Page 69 - Advances In Productive, Safe, and Responsible Coal Mining

Productive, safe, and responsible operations are not possible without visible safety leadership 55

This scenario exemplifies symptoms of a safety culture that is more negative than
positive, or as explained by Carrillo, is infected with “Safety Culture Toxins” [3].
One such toxin, the fear of reprimand, is a double-edged sword. As in the example
here, it can prevent accountability and the acceptance of responsibility, both of which
are necessary leadership qualities. Secondly, fear of reprimand can be felt when
employees believe production is prioritized over safety. Carrillo further states:
“Often employees [assumed] that it was more acceptable…to take a safety shortcut
than to miss a deadline” [4]. When employees fear reprimand will result from being
accountable for safety lapses, but at the same time are compelled or pressured to take
shortcuts for fear of underperforming, leadership has failed to be consistent in promot-
ing safety as a cornerstone of the organization’s culture.

4.3 Promoting a safety culture

Because safety leadership is not limited to personnel with “safety” in their job titles and
is a requisite of good safety culture, the concept refers more to a shared state of mind
than a particular job duty. The collective responsibility for safe work makes everyone a
safety leader. Reason suggests that if all personnel shared the responsibility to ensure
safe work, fear of reprimand among the workforce, plus the perceived need to repri-
mand the workforce, would diminish because of greater self-accountability. At the
same time, because of the fundamental top-down social dynamic, management and
supervisors play a crucial role in ensuring that the shared responsibility for safety lead-
ership has momentum and positive direction to promote positive culture change.
Traditionally, front-line workforces tend to be culturally isolated from their man-
agement principally because, as described earlier, they may not interact frequently.
But research shows that front-line employees would prefer to see management visit
their worksites with regularity, because management’s visible presence demonstrates
attention to the work environment and its workers, and by extension, their safety. Cari-
llo reported that employees “said they cannot trust decisions made by managers who
have never been to the job site, haven’t demonstrated visible concern, competence or
interest in learning about the real challenges workers face. They saw visibility as a
symbol of the importance managers placed on safety” [5].
Although managers may claim time is too tight to spend any of it visiting the
worksite, simply being visible to the workforce pays dividends that could counterbal-
ance the number of issues that arise from miscommunications between groups that are
often isolated from each other. Visible formal leadership helps diminish the cultural
isolation between management and workers, and it engenders better communication.
When communication is strong, trust follows.
Another common characteristic of a culture or subculture is its collection of values,
and advocating shared values is an important responsibility of leaders and managers.
A common toxin of safety cultures is a perception that production may sometimes be
more important than safety, which, as described earlier, is a problem of communica-
tion. Dunlap explains that this occurs because safety is often viewed as a priority (the
first step in undertaking a task, so to speak), thanks to empty expressions like “Safety