Episode 183: Going Beyond

In this episode of the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast, Dr. Mark French explores the contrast between managing people the easy way versus the right way. Sparked by a discussion with a fellow safety professional and the media’s coverage of the Texas floods, Mark reflects on how safety failures are often sensationalized, leading to blame instead of meaningful solutions. He argues that while it’s easy to point fingers and assign fault, true leadership requires deeper examination of systemic causes and cultural influences.

Drawing on insights from How to Win Friends and Influence People, he criticizes the common "blame, shame, retrain" method as ineffective, favoring instead adult learning and genuine engagement. The podcast underscores the importance of avoiding the toxic cycle of criticizing, condemning, and complaining—especially within safety committees—and instead encourages empowering those most critical of safety programs to become part of the solution.

Mark emphasizes that understanding the “why” behind unsafe behavior is key: Why don’t people follow procedures? Why is noncompliance easier? By asking these questions and involving workers in problem-solving, leaders can drive lasting change. He reflects on his own growth from being a “safety cop” to someone focused on enabling others to choose safe behaviors. The right way isn’t easy, he concludes, but it leads to real improvement in safety culture.

He ends by promoting his upcoming talk on safety culture at the Kentucky Governor’s Safety Conference and encourages listeners to keep pushing for authentic progress.

Transcript

Mark French: 0:01

This week on the leading and learning through safety podcast, we're going to talk about people, no surprise there the right way or the easy way to handle them. That's what we're going to head into this week on the podcast. You mark,

