Page 73 - Advances In Productive, Safe, and Responsible Coal Mining

Productive, safe, and responsible operations are not possible without visible safety leadership 59

Fig. 4.1 Roadmap of four key behaviors that visible safety leaders demonstrate in influencing
others.
potential as well as their possible limitations in influencing others. Self-awareness
does not develop overnight and always requires thoughtful reflection. Such activities
are not easy to engage in, and they take deliberate time and attention to prove useful.
By committing the time necessary to learn and reflect on one’s own dimensions, vis-
ible safety leadership can begin to develop.
A second stop along the roadmap to develop visible safety leadership involves
transferring the same attention given to self-awareness in a deliberate attempt to
understand others’ personal strengths and possible challenges, then using this infor-
mation to build effective teams. This is one of the applied skills on which leaders
should focus in order to improve interpersonal interactions. While members of orga-
nizations often engage in work groups, these groups are not necessarily considered
effective teams. Teams are recognized when the product or outcome of the teamwork
is more significant than the sum of the inputs from individual members. One of the
most important things that visible safety leaders can do to build effective teams is
to understand the strengths and limitations of individual group members. With this
knowledge, leaders can assign work more appropriately and ensure that team mem-
bers understand their roles and feel valued and capable.
A third stop on the road map involves another applied leadership skill: effective
communications. Visible safety leaders understand that the terms “information”
and “communication,” while often used interchangeably, are different. Information
is the content of a message that is delivered through communicating, while commu-
nication is the process of getting information through to a recipient and verifying it has
been received. A key distinction is that at various points in the communication pro-
cess, a message (information) can be decoded (received communication) differently
by the recipient than was intended by the source (delivered communication). Another
distinction is that without proper feedback, the source or sender is unable to confirm
if the receiver’s decoding of the message aligned with how the sender encoded it.
One way that leaders can ensure effective communications is to deliver information
through appropriate channels, whether verbal or written, electronic or otherwise. Also,
considering that much human communication is processed nonverbally, it is important
that verbal messages and body language be clear and consistent. In addition, effective
leaders should avoid messages that are too lengthy, disorganized, or contain errors.
Oftentimes, leaders are served well by delivering information based on the insight that
less is more.