Episode 175: Bridging the Gap

The podcast episode from "Leading and Learning Through Safety" hosted by Dr. Mark French focuses on the significance of ethics and values in safety leadership. Dr. French discusses how companies often face a disconnect between stated values and actual practices, leading to cognitive dissonance and weakened organizational culture. He emphasizes that true values must be lived and reinforced through actions, not just written statements. Trust is highlighted as a fundamental aspect of effective leadership, surpassing even high performance when fostering commitment and safety.

Dr. French references Simon Sinek’s principle about trust, noting that organizations must prioritize trustworthiness over mere performance. He also touches on the devastating consequences of treating employees as expendable resources, drawing a parallel to companies that only value profit over people’s safety and well-being. Using metaphors and real-world scenarios, he illustrates the impact of values that drift too far from actual behaviors, leading to breakdowns in organizational integrity.

The episode concludes by stressing the importance of aligning company values with individual values to create a thriving and safe work environment. Dr. French encourages leaders to actively hold themselves and their organizations accountable to their core values, urging them to continuously evaluate and reinforce their commitment to safety and respect for their employees.

Transcript

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This week on the leading and learning through safety podcast, we're talking about ethics and values and how they fit into the whole world of health and safety in leadership, it's the most important part how we lead this week on the podcast. You 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 music. Hello and welcome to this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. I am so happy you've joined me excited to talk about this topic in particular, because I've been working on it for a while, for a lot of different reasons. So coming up in just a couple of weeks now, the Tennessee safety conference will be happening in Nashville, in my opinion, is one of the best in the nation. It's been around quite a while. They do a great job of bringing in some really talented speakers for the breakout sessions. I'm honored, truly unbelievable. I'm one of them that will be there talking and this year, a lot of focus on values. And I think this has to do with just me really developing a lot in HR, but also looking at safety and how safety relates into business from a top level down. How do you really integrate safety into a value scheme? Because there's so many ways that values fit into what we do and how we do it. Now, I'm not going to go through my my spiel that's going to happen coming up in April, but this is kind of supplementary to it, and some thought process behind what is happening in safety, more importantly, what is happening in ethical, value driven leadership to be able to help us assure that we're doing the right things in what we do every day, that we're holding people accountable to the values. And that is, ultimately where it comes down to, is that a company's values can be as ingrained as you want them to be, they can also be just a piece of paper that floats around that no one talks about, and no one calls out, and if you do bring up the value code, then you're in trouble for actually wanting to talk about values. That unbelievable. It's true though an organization, the culture of an organization is shaped by the how the people we're living in your values document should be kind of what you go back to to say, here's how we're going to do it in this organization. Here's how what we think are the most important, the things we want to ingrain into the DNA of who we are. That should be the values document. That should be what you publicize, what you talk about, how you do it, living into your values and trust and values go hand in hand. I love the Simon Sinek talk about the Navy Seals and how they want the person that's high trust, high performance. Of course, everybody does, but they would rather have lower performance and higher trust than low trust and high performance. That trust is actually more important. Values are more important in the way that leadership functions. People are going to follow what they trust. They're not going to follow necessarily what is going to accomplish the goal the best if they don't trust in the first place, if they're if, if there's expendable people trying to get you to your goal, that is never going to get people to follow you, because you don't know who's expendable in. That. And in the safety world, we're talking literally expendable, not hey, you might lose your job or you might get in trouble. We're in the world of safety, and we're talking about trust, and we're talking about leadership and safety. And this isn't directed towards safety people. We're doing this all the time. It's all the people around us that we rely on to be good leaders and carry safety in and do the safety things we are quite literally talking about people being expendable when we don't have high values and safety that's hard to digest when you put it so frankly, and as I say it, and as I thought about this, it hit me hard to really rationalize the idea that when we're not living our values, we're not setting safety. And the value scheme doesn't necessarily have to say safety. It just