No One Chooses to Fall Flat

I can point to dozens of powerful lessons I learned in the decade and a half I had direct involvement in behavior-based safety. While the initiative was focused on identifying and decreasing the risks the workforce was exposed to, it provided a hands-on look at why people do what they do. I’d put that real world experience up against any kind of degree in psychology all day long! 

While it’s not the lesson I reference most often, recognizing that no one gets out of bed on any given day hoping to have an accident. I’m guessing you just rolled your eyes (at least a little bit) as you considered that statement. Duh, Wes, of course no one would do that… Yet, every single day, we all do things that put us at risk of injury - sometimes death! My initial training in the behavior-based safety concept in 1998 taught me not only how to recognize the actions someone does that can expose them to injury, but how to ask open-ended questions to identify why they chose (yes, chose) to do something that could get them hurt.

The responses ranged from “I didn’t realize I was so close to being injured” or “That’s the only way the job can be done” to “I have to do it that way to make my numbers.” As you likely imagine, we heard plenty of other replies, too; those were just some of the most common. In each case, though, the reason for choosing the behavior did nothing to prevent an injury. To compound that, the risks someone was exposed to typically became more significant over time. Each time they performed an at-risk behavior without being injured served to reinforce it as an acceptable way of doing the job. And with that reinforcement came more confidence for assuming even higher levels of risk. Unfortunately, the worst workplace injuries I ever dealt with were ones where someone had taken (often multiple) risks in doing their job for years without the slightest issue.

During my time in human resources, dealing with some of the most miserable scenarios you can imagine in the workplace, I had to reflect on this often. Just like no one wakes up hoping to get hurt at some point in their day, people rarely want to do a poor job or be seen as being a bad person. Without revisiting that thought, at least occasionally, having multiple disciplinary action conversations each day would leave me a worldview that was more than a little bit jaded…

With that in mind, let’s consider how strong values with clear definitions could fall flat. If Enron employees were exposed to the detailed values I shared before, even occasionally, I can’t picture many consciously choosing to violate them. I’d go so far as to bet that just the words alone, without the concise definitions detailing what each meant for the organization, gave most of them a strong reference for how they should do business. But, like taking incrementally more risks for being injured, I can understand how the pressures to achieve organizational targets could lead to pushing the boundaries of any one of those values; a little at first, but more and more over time as the results met those targets without the behavior that produced those results being called into question. I’d guess situations where someone wildly violated any specific value were few and far between. But with even the slightest bit of ambiguity around exactly how the value applied to a specific scenario allowed the individual involved to form their own definition that justified why it was necessary and only slightly pushed the boundary those values provided.

When results get more attention than the behaviors that led to those results, you can bet those behaviors will get repeated! In far too many cases, business owners and high level executives get caught in the urgency of the daily fires burning their backside and drift away from ensuring the message they’re sharing with their teams, the managers they count on to run their businesses, includes clear definitions for their organizational values. And that opens the door to the slippery slope that leads to a fall - so we’ll pick up there soon!