Management Versus Reactionary Behaviour

To be blunt, if your safety program is “managing crisis” it is neither managing nor imparting any value. One of the key discoveries we embedded in our solution-set relates to the recognition that you react to crisis situations, and you manage in order to avoid crisis. If you are managing, you do not experience crisis, even if you manage the outcomes of a negative incident.

Management is about improving decisions over time; thereby reducing time spent managing small issues so that larger targets can be focused upon. Whenever a company has reams of paper related to safety, there is an instant proof in those papers that risk-management isn’t being done or else there would be no static cache of paper choking actual work time.

When you manage training, for example, what you are doing is imposing controls to avoid or suppress risk, creating productive opportunities, or doing both simultaneously. Mentoring exemplifies a value proposition for training controls that is often lost when monitoring is substituted form mentoring. When Fred the welder spends half his day filling out forms to say he stood by welder apprentice Sally, where was the value? Even if Fred is an excellent mentor, especially so, is it not likely that having him spend 90% of his time doing the mentoring preferable to a fifty-fifty split between that and filling out paperwork?

When you manage productive timelines, what you actually do is set those targets, recognise them, and achieve them by proper process of operations. You don’t panic and turn off all safety guards to double speed, unless you haven’t been communicating well, and have no actual management process. Does it not make more sense to communicate effectively and manage rather than react in chaos?

When supervisors are overwhelmed by paper are they managing or shuffling? Over time good supervisors build trusted workers, with higher reliable skill sets, because they spend an inordinate amount of time present. They have the time to stand with an employee and deal with them behaviourally before stress flares, because they are not pushing shreds of paper into some black box. They have the time to manage rather than react.

In traditional safety though we almost never see anything managed. We see crisis reactions, panicky attempts to bury stupid decisions, and repeating cycles of destruction. We see it because you cannot manage an outcome, only a process, and the idea safety is itself something more than an outcome is ingrained in traditional programs.

Reaction leads to poor feedback, worse communication, and a lack of analysis – a repeating cycle of risk encounters.

Management engenders feedback, through immediate contact); good communication, since the opportunity is two-way; and provides a contextual basis for analysis, since all discrete data will be objectively related (assuming the correct tools).

The most common barrier to introducing risk-management into a company is always lack of management. It has sometimes been so severe as to beg whether any companies even understand the idea of operational management, let alone risk-management.