Leading and Learning Through Safety
Leading and Learning Through Safety
Episode 174 - Ethical Decision Making
The podcast episode discusses the relationship between ethical decision-making and workplace safety. Hosted by Dr. Mark French, the episode explores how distance from the work environment affects ethical judgment in safety-related decisions.
Dr. French references an article from the Journal of Applied Psychology (February 2025) titled Out of Sight, Out of Mind: How High-Level Controls Can Decrease the Ethical Framing of Risk-Mitigating Behavior. The research highlights how individuals making safety decisions—often executives or managers—tend to underestimate workplace risks when they are physically removed from the job site. This detachment leads to decisions that may prioritize cost and productivity over worker safety.
The discussion emphasizes how safety professionals frequently face ethical dilemmas, such as choosing between enforcing safety measures and aligning with corporate expectations. Dr. French underscores the challenge of instilling ethical behavior, noting that while organizations can promote accountability and structured procedures, individuals ultimately make their own ethical choices.
He provides examples of how ethical misjudgments have led to real-world safety failures, citing an incident where a supervisor disregarded a stop-work order, leading to worker fatalities. He stresses the importance of leadership engagement—actively seeing and understanding workplace conditions—to ensure informed safety decisions.
Drawing from quality management principles like Six Sigma and Toyota’s Gemba method, he advocates for leaders to observe work environments directly, rather than making abstract, detached decisions. The episode concludes with an invitation to the Tennessee Safety Conference in April, where Dr. French will discuss integrating values into organizational safety culture.
The key takeaway: ethical safety decisions improve when leaders engage directly with frontline work, reinforcing a culture where employees feel empowered to prioritize safety without fear of retaliation.
This week on the podcast, we're talking about ethics. We're going to talk about, how do we help create stronger ethical ties that then lead to better safety decisions? This and more. This week on the podcast, you Mike, 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, hello and welcome to this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. I am your host, Mark, and I am so happy that you have joined me. Also sorry for my absence the past few weeks, as with this time of year, and you can probably still hear it in my voice. Illness struck, and it was really hard to talk sustained, which might be good for some people. My family may have been happy by that, but now I am feeling better, and I've got some exciting topics that I want to keep discussing, and I look forward to this. So welcome again. Glad I am part of your podcast routine, and let's jump on in. So this week I got a got one of my psychological journals, and this is the Journal of Applied Psychology, and I was really excited when I opened it and found an article that directly related to occupational safety. It wasn't even a stretch to get there. It was definitely an occupational safety style article. And research works. So again, the Journal of Applied Psychology, February 2025, the name of this article is out of sight, out of mind, how high level controls can decrease the ethical framing of high of risk mitigating behavior. Yeah, a mouthful, but it means a lot, and it's something that we as safety professionals have known for a long time, is that the further that someone is from the work, the easier it is to say it's not that risky. And so the research looked at some high risk work opportunities and did a few minor experiments try to understand how that works, how that there can be high work context and low work context, and basically trying to show the ethical framework around safety judgment calls. And the people who make the judgment calls for safety are normally the ones that aren't right nearby. Now this is something that has been in ethical decision making and safety decision making. This research is coming more and more to the forefront of the safety world, of understanding how our decisions impact real safety and how it actually is ethical in its framing, because safety is it's a huge piece of ethics. We make the decision whether or not there's enough risk present to do or not do something, and whether it be fixing it, not fixing it, allowing the work, not allowing the work. How much risk is acceptable, how much loss is acceptable in what we do in decision making, and a lot of the times, even the safety professional has a lot of dilemma, having to choose between, do I do the right thing, or do I go along with what I know my boss wants, or what the corporation or the organization wants? We dive into these ethical decisions every single day, and it's probably one of the largest dilemmas, at least in my opinion, and it has affected me for years and years, and made me ponder a lot of what I do and how I do it, and who I work for and where I work over and over again, is, can we make the ethical decision or. Much punishment do we take for making the ethical decision, for doing the right thing, for calling the thing out? And I've been on both sides, good and bad, and I'm sure if you've been around the safety world for long enough, you've seen it too, that making the right decision sometimes