Your default setting
In my workshops, I occasionally ask leaders:
What do you hope to get out of a safety conversation with a frontline employee?
The answers tend to cluster around three things.
Content: what is, could and should be happening?
Some people want to get something across. They want John to realise something. They want to send a strong signal about what should happen. They want to correct, influence or motivate.
“I need him to understand why safety matters.”
Sometimes the inquiry is more subtle. The question sounds open, but the person asking it already has an answer in mind. They are hoping John will arrive at the conclusion they have already reached.
These conversations often stay close to the immediate safety content:
What could happen here?
What should be happening here?
What is happening here?
There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Sometimes something does need correcting, and sometimes a leader needs to be clear about what matters. But the purpose we bring to the conversation shapes the person standing in front of us. John can easily become the person we need to influence. And we miss other possibilities.
Context: what shapes what happens?
Others prefer to use the conversation to understand. They want to know what it is like to work in this place. Why does a particular way of working make sense from where people are? What pressures, constraints, history, relationships, assumptions or incentives shape what people do?
The safety issue is still there. We have simply widened the frame around it. We might look through an ergonomic lens, a cultural one or a historical one. We are still interested in safe ways of working, but we are trying to understand it in its surrounding context.
Connection: who are you with?
And sometimes people want something else: They want to get to know their conversation partner. They want to get to know a colleague. To discover something about them. To share something of themselves. To find something they have in common. To enjoy a conversation.
The safety issue might be what brought them together, but the relationship becomes worthwhile in its own right. Which matters because conversations happen between people. The person sitting in front of us isn't simply someone who has information we need, or someone whose behaviour we want to influence. They are someone we are in relationship with. And connection can mean more than getting along. Can we listen to each other? Can we challenge each other? Can we think about this together?
These give us three ways of orienting yourself in a conversation:
Content is about detection and correction.
Context is about understanding.
Connection is about relationship and shared thinking.
A conversation about a speeding forklift might begin with what is happening, move into why the work makes sense the way it does, and somewhere along the way become a conversation between two people who understand each other a little better.
What we hope to get out of a conversation shapes what we notice, what we ask, what we listen for, and what the other person becomes to us. If I need someone to realise something, I approach them differently than if I want to understand their work. If I want to understand their work, I approach them differently than if I simply want to get to know them.
Most of us have a default. A lens we reach for without thinking. A way of showing up that has become habit.
It's worth knowing what yours is.
/Daniel
PS I’ll be exploring these ideas, and putting them into practice, at Safety Conversations for Leaders in Dallas on 15 October. There are still places available if you’d like to join me there.