Episode 193: Inspect What You Expect

In this episode of Leading and Learning Through Safety, Dr. Mark French explores the timeless leadership principle of “inspect what you expect,” rooted in the lean concept of gemba—going to where the work is actually done. Safety and lean thinking should be natural partners, but too often leaders set expectations without validating them through presence and follow-up.

Mark recounts observing a construction crew working without proper PPE, despite safety glasses being available. One worker wore them on the back of his head, another tossed new ones aside after seeing no one else using them. This real-world example underscored how expectations without inspection quickly dissolve into unsafe behaviors.

He emphasizes that genuine safety performance is proactive, consistent, and reinforced by leadership presence. When leaders actively validate expectations—whether for safety, quality, or productivity—they create accountability and consistency, while modeling the behaviors they wish to see. Conversely, when leaders only appear during crises or productivity shortfalls, employees learn that safety isn’t truly prioritized.

Mark also highlights the importance of peer influence and “leading up.” Younger leaders look to experienced peers, while supervisors may eventually shift when they see frontline consistency. The process may be slow, but leadership presence builds trust, reinforces values, and fosters long-term cultural improvement.

Ultimately, leadership isn’t about words—it’s about being present, validating expectations, and showing people that safety and values come first. A leader’s presence on the floor is both the simplest and most powerful tool for sustainable performance.