has to show that we have a common respect for people, and through that respect for people, we're not going to let them get hurt, because that's respect for people. That's what that means. And when we're not living those we are treating people as an expendable resource. How did I get here? This week I was reading through, as I do every week, I read through different articles and blogs about the fatalities that are happening in the workplace across the country, and it's anything from, it was car accidents, it was stuff being dropped. It was for truck incidents. It was shootings at different stores or workplace violence that comes up. It's the normal sad smattering of safety stuff. There was nothing that really jumped out at me as being unique, which is kind of sad on its own. I'll be honest, that's when nothing jumps out at me that's being different. It's just the same stuff over and over again. It's a little discouraging to think about where we are to allow these things to happen. And I use the royal we as the country, how organizations maybe they were trying. Maybe they were trying to get better. I'm not pointing a finger or judging, but not all of them are. And there are those that certainly we have seen, we have studied together, we've talked about together of those organizations whose values were nothing related to their people. Ultimately, I think if there were had been a value like, if there had been an actual, real value statement for some of these organizations, that would be, make the owner as much money as possible, there's your value statement. Everything else is doesn't matter. We have one goal here. It's our values. It's our goal. It's our vision. Make the owner as much money as possible. And in those organizations, we see people again, literally, see people as an expendable resource. Unbelievable. So where is this taking me down the value statement is it got me thinking about what happens when there are large gaps between what we say our values are and what we actually act upon as our values, whether it be individually or whether it be as an organization. How do those play together? And this is a very common version of cognitive dissonance, that the reality is not the same as what we think it is, what we believe should be happening, and the reality are are separating themselves. They're getting further and further apart. For instance, a company that has a value statement that say we respect and we'll take care and all all those wonderful things about people. And then you go there, and there's OSHA citations, there's labor issues, there's people that turn over and people who aren't happy there, and it's over, like you just see it, re, rinse, wash, rinse, repeat, over and over again the same things. There is a dissonance there. The company has said one thing, you walk out and you see it in a very different way, not living in the values. This creates a cognitive dissonance. It creates a psychological issue, not only individually, but with the overall culture. And this ultimately leads to a lot of different issues within the space of the organization, and that's where I want to go in the second half. This is ultimately where I've been leading to is what happens as the cognitive dissonance gets. So far apart that it collapses. We'll talk more about that. We're coming up in the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast, humanizing the workplace. It is the leading and learning through safety podcast, tsda Consulting, learn you lead others. Traditional development focuses too much on weaknesses. They make you believe that the only way to find success is through improving your faults. Strengths based coaching instead focuses on creating success through using your natural talents. Dr Mark French at tsda Consulting is an authorized Clifton Strengths coach. Your customized report and a personalized approach help bring out the best in you and your team. For more information, visit us on the web@tsdconserting.com Welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast. We began this discussion talking about values and having to live in that trust, living in those values, and now we've moved on to talking about what happens when a company or even your personal values start to really get too far apart of what the truth is. So we see it, it's written and stated, and we talk about it one way, but we're living it another. So imagine that you take, I like to imagine, like some sort of like putty or stretchy material, and you start to stretch it at first. It's pretty strong. When you only stretch it a little ways apart, when you really start to stretch it apart. It starts to sag in the middle. And then eventually you keep stretching it, it just falls apart. It just that is what happens when an organization far two separates the truth and what is written or what is supposed to be in place that we say this, we're doing something else. Now there's no actual true calculation of, when does it implode? When does it break? What is the triggering? Because it can be different for everyone. So let's go to a personal level. It's easier to look at it there, if you were to look at a and I love this exercise that comes from Brene Brown, where you look at the what are your value words, and you have a whole list of value words, trust, authenticity, love, family, faith. Take your all kinds, and you pick the one or two, maybe three, that are your most important. You say, these are my lines. You don't cross. These are my values. But let's