comes with not necessarily direct punishment, where it'd be retaliation, but more work, or you're excluded, or you're not asked anymore, or that opinion isn't needed, or they give you more work because of it. Well, yeah, if that's true, then you need to go find the fix for it. Those ethical frameworks are organizational. They're part of the larger group of the organization having to choose. Now, I'll take a step back and say the hardest thing, and probably one of the most impossible things we can do as safety professionals, is help someone become ethical. Now we can hold the line. We can hold accountability. We can write procedures that lead that way, but ultimately, when we go inside the human being, and I'm being very philosophy, being a philosopher here, philosophical bringing that out and saying, We cannot dictate someone's ethics. We can help guide them into doing the right thing, but ultimately their ethics are their ethics, and we see people that want to maybe blur that line or have a very gray or even dark ethical alignment to what they do in the workplace. It's very common, and what this study looked at was it began with the premise that the people who are making the critical decisions for safety generally are not the people on site, the worker can allegedly now here's where I some companies do a great job of a stop work program. They empower it, they celebrate it. They do the right things. Some companies don't. They don't fully understand what it means to do a stop work, and it is uncomfortable to go almost stop work, because there's a potential that someone could get hurt. Sometimes it's a no brainer. Sometimes it's super easy. Other times it's kind of like, well, you know, done it a few times, maybe do it again, try it one more time. But ultimately, the decisions were made upstream from the work that influence and dictate the decisions that will happen the moment of a potential incident and to the person that the incident could happen to. And in the article, they cite a few examples of that historically, where the key decision makers for the big safety decisions were not there. They were separated from the work. Therefore it was easier for them to make ethical assumptions that things were just the decision they made was not going to affect someone's safety, but, yeah, it was important, and it could, but they really diminished their own ethical ownership in that decision, which I found absolutely fascinating, because it's Something we've known we know that as safety people, we think about large corporate organizations making decisions for safety, and we think about these suited people, and I'm, again, I'm giving this context of just generalizing, we think of these in a boardroom making decisions on cost productivity, without any consideration for what it could do towards safety and a lot of catastrophic incidents. When you trace the decision making way back, it comes from those decisions that were made not sitting in front of people, not being on the front lines, or even understanding what it looks like on the front lines, but just making a decision arbitrarily and with generalizations at that higher level. And so it begins to look at can Is this true? Does it really create some opportunity for risk? Does it create this opportunity for it's easier to ethically justify it when I don't see it. And absolutely, for those of us who have seen this work time and time again, even I'm going to talk a little bit later about continuous improvement Six Sigma in those productivity management systems and how even they are contrary to that decision making in the boardroom, that it has to be made based on the what is reality and the physical truth of the situation that we sit in, we can only make those ethical decisions when we are looking at the work. Work. Maybe it's a photograph. Maybe there's ways remotely now, with no doubt that with the technology, we have to better engage ever before with the work in the workers. Are we doing it? Though? Yeah, I'm as Gill. I do. I get out in the field as much as I want to. No, I'm gonna go ahead and preamble the fact that I understand I'm not there as much as I want to be. But I I see this, I understand the fact that the decisions that I can make still affect in a very real way, decision making and overall ethical determination of how a company runs a safety program. Let's talk more, and let's move on to the positive on what does this mean for what we can do coming up on the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast. You are listening to the leading and learning through safety podcast with Dr Mark French 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 Welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast. This week we're talking about an article in the February 2025, a Journal of Applied Psychology from the American Psychological Association. The articles title is out of sight, out of mind, how high level controls can decrease the ethical framing of risk mitigating behavior. So essentially, the further away you are from the work, the easier it is to make a very high level ethical decision making process that may not really be beneficial to the people in the field or the people doing the work. It may actually influence them Oppositely, to make decisions that are not in their best interest and in their best safety. And the biggest way, the biggest way, to overcome that obstacle of out of sight, out of mind, which the title said it all right there. If it's out of sight and you're not