Transcript

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This week on the podcast, I'm going back to a very basic principle of the gimba. Inspect what you expect. Go out and see, go to where the action is, go to where the work is. I want to talk about that in a real life scenario. This week on the podcast. 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, welcome to this Episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast, so happy you could join me. Thank you for allowing me to be part of your podcast rotation. I am truly honored to be a part of it. This week, I wanted to talk a little bit more about some lean theory and safety, and sometimes lean theory and safety, they should go hand in hand. They should be best friends. They should be partners in everything they do. But sometimes it doesn't go that way. But again, kind of continuing our theme here recently of leading safety first, letting safety be that leadership tool that gets everything started. That's where true lean principle comes in. And the idea of the gimba, the idea of, go to the location, go to where the work is done. The same thing you hear the word go. Inspect what you expect. And if you're not inspecting it, you get what you expect. It just comes however it wants, which is absolutely 100% true in everything we do, safety, quality, delivery, cost, if we don't look at it, if we don't inspect it, if we don't give feedback to it, then it is simply just not going to work. It won't happen the way we want it to. And so I'll tell a story. This is recent that I saw this happen. Found it interesting. It was a construction site that I was near and was just waiting basically for something else. And I saw construction going on, not my construction. It was fully gated. Couldn't get into it, but I could see what was happening. And seemed like they were doing something pretty simple. They were pouring some concrete. They were making a sidewalk and a concrete pad for an organization. And I was watching the work, and it just it didn't feel right from the beginning and then, so of course, then I couldn't help but watch a little closer, and it started off with, you know, the lack of PPE. There were some gloves. They looked like they were wearing boots, but again, at first, they were just pouring concrete. So I kind of all right, that makes sense. Then they brought out the big concrete hand saw, and they started cutting, either scoring some of the concrete, but also cutting blocks to make them fit, to make it look like a pretty pad. They were making sure it was look nice. So they were cutting blocks. And there was a whole there was quite a few workers there doing the work, and the guy's using the saw, and there's dust everywhere, and it's cloudy, and they they take some water bottles, start spraying the area with their with their drinking water bottles, trying to keep the dust down. And I look over, and I go, why isn't that guy wearing safety glasses? He was wearing. Them. They were just on the back of his head. He had put them there, I guess, for safe keeping. And then when he started cutting the block, never put them back on. And I was thinking, oh my gosh, what's going on? And then, then I thought, okay, here we go. Someone. Showing up, and they were all wearing brightly colored gear, like kind of high vis. It was yellow and orange and blue, and it looked like that. The different classification of workers had different color. Well, here comes blue shirt. It looked like he was probably looked like a supervisor. And I'm like, All right, maybe this is gonna take care of it. This is what's gonna happen. Realized it wasn't a supervisor, just another worker. But he walks up and he looks around and he he sees he's got a pair of safety glasses, new in package in his hand. I'm like, Ah, okay, he's gonna hand these out. He's gonna try to get people involved protect their eyes from this dust and concrete that's being cut. He walks over. He looks around, he looks at all the others, and he realizes that nobody else is wearing safety glasses. So he takes the new impact, he tosses them over into the into the pile of other gear that they're currently not using, and just continues on his way. So that made me think of why is this happening? It can't be lack of knowledge. It might be. But they had the safety they knew they probably needed safety glasses because they had them. So at some point, somebody handed them new and packaged safety glasses. The one guy cutting knew he needed them. He had them on the back of his head. He knew he needed them. He didn't quite go all the way with putting them on. I guess he felt very comfortable running the saw very comfortable not wearing those safety glasses. And I wondered further. I started thinking, why would someone, why would a group decide to take such blatant, dangerous in a lot of accounts, decision making, and I wonder what the expectation was. Was there truly an expectation to wear PPE, if there was, there was definitely no inspection. No one was showing up to validate, to verify, to look at the fact that are they doing what I expect. Now, occasionally it looked like there was a design engineer that would come around and make sure the concrete was being poured according to his his specifications, because he had a clipboard. Lucky had some drawings. Again, I'm a distance away. I'm observing, observing from a little bit of a distance, and I can tell that they're looking at like, how are they pouring? Is it smooth? Is it going the direction they want? I can see some of that, but again, no expectation, no inspection for safety, for the basic critical nature of looking for something safety first, and one of the items, and this comes from the Kraus spell research, this comes from other research that's out there, but that was the most prominent is that when you have good safety performance, and that's not a Zero injury rate, it's truly proactive, measured, real safety performance, caring to safety, putting energy into safety, that performance also creates performance in all other categories. A good safety organization is a good performing organization every time that data is there. And why is that? And I come back to the inspect what you expect. If I am going out to verify that my people are okay, that they're doing what I expect for safety, then there's a very high likelihood, very high likelihood, that I am going to also check out the work conditions, make sure the quality is there. Make sure they're performing and working, to make sure that they're out there doing the work that should be done, and maybe not doing other things they shouldn't be doing, or all the things that come with good leadership and good management, being available, being out there, being at the work, seeing exactly what we expect. How do we inspect exactly what we expect? And I keep saying that, but that's the easiest term to use about what is the expectation. As a leader, we have expectations every day of the people who work for us, around us and who we work for, we have an expectation of how they should perform and what we need to be able to perform that work. And I'll back up and say that again. So we have an expectation, if we are true, if we are leaders, we're managers, and we have people who work for us, we have an expectation of what they're going to do every day. We have an expectation of the work, the work quality, the