say, unfortunately, in life, as life constantly does, it plays with that, and you get further and further and further apart at some point, whether through just seeing that your values and your life are what you really hold to your core and what's actually happening in your life or separating. Maybe it's an event that happens that triggers it. Maybe it's just time you're seeing it separate. Eventually it will sag and break, and that cognitive dissonance, if not corrected, can create this break, and suddenly it falls apart, and you have to reconcile. This is where I look at some companies. And I wonder, what will it take for the value scheme to hold on? You would think a fatality would do it. But then, unfortunately, there are those companies that will have multiple they'll do it couple years later, they'll have another one. Couple years later have another one. And sometimes they're very, very similar in in design and how they happen. This is where that separation is not being reconciled. Someone's reconciling. There's someone there that is working there, and going, No, we are nowhere near what we say we are to what we're acting on. And that's where we start to lose our motivation with our team. We start to we start to work really get to where the dynamics of the workplace are non optimal. There's no way to optimize at that point, because if you don't have that basic feeling of safety, that basic behavior in place, it's falling apart on you. It is absolutely not holding itself together. It has nothing to brace itself on, and it's falling apart. Some organizations, unfortunately have learned from fatalities, and that becomes the the breaking point where they go, Okay, it's time to start living this. And they go in and they really turn it around. There's some companies who don't let it separate that they have held strong to their values for so long that they can't. Look for ways to maintain them and to question them, and are we living it? Are we doing it? And I'll use Amazon an example. Here the early Amazon they talk about early on when Jeff Bezos he said, I wanted to create the most customer centric company on Earth, and so he would put an empty chair at his table for his staff meetings. Go, this is our customer. What do they think about the decision we're making? Imagine if we did that with safety or people, let's just say people. We put an empty chair at the table of a staff or leadership discussion, and we go, that's our team member. That's our employee. What do they think about it? How do they feel? How does it affect them? Sometimes, some decisions, when it comes to outside what I would believe, outside of safety and respect, sometimes you look at it and go, they're not going to like it, but we don't like it either. Maybe it's a really tough business decision. We don't like it. They're not going to like it, but we're going to have to do something that happens. But when we talk about basic human dignity, basic human respect, basic human right, the right to not die at work, to me, feels like something that is really important to have the systems in place so that people can be safe. Do we really think about that as part of our decision making process, and it ultimately comes down to what is the decision we're trying to make, and does it uphold our values, both individual and both company? There's some been some, some work done in that space to say that if a company's values and the person's values align. The more that they align, the more likely that person is to stay with that company for a very, very long time and to have a very happy, successful working relationship with the company. That it would be a very prosperous for both the company and the individual. They flourish together because of that. But it's not just written values. It's living it. Because the written or the spoken or the the document is really only as good as if we're doing it, if we're calling it out, if we're actually holding ourselves accountable to that. That's the harder part. Is the accountability to once we determine our values, are we the heart? Are we willing to stand up and say, I'm not sure that aligns with our values. Lot of people get defensive when that happens. I I will be perfectly honest. I would get defensive. I would have to think about it. I would have to digest it. Wouldn't be an easy conversation, but sometimes it's necessary that we have those conversations in in a way that's open and two way of understanding are we living in? How do we check it? How do we balance it? And that is ultimately where, when I am at the Tennessee safety conference, what we're going to talk about, we're going to go into a little of the background of really building a value. But how do we make it happen? And there's no I'm going to be honest. There is no silver bullet approach. There's no one way. But there are some things we can do to begin to build that, to shrink the cost cognitive dissonance, to build it into our culture, to build it into our people. There's some steps we can take. I would love, if you're in the Tennessee area, if you're able to I would I'd love to see you there. Love to say hi. I know maybe not. That's fine. We'll continue to talk about how we build our values, how we continue to be great leaders, how we continue to drive what I say is a basic human right of the workplace, and that's to be safe. I hope that you have a wonderful week, and until next time we chat, stay safe. You. Music. 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.