How can I help my senior team pay attention to issues like diversity, workplace safety, or employee engagement if it’s not a part of my firm’s Strategic Advantage? (This is part 2 of my last post on diversity)

I spent time this week at TI Automotive in Caro, Michigan as a part of a workplace safety study VitalSmarts is leading. TI Automotive’s safety record is the envy of the industry and I wanted to learn how they do it.

  First, a bit of background: TI Automotive isn’t in business to be safe. They’re in business to provide cutting-edge fuel, brake, and powertrain technologies. Their workplace safety record doesn’t provide them any kind of unique monopoly in their industry. It’s not their Strategic Advantage. It’s more of a Competitive Necessity. And yet, they maintain an obsessive focus on keeping their people safe. How and why do they maintain this focus on a “non-strategic” area?

What we learn from TI Automotive’s approach to safety can be applied to other Competitive Necessities like diversity and employee engagement—issues that are important, but may not seem strategic.

Here’s how Mike Wildfong, their general manager puts it, “I use safety as the leading edge of accountability. We need accountability to achieve the quality, productivity, and cost targets we set. But I start with safety. If I can’t achieve accountability around safety, then I can’t achieve accountability around anything.”

See what he’s doing? Mike has identified a small cluster of vital behaviors related to accountability (for more on vital behaviors, see Influencer, chapter 2). These same few vital behaviors drive quality, productivity, costs, and safety. And he’s using safety as the “leading edge” to introduce and promote these vital behaviors.
  
Back to Mike, “How is anyone going to object to safety? If you come to me and say you don’t want to be held accountable for keeping people safe, that’s a major tell. You’re signaling you don’t want to be held accountable, period. That you don’t want to be on the accountability bus.”

Mike is using safety as a test for buy-in. But his approach goes deeper than that. He builds an entire six-source influence model (see Influencer, pages 73 – 82) designed to promote the safety behaviors, the vital behaviors, related to accountability. And these vital behaviors not only drive safety, they drive quality, productivity, and cost control.

Why does Mike’s approach work? Here are a few of my thoughts…

• The vital behaviors that drive safety are virtually the same as those that drive quality, productivity, and costs. They include rounding to discover problems, speaking up when you have concerns, diagnosing causes, reaching decisions on solutions, and following up to ensure success. Mike teaches people to use quality tools like the “5 Why’s” and communication tools like Crucial Conversations to support these vital behaviors.
• When a senior leader cares about workplace safety, he or she is saying, “I care about you.” Mike is unashamedly passionate about safety. And this passion creates a relationship that is deeper than a simple boss-subordinate transaction. He genuinely cares about the people who work for him. Review chapter six in Influencer to see how important these deeper relationships are to your success.
• Workplace safety connects to Personal Motivation—see chapter four in Influencer. It provides a powerful motive for mastering the vital behaviors. For example, “keeping a co-worker safe” is far more inspiring than “improving shareholder equity.”

I don’t want to give the impression that Mike focuses exclusively on safety and counts on quality, productivity, and costs to come along on a free ride. Mike’s mantra is “Safety, Quality, Volume, Cost.” These are the priorities, and that is their order of importance. Everyone at TI Automotive is quick to recite these priorities and they use them to drive decisions.

Imagine your focus is diversity or employee engagement, not safety. Ask yourself whether your focus could be the “leading edge” for broader more strategic changes.