seeing it, it's out of mind. It's just a statistic. It's just a number. It's just a thing where a procedure is out there that something should happen. It goes back to seeing the work, getting feedback, real feedback about the work. Yeah, there are times where leaders do go out in the field, and sometimes it's just a pony show. Sometimes it is staged. It is not the real work that's going on. And hopefully what you do see as a leader is the real work. You have a chance to interact and talk to people in a real way, to understand the decisions they have to make every day for their own safety. Let's go back to quality management. Let's move to a continuous improvement Six Sigma style, whatever, wherever you want to put that. And even when we go back to the book The Toyota way, looking at some of the foundations of it and Deming and his studies, it begins with the idea of the Gemba, the going to the place of the work to see it, knowing that you can't fully understand the quality implications. And here we're talking about safety implications of what's happening until you go and see it. Maybe it's a video, maybe it's a photo, maybe it's a Face Time video, where you're seeing it live, but in a different way, and in a remote workplace, or workplaces that are spread out, you have to get creative with how you evaluate and how you look at that risk. So it becomes real. Once it becomes real, it's hard to ignore. It's hard to not make the ethical decision. It's almost a forced ethical decision when you're looking at the person now, time and time again, I am amazed, both good and bad, and in this case, bad with human nature. There are absolutely times where people have stopped work, and this was late last year, if I remember correctly. One of the news stories we talked about together was that they stopped at work at a trench site. Everybody came out. The supervisor, the leader of the group, said, it's perfectly fine Get back in there. And he was there when it collapsed and killed people. You. That is despisable, despicable, horrible to be that level. And again, this is where I go back and say, we can't. We can't create ethical decision making for people. We can, we can help guide them through it, but ultimately their ethics of their own. And if that's their level of ethics, that's a scary place to be as a leader, and it gets even easier imagine that leader, even easier as the further away from your work. He looked those guys in the eyes and said, Get back in that trench, and then watched them die. And again, that was months ago. I remember that article. Can't remember all the details, but I remember being just as angry now as I was then about it, and I read this article, and I go, Yeah, exactly when it comes to having to make these ethical decisions or being able to empower our team to do the right thing, we have to be able to see it. We have to put our eyes on it. We have to understand for real the construal, the context of what is happening, so that we can help empower them to make the very best decision that they can make on their own behalf. Isn't that wild that we as a company, we as organizations, have that level of power that people second guess making the right decisions for themselves because we have created something, that they feel like they have to do it that way, that they don't have empowerment to say no, or empowerment to say, can we think about this a little further? Because I don't feel comfortable with it. I don't feel good about this. I don't feel safe doing this, that there are organizations that have put such great pressure on people from a distance, again, that ethical decision making from far away puts the pressure on people that they feel that the productivity, the cost measures, the other measures are more important to make those decisions than it is to save their own lives or to protect themselves from harm. That's a scary situation, and I love the fact that this article is trying to find creative ways in the theoretical sense of psychology, of understanding how we make these ethical decisions and how we as people, we as leaders, can make better decisions for our team. And it comes back to the very simple premise of go to where the work is happening, one of the tried and true methods of understanding, of improving, of problem solving, of all the all the things that make a great process. It all begins with going out there, seeing it, putting eyes on it, being in the mix, engaging with our team, being able to really see the work as it's happening, and be able to make good decisions based on what we see in the feedback we get from the team in the field doing the work. Thanks for joining me on this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. As always. Thank you for joining me. Always a pleasure to have you. A little bit of fun. News coming up in April. The first week of April is the Tennessee safety conference. Very timely. I'm going to be talking about how do we build values into our organizational structure to help lead safety we're going to get right to the heart of it. We're going to talk about values. We're going to talk about mission and vision, and we're going to talk about how we build that to really drive safety coming up in Nashville in April. Hope you can join me. It'll be a lot of fun. Great conference, probably one of the best in the nation. I love it. So excited. Until next time we chat, stay safe. 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 This has been the leading and learning through safety podcast. You.