Announcer: 0:32

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,

Mark French: 1:29

hello and welcome to this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. Thank you for joining me. I am always honored to be part of your podcast rotation to be downloaded. Thank you so welcome this week. This week, I had a great conversation with another safety professional, and it came down to really talking about how we manage people. And again, we've talked about how people are the most complex item in any culture, especially with safety, because we aren't just a machine. We bring it all when we come to work, good, bad and different, we bring it all. And we're very complex creatures. And to think that we're not as well silly. And we were talking more about how there's an easy way to manage people, and then there's the right way, which is the harder way, and it's so difficult, sometimes it's easy. And when I talk about the easy way, I'm going to move into that here in just a moment and kind of talk about what, what does that mean when I say it's the easy way? Well, it all started with us watching the news. We were on site, traveling, watching the news, and of course, right now, the devastating floods in Texas was was dominating that and it felt like the news and I have my beefs with media, as I've we've covered that so many times of where I don't think they do a fair shake to safety, a lot of times that the journalism isn't there, that we treat it as just a normal day when things happen in the world of Safety. Well, they were, of course, jumping in on this, and it felt very sensationalized, and it didn't feel helpful. And that's where it we started talking about, you know, the easy way is to sensationalize, to point fingers, to blame, and then there's the hard work that comes of well, how do we fix it? How do we do? How do we prevent it again? How do we learn? How do we go? How do we go forward after tragedy or after anything? How do you move forward and my my thoughts, my prayers, my deepest, sympathy for everyone affected by those floods. It's devastating, and it's, it's going to be a huge learning from a lot of a lot of ways of Emergency Management predictive. And it's, there's going to be a lot of work there, but what we can do is get focused on blame. Yeah, though, if there's negligence, there should be some accountability. Negligence is never acceptable. But there's also more than just we have to get beyond that too and the same. And that's what God is talking about in the world of safety. How we see that so often that something bad will happen. Someone will get hurt, and something, an environmental spill, a motor vehicle. Take your pick of any safety crisis that could happen. And there's such a natural inclination to say who did it, who's at fault, and there could be negligence. Absolutely there could be. Some form of negligence involved that needs and has to be addressed. But there's also something deeper there. There's culture. There is the the deeper piece of of what led to it, what decisions brought us here, what, what processes, what allowed this to get to the state that it was in, that we even got to the situation, and that even pushed me further into like that's the easy way to manage people. You find the person that did something wrong, you point your finger and you go wrong. You pat yourself on the back to go, whoo. I fixed it, and you move on. And it's not the right way to manage people or organizations, or root cause analysis or looking at, how do we get better because of whatever happened? How do we improve? And some situations came to mind for me in my past of many times where it seemed like the easiest path was to go, Well, you didn't put your safety goggles on and tighten them up the right way, and it's your fault, rather than really digging harder and deeper into the real learning, the real hard work, but the work that actually makes a difference in a lot of people's lives, the difference that would push it further into making something that becomes what can be a learning rather than just a blaming exercise. Because I truly, truly hate the the blame shame, retrain style of management, because it doesn't, it's not effective. It can't just be that, and I never like blame and shame anyway. Now, retraining can be effective when it's the right thing to do, when you recognize that there's maybe a systemic gap in learning or training or the methodology, and that doesn't necessarily mean setting them down and making them watch the safety video. Again, it means maybe engaging in real adult learning. And again, none of this is easy. That's the part we want, the easy solution. We always want the silver bullet approach. And I think that's what makes some of the popular self help books, popular management books, popular leadership books, is that they push the idea that if you follow this routine, you'll find it. But when you actually start reading into the light, it's actually a lot more complicated, and there has to be pieces of that that can evolve into how we lead as people, and all this leadership here, I'm taking it one more step. Why not? I love taking it one more step. It brought me back to one of my favorite, favorite books of all time, and that was it's, it's a leadership book from a lot one of the one of the originals, I would say. And probably one of the best ones is How to Win Friends and Influence People. And it reminded me of the chapter on you don't want to criticize, condemn or complain. And that, to me, comes back, is like one of the central focuses of some of some of the easiest paths that we take in the safety world. We see this happening, and it's everywhere, and it's it's been happening for as long as there has been people to talk about safety. That's happened that we it's easy to sit in a room and criticize the program and the procedures and the way things were happening. It's easy to complain about the state of things and the other people, and then it's easy to condemn them and go, Well, they're the ones that wrong. We're the ones that are right. And it becomes very hard to break that cycle when you're leading people in in the safety field. And I'm going to give you a perfect example, if you've been around safety or seen it, the safety committee, to me, is the perfect example of how easily we can fall into this, this idea of criticizing, condemning, complaining when we really we know we shouldn't be there, but we fall into that routine. And I would love to say that I'm above this. I am not. I have been part of safety committees for years and years and years, led and championed and been a part of them, and it is such an easy it's just like, that's the perfect rut. You just fall right into it. It's super comfortable, and you're right. There's also some other items where, you know, complaining and having venting that does give some nice release of some some nice brain chemicals that make you feel better by doing it. But then you. Once it gets too much, it starts to spiral. Let's talk more. I know I'm transitioning a ways away here, but we'll come back to where we're going, and that's leading the right way when we're dealing with people. We'll take a break. We'll talk more on the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast, humanizing the workplace. It is the leading and learning through safety. Podcast,

