdown has occurred, and how can we fix that? How do we go and understand where we were communicating, that we thought we were communicating, but not that's where we understand the symptoms and then create more of what we can do to improve it so we bridge that gap between flourish and faith by asking detailed questions and seeing if we can. Maybe it's just we need to promote the good stuff. We're doing more. Maybe we're missing a few things and we need to close up that system always opportunities keep driving improvement, especially in safety and leadership. Again, my deepest thanks to all those who attended. I deeply appreciate all those that were willing to come see me. Thank you for listening to the podcast, especially, and of course, until next time we chat, stay safe. You.

Announcer: 19:00

You. Thank you for listening to the leading and learning through safety podcast. More content is available online at www dot tsda consulting.com all the opinions expressed on the podcast are solely attributed to the individual and not affiliated with any business entity. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes. It is not a substitute for proper policy, appropriate training or legal advice. You us. This has been. The leading and learning through safety podcast. You.