Questioning Safety
This is a tale of — and lesson from — two stellar professionals who each achieve extraordinary results in safety by enlisting out-of-the-ordinary methods.
- By Robert Pater
- Nov 08, 2023
This is a tale of — and lesson from — two stellar professionals who each achieve extraordinary results in safety by enlisting out-of-the-ordinary methods. Both Mickey Hannum, MS, CSP, SGE, CPSA, CPEA, Vice President of Health and Safety for McWane Inc., and Craig Lewis, J.D., Harvard Law School (who, as my colleague, is one of the most effective safety change agents I know) realize the value of “questioning safety.” That is, utilizing the right questions at the right time to enhance safety knowledge, skills, motivation and commitment.
A Time-Tested Method
This overall approach isn’t new. After all, the great Socrates famously employed asking-rather-than-just-telling — written about in his student Plