The people you don’t lead
The people who shape your people's work aren't necessarily the people you lead.
Much of what’s been said about safety leadership is about how we make expectations travel downward. But most safety challenges don't respect organisational boundaries or hierarchies. The pressure that encouraged John's speeding forklift might have come from a scheduler in a different department. The contract that created the engineers' impossible workload was signed by Kenneth in a completely different part of the organisation. Other issues are shaped by clients, a contractor's commercial decisions, a designer's specifications or a supplier's constraints.
Safety challenges are produced through relationships between decisions, constraints and actions across the organisation. So the safety leader who only thinks about leading people who report to them risks trying to change the behaviour of the people who are absorbing the problem, rather than engaging with the people closer to the sources of the trouble.
If the challenge includes people with whom you have sideways and upward relationships, like schedulers, procurement managers, engineers, senior leaders, clients and contractors, then safety leadership is also about building a fellowship of people with a shared opportunity, even though they occupy different parts of the organisation.
How do we, as safety leaders, create and influence change when we don't have authority over everyone whose decisions and actions shape the work? How do we create the conditions for a fellowship to form around something that matters?
Here are three moves to consider.
Scout the space
Go and talk to people about how the issue appears in their world. Talk to the frontline employees. Talk to supervisors, schedulers, engineers, procurement, project leaders, contractors, clients. Listen for what they are experiencing. What is getting in the way? Where is work becoming harder than it needs to be? What do they wish could be different?
You're looking for a possibility that exists between their different experiences. Something that none of them can address alone, but that several of them recognise is worth working on. The scheduler might talk about client requirements. The supervisor about being stuck between a rock and a hard place. The frontline employee about never knowing what the day will bring. Different stories. Perhaps the same opportunity space.
Find the thing people can agree is worth working on.
Convene around the shared opportunity space
Invite those people together. Not everyone will come. Kenneth signed that contract under real commercial pressure, and he was probably praised for it. An invitation to talk about the engineers' workload might look to him like an invitation to be blamed. So before you convene, ask what each person stands to gain from being in the room. If you listened to Kenneth first, you may have heard that his contracts keep ending in variations, disputes and late delivery. That's his version of the problem, and it belongs in the question.
Some people still won't come. Start with the ones who will. A small group that tries something and learns from it creates its own pull, and a result is often a better invitation than a request. Sometimes the invitation travels better through someone else: a peer, a manager, someone they already trust. And pay attention to who stays away. Absence tells you something about where the pressure sits, and what it costs people to look at it.
The question you bring to the convening should emerge from what people have told you, while leaving enough room for those in the room to shape it themselves.
How might we make it easier for people to do good work when priorities change?
How might we create better conditions for contractors and our people to work well together?
How could we make this work better?
The invite and purpose need to involve something each person can recognise from their own part of the organisation, while being something none of them can solve on their own.
And then let them talk. Let the scheduler hear what the frontline experiences. Let procurement hear what happens downstream from a specification. Let the project leader hear what their deadline looks like from the other end. People may discover that what looks like a reasonable decision from one part of the organisation creates difficulty somewhere else. That's part of the point. You're trying to create the conditions in which people can see more of the system they are part of.
Try something
A fellowship can't exist on conversation alone. When the group sees a possibility worth exploring, initiate a learning probe. Try something deliberately and carefully, small enough to be reversible, and with enough attention to what happens that you actually learn from it. Change something small. Bring two groups together earlier in the process. Give someone more influence over a decision that currently happens without them. Change the question being asked at the start of a meeting. Test a different way of handing work between teams.
Then pay close attention to what it reveals about the system. What did people do differently? What became visible that wasn't visible before? What did the system push back on? What became possible that wasn't possible before?
The energy of a fellowship is fuelled by progress, discovery and learning. People stay engaged when trying something together produces something worth noticing. When the experiment reveals something real. When the learning changes what the group does next.
So keep going. The next probe emerges from what the last one revealed. The fellowship deepens through acting on it together, learning together, and gradually changing the conditions that produced it.
That is the work of building a safety fellowship: creating the conditions for people who would otherwise experience different parts of a problem to discover that they have something worth working on together. A shared challenge creates the possibility of a shared opportunity. Working on it together creates something more valuable than agreement: a shared capability to do something about it.
/Daniel