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Mark French: 11:08

and welcome back to the second half of our leading and learning through safety podcast. So we're talking about managing people the right way or the easy way. The easy way is to point fingers and to condemn and criticize, and the perfect example, to me has always been the safety committee. A safety committee can be a is a wonderful thing, and it can be a very powerful tool, and you have to balance it. There's something about coming together and having that we're in it together, and we know that there are things going on that we need to fix, but we can't get in so deep into the rut of criticizing, condemning or complaining that we can't get it done, or we can't pull ourselves out and go to work. But we see it like we see those that go well, I see So and So breaking a rule all the time, or the we'll never get the money to fix that. And so why are we even trying? And it becomes such a hard routine to break. Where it comes down to, though, is, are we actually seeking the real reason things are not working? Are we digging deep enough to look beyond the people, beyond the person itself. Now, not again. I'm not. I don't want to mince words here. There are times where there that has to be addressed, the human behavior has to but what I want to, I want to get, don't just stop there. And that's where it's funny when you go through, uh, I'm changing topics. Again, it's funny, when you go through a root cause analysis training in one like a tool, that's one of their biggest points is, don't stop at the person. Don't stop there. It's easy that the first why is a person did something wrong and you're done, bam, got the root cause. Don't stop there. And so that's what I want to really focus on. We don't stop there. It's a piece of it. Yes, always, humans are a piece of it. They interact with whatever. But we have to move forward. And we have to look at is, how do we get past the criticism, condemning, complaining and using one of my favorite books, how to win friends and influence people and that centralized theme? And it really comes down to the fact that we are in it together. If someone gets hurt in our organization, none of us have won. And if we leave it open to where it can continue to happen, we still don't win. There's no good scenario there by doing that. And so we have to move forward. We have to learn more. We have to push harder to find the real solution and the real root causes, and how do we put something in place. So when you have those people who are condemning, complaining, criticizing the safety process, those are the ones we want to engage first. Now they're the hardest ones, but we want to engage on okay, how do we do it? What would you do? What can you do? What? What can we empower you to be able to have the ability to do and that's a great tool for a safety committee, and I've used it a few times, and it's not again. I when talking about things like this, it's easy to make it sound easy when really it's work, and it can be very, very socially draining when you're working through these situations where you have that person who maybe is doing a lot of criticizing of the safety world or not being that proverbial like armchair quarterback of the program and getting them engaging. Okay, we're going to empower you to be able to do something about it. Find out why they're not wearing their PPE. Find out why they're not following that process. Find out why. Do some interviews. You're telling me you see the people that are having the trouble following the rules, we don't want you to go out and police it. We're not. We are sometimes the safety police and we have to make corrections, yes, but let's really understand why? Why do you not like wearing your safety glasses? Why do you not like walking in the safe lines that we've put on the ground? Why do you like approaching the fort trucks when they're getting when they're moving things? Why is it that you you don't like performing a lock out, tag out? Let's understand. Don't just tell them they're wrong. Get to their level. Understand, why are we doing it that way? What is the why is the behavior easier to do it that way? And how do we how do we correct it? How do we remind someone that, hey, you know, the safe way is this? Yeah, it seems inconvenient, but maybe we can make it more convenient. What are your ideas? Get involved in really putting a solution to it, rather than pointing the finger at a person. And I'll be honest, in early in my career, that was my goal. Like safety police, it was my job to go out and find every single person who was doing something unsafe and correcting them, not understanding why, but just correcting him, correcting that individual act and situation. And I wasn't very nice about it, either. Yeah, and you know, that was very unfulfilling in a lot of ways, one, because you get into the mindset that you have to be everywhere, and you you are the keeper of everything safe and so you have to be everywhere. You have to do everything. You have to be there all the time. That becomes overwhelming. It creates a significant amount of anxiety, when really the focus is if we help people enable to choose the right way to do it, if we make it so easy to do the right thing, or we make it actually just easier to do the right thing than the wrong thing, they'll choose the right thing. And again, that takes work, and when you start putting that work into it, you see real change, rather than the temporary push, I think, when you're when you're working through and criticizing and work, it works for a very short amount of time, but it can give you a very quick boost in some of the metrics and making yourself look good and in if you're looking at that kind of thing, it's a very short term approach that can have some significant results, but long term fades away. Doesn't provide the people any really faith or care in the safety world and the people, and it also creates a lot of anxiety for the safety person themselves. I found personally, that's what I felt when doing it that way, because it made me feel that I was responsible for every it was easier, because then I could just go out and just knocking things out rather than actually trying to figure out what was happening. Because if I can just control me, that's easy, but when I have to worry about influencing others, helping them learn, helping them grow, and even growing myself by you learn, which is a pretty neat thing,

Unknown: 18:21

but it takes the hard work,

Mark French: 18:23

and I think that's where ultimately I wanted to come to, is that we have to break past just the finger pointing. We have to move into real problem solving, real cultural development. Thank you for joining me on this episode of the leading in learning through safety podcast. Just a quick announcement. Coming up in August is the Kentucky Governor safety conference. I will be there talking about culture. No surprise, if you're around the area, hope you can join us until next time we chat, stay safe.

Announcer: 19:01

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.