HSE Leadership Conference 29
March 2007 'A Union Rep's View'
The Cost of Getting the Point Across
The “Leadership
Conference” hosted by the Health and Safety Executive on 29 March was billed as
a specialist one-day program in “how to achieve effective leadership in Health
and Safety for Directors and CEOs of Manufacturing Organisations”, and it wasn’t
a conference that many Safety Reps will have attended.
You’d be forgiven for fearing the worst — for thinking that the under-funded and under-manned HSE was turning it’s back on Safety Representatives, by taking the step of charging, what for any Rep, would have been an incredible entrance fee for this conference.
Locked in continuous struggle to get time off from employers to attend such events, and disadvantaged by the high cost of HSE publications that are often needed to do their jobs successfully, few Safety Reps were going to be in a position to buy their way into what appeared to be an “exclusive” conference. It almost looked like a calculated snub, in some new outbreak of class-warfare, with Reps (“the riff-raff”) being virtually barred from the proceedings by the £150 fee for a seat.
‘Not to worry, mates — nothing so sinister was ever on the agenda. But I shall return to that.
The boat was pushed out on this conference, with sponsorship from O2 as well as with commercial exhibitors in an adjacent hall who paid for the right to flog their H&S wares and services. The promotional leaflet, skillfully aimed at the bosses and managers with key words that would draw their interest, promised to show them how they could improve company performance through effective leadership. “Performance” and “leadership” were used frequently throughout the promotion, and the prominent O2 symbol lent a touch of commercial style to a leaflet devoid of any union logos.
There was some thought put into the marketing of this conference, and I think it succeeded admirably. Attendance was high, with 32 large dining tables overlooking the Derby FC pitch, filled with seven and eight people at each table. Large LCD screens placed to the sides of the main stage provided extra viewing of the PowerPoint presentations as they were rolled out by a good selection of speakers, and wireless Blackberry devices, situated on each table, were set up to provide feedback during the customary interactive session — all going to create a more “managerial” and “hi-tech” ambiance than we generally find at such conferences and seminars.
The key aims of the
conference were, in the words of the Delegate Information Pack, to:
1) Promote the application of senior management leadership in health and
safety in manufacturing industries
2) Share best practice in leadership, by demonstrating successful models of
leadership in a variety of manufacturing environments
3) Demonstrate the effects of good leadership
4) Illustrate the components of good leadership in health and safety
All fairly vague and innocuous, from the sound of it, and much like what we’re used to from the HSE, as well as from the promotional material of management consultants, if you’ve ever seen any. That, I think, may have been part of the strategy.
The heavyweights amongst the several speakers were certainly John Oliver, OBE, and his partner from the days of Leyland Trucks, David Graham.
John is the author of two books on management technique and is also a former CEO of Leyland Trucks. It was John‘s application of his “radical employment engagement” method at Leyland Trucks that turned the company around in less than two years, transforming it from an unprofitable wreck, hobbling along on government hand-outs, into the most cost-efficient operation in Europe. The sum of John’s excellent presentation was that employee engagement can be the safest, quickest and cheapest way of transforming an organisation, delivering results in greater efficiency, quality, employee morale and profitability, by releasing the hidden talent and expertise within an organisation and maximising contribution from the workforce. “You’ve got two of these”, he told the managers, pointing to his ears. “And you’ve got one of these”, pointing to his mouth. “That’s telling you something — you’re supposed to use these twice as much as this.”
David Graham was John Oliver’s Production Manager in their time together at Leyland Trucks. He followed John onto the podium and his presentation was an apt follow-up, linked as it was to John’s by their experience together at Leyland. David offered a highly humorous monologue on his inadequacies as a production manager, and how he underwent the change from the old autocratic management methods of the 1960s and 70s, to the more effective “participative coaching and facilitating” approach.
With comical self-ridicule — taking the mick out of himself somethin’ wicked — he illustrated how his own lack of leadership skills contributed to the malaise that Leyland Trucks was suffering in the 1980s. Everyone laughed at the tale of his tough-bastard approach to management, with his inter-department squabbles, jealousies, blame-shifting and refusal to listen to anyone’s ideas but his own. His presentation was an exercise in self-mockery, but it was also an ingenious mirror through which those in the audience could perhaps see themselves, once the laughter had died away.
In contrast to all the valuable academic and statistical evidence promoting this change in leadership style, one speaker in particular, Frank Carrano of Accident Safety Awareness Presentations offered personal and graphic evidence of the terrible impact on an employee’s life as a result of an accident at work.