work safety, all of the things that come with being a good manager. We have expectations of our peers. We need to work as a team. We need to work cross laterally. We need to be able to see what is happening there. We need that connection, and we need that teamwork, and we have an expectation of those that we work for. All of us in some form or fashion, have a have a boss, unless you're at the very, very tip top, and then you probably still report to a board potentially. So you still have a boss. There's an expectation of what we need from them every day. There is that expectation. There is a strong expectation there. So let's move into the how do we inspect? How do we make sure that we're getting what we need when we have expectations 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 tsda 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 TS da consulting.com and welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast. This week, we're talking about the act of the Gemba, the going out and doing and why do we do it? Is because we have to inspect what we expect, we have to be able to somehow measure, view, evaluate, is it meeting our expectations? And so in the case I spoke about earlier, the construction site that I observed, I think deeper about the idea of, was anyone inspecting the expectation, probably not. And I also will go back to some of the investigations I've been involved in, some of the other research I've done of some very tough injuries, very like Sif events, so significant incident or fatality events, and while doing the the investigation, when asking the hard questions, there's a lot of times where absolutely the expectation, oh yeah, I asked them to do the lockout. Every time I asked them to wear their PPE, I pass out PPE. But you also found out that the x the inspection was not there. Did you ever go evaluate? Did you ever go out there and have the chance to go look to see if they were actually doing it the way that you expected they were doing it? And unfortunately, there were a lot of times that that was not true, that the the expectation was there, but it was loose, because if you don't go out and validate, and you don't go out and create accountability, you don't go out and create consistency, you don't go out and model those behaviors, it won't happen. It's absolutely human behavior, psychology, management theory. It's absolutely true that if you don't go in and inspect and set the set and validate and verify your expectation, there will be no accountability, there'll be no consistency. And they looking at you to lead. They're looking at your model as a leader, and that that's everyone again. So we going back to the idea of your people, the people that work for you. If you're in a position of management, where you're a leader of that style, your team is looking at you to model that behavior. If you never come out and look at the work site, or the only time you show up is when there's a problem, or if there's a cost or delivery issue they understand. You can talk about safety, you can talk about culture, you can talk about all the other things. They catch on. People see it, they feel it. They may not be able to like bring themselves up to the meta, to really understand it, but they feel it, and they know it, and they know suddenly now what the expectation really is. And that's when you do the you do some of those interviews, and I've done a lot of these throughout my career, where you talk to people about, hey, what do you what do you hear about? Say, oh yeah. We talk about safety all the time here. I'm like, Well, tell me the truth. Then tell me what's really going out. And sometimes you get a really great story of like, oh yeah, they come out here, they they've bought us things, they've improved things. You get the good stories. But of course, the fun stories, the stories that really shock us are the ones where it doesn't go well. When you hear about oh yeah, they tell us all that. But the only time the supervisor really shows up out here is when our numbers are dropping and. We're not making production quotas. Suddenly, they're out here in force, taking care of business. Okay? We know the truth. Now we know what gets the reinforcement. We see the modeling. We see what is getting motivated? What is the motivation? Productivity only until safety is a problem, and then safety is a problem. Peer to Peer, our peers look at us to see how we're going to perform if we they understand if we're the ones who always set the high expectation. And sometimes that's a relief for some, maybe younger leaders, maybe leaders who are learning for the first time how things are. They look to the older ones who are their peers, and they look at those that are senior or those that have done it before, and they look to model that behavior. And if it's a safe behavior, if it's one that is constantly getting out, doing the inspections, setting the expectations, making it real, making it accountability, making it model, making it the way it should be. They're going to pick up on that. Our supervisors see the same thing. Now that's harder. Leading up is a very difficult process. It sounds so easy, but we know it's not. But it is something we do, and it's something we set the expectation to if our if we stay in our own and we hold true to our values, hold true to our core of who we are. And we set the expectation that we are going to be a frontline leader on the floor. We're going to be a leader who shows that when we lead safety first, it is setting the right expectation, because we perform better overall in the long term because of how we do that, our supervisor catches on. They may not change the way they lead, they may not change the way they hold accountability to others, but they'll recognize what we're about and what we do and how we do it, and a lot of times it does spread. Now it's a lot slower, in my experience that that type of leadership does slow. It does influence. It does create influence. It creates a lot of interesting trust. And in kind of human grouping processes, it creates that other people will either start to be attracted to that pack, that idea of like, Hey, this is the way we're all going to do it. We're all going to start doing it because we see it that way. It may even change the way the leader leads to get more involved in those processes. And ultimately, what it comes down to is that we have to be leaders who were present. We have to be present to the people that we work with and work around. Is in that actually is quite simple. I do have to say that being present in the space, it takes energy, but it's not a hard process. Just go to where the work is. Where is the work go there. You don't have to spend a lot of time to make it meaningful, but you do have to be there. It has to be you have to be present. Be present in that moment. That's even a mindfulness idea in all the other processes, the way we deliver it, the way we Yeah, that gets more complicated. But this first step, the very first step, the one we can absolutely control, 100% right now, at this moment, is to go out there, be present at where the work is happening and start that inspection. Be there. Thanks for joining me on this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. Until next time we chat, stay safe. You. Life. 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, power. Podcast.