Transformational Leadership: The Key to World-Class Safety

Since retiring as director of health and safety worldwide for Procter & Gamble, I have had the privilege of working with a number of companies dedicated to achieving EHS excellence, a.k.a. world-class safety (WCS).

Safety professionals know that employees do not become engaged by decree or by promotional gimmicks like flashlights and blankets. But do safety professionals know how to achieve employee engagement, and if so, what are they doing about it? The key to engagement is not the safety professional, it is the organizational leaders who must become less transactional and more transformational. So the question now becomes, what can safety professionals do to convince leadership of the need to become more transformational?

Transformation leadership not only will drive better safety results but also better business results, because the workers are totally engaged not only in safety, but in the entire work process. This could be the key selling point for leadership to become more transformational.

This article will provide safety professionals with something they can share with their leadership as a start to increasing the transformation leadership of the entire organization. A key selling point is the fact that an organization where leaders develop transformational leadership skills not only will excel at safety, but also at other critical business outputs. No smoke and mirrors — hard data demonstrating this is included in this article.

Atlas Holdings LLC accurately captures the importance of engagement in their safety principles: “We believe companies with WCS performance will achieve business success through engagement and empowerment of employees.” However, this is no chicken-and-egg story. Engagement clearly precedes world-class safety and outstanding business success.

WORK SYSTEMS

When I joined P&G several years ago, there was a strong initiative to move from a traditional work system to a high-performance work system (HPWS), also known as an empowered or self-directed work system. Peter Drucker, a widely revered and respected author and management consultant, was a leader in this movement. In one of his early books he stated, “The attainment of the quality (of work life) increasingly will have to be considered a business opportunity and will have to be converted by management into profitable business.” USA Today had a write-up on Drucker shortly after he passed away and this quote sets the stage for employee engagement and the role transformational leadership plays: “His concepts turned companies away from treating employees simply as cogs (in a wheel), persuading management to think of workers as assets and partners — which is how the best companies behave today.”

Figure 1 describes a traditional work system where workers are utilized from the shoulders down, i.e. the brawn and their work is task-focused vs. process-focused. This work system will drive average results for production, quality, cost or safety. These work systems are highly transactional, featuring a quid pro quo relationship between management and the workers.

Figure 2 describes a HPWS where the worker is fully engaged in the work process. The worker is utilized from the head down, i.e. both the brains and the brawn. In many cases, the worker's heart also is invested in the work process. Only under these conditions can the relationship between the worker and the work be optimized and maximized. It may be a cliché, but when the “hearts and minds” are engaged, above-average results will be achieved.

As you will see, the HPWS requires managers to focus both on the work and the worker, which is what transformation leadership is all about. Several years ago, the terms transactional leadership (TAL) and transformational leadership (TFL) did not exist. The management model in vogue in those days was the Blake-Mouton grid, where a traditional work system was managed by a 9:1 manger with nine being the primary focus on the work and one being the minimal focus on the workers. The HPWS requires managers to have a balanced approach, which on the grid was labeled as a 9:9 — equal weighting on both the work and the worker. Today a 9:1 manager is a TAL and a 9:9 manager as TFL. The bottom line being that a HPWS led by TFL will deliver above average results across the line — production, cost, quality, safety, etc.

Transitioning from a traditional work system to a HPWS is no easy task. In fact, there were a number of false starts at P&G. One of the key success factors in the transition was leading with safety. In other words, engaging the worker in the safety process first and following with the other critical work processes. This might seem intuitively obvious today, but it certainly was not years ago. Figure 3 (next page) describes the P&G journey to WCS as reflected by the OSHA Total Recordable Incident Rate over time. To put this in perspective, in 1980 the industry average was 8.7 versus P&Gs 4.0.