With slides of his accident — a half-ton metal sheet fell onto his back — of his injuries, and of the active life he had before the accident, Frank’s hard-hitting presentation drove home the message for the need for risk assessments, safe systems of work and procedures. Frank’s honest and sensitive story exposed the audience to the personal and family consequences of a serious works accident and gave everyone food for thought on the human element of a good health and safety system. Frank is to be commended for his courage, both in coping with what happened to him, and in taking his story to the many, many people who will benefit from hearing it.
Any trade union representative who has attended some of the conferences and seminars hosted by the HSE will have noticed how edgy and uninterested a few individuals suddenly become when a Union official or Safety Rep takes the podium and mentions the subject of consultation, of “listening to Reps”. You’ve seen them squirm in their seats, gradually slouching in boredom, and you could tell that they’ve turned off the internal volume control. You’ve seen them look at their watches, as if they’re thinking “Ah, I should hear the Union side, but now’s the time to beat that motorway traffic”, and they slide out of their chairs and make a crafty exit “for the toilet”, carrying all their paperwork and jacket with them. But not this time.
The presenters here were in command of entertaining speaking skills and held the attention of everyone. Many in the audience made copious notes in their pads to take back to work with them, and the applause for every speaker was genuine — not the polite but half-hearted applause you sometimes hear.
Now, why did I say “Not to worry” about missing this conference?
You needn’t worry about having missed it because the message, repeated time and again by every speaker, was the one that we wish would be heard and acted upon, the one that we are so familiar with that we’re almost bored with it ourselves: that an essential of good business leadership is communication, and communication means listening to the workforce and working with Safety Representatives.
Earlier speakers and those who followed John Oliver and David Graham all delivered the same message: that employees should not be merely consulted, as a paper exercise conducted in compliance with regulations, but should be effectively involved in providing answers to health and safety problems in the workplace. Every presentation used hard examples and offered hard evidence of the wide-ranging business gains that have been made by companies that have taken the route of participatory leadership, in leading by visible example; actively demonstrating a commitment to health and safety; and actively engaging the workforce in health and safety matters.
The only real departure from this underlying message came with a series of propositions to be discussed and voted on at the tables, in the interactive session. The propositions all revolved around management accountability, and the results from the votes of the tables of assembled managers and middle-managers told a story that we, as union members and safety reps, should consider.
Three of the propositions
stand out as good examples of the point I’m going to make. They were:
1) that there are limits to the effect that directors can have on accidents
and ill-health. Ultimately it is up to those who create and are exposed to the
risks — i.e. the workers — to behave in such a way as to exercise care and avoid
risks.
2) that directors who lead successful companies are, by definition, good
leaders and the existing leadership skills they have are sufficient to ensure
they can lead effectively in the area of health and safety.
3) that health and safety performance is too remote from the boardroom to be
a legitimate factor in the remuneration of directors.
When the votes were transmitted on the Blackberrys and counted, the first proposition was defeated by 80%. The two other propositions were opposed by 100% of the votes.
This vote on the propositions was conducted before the presentations by John Oliver and David Graham, so they can’t be construed as “tests” of what the audience remembered hearing in the presentations. They were a relatively fair gauge of opinion around the tables.
What these results demonstrate is that we must we recognise that not all directors, managers and middle-managers are conducting themselves with that “them-and-us” attitude — that mind-set from the 1970s of mutual distrust and resistance to change, on both sides, that so damaged the British economy. The risk of perpetuating that attitude amongst ourselves, by refusing to recognise that management is moving into the 21st century, is that we may become the greatest obstacle to the changes we seek.
Had you been there, it would definitely have been a case of the speakers “preaching to the converted”. There was little at the conference that you didn’t already know or agree with, and you might have found yourself with a dose of numb-bum and an itch to hit the motorway early, if you hadn’t paid a hundred and fifty quid to be there!
As it was, I think the entrance fee served not so much to exclude Safety Reps, as it did to attract those people to whom the HSE really wanted to speak.
The “marketing”, as it were — the strategy and the psychology — behind the success of this conference required the feel of “exclusivity” and a price. I was fortunate to have been invited, and I sensed that those who attended were not only pleased with the event, but that the message that was being delivered was acknowledged and well-received. As Safety Reps, we could never have done it better ourselves, and we owe the HSE a round of applause for a job well done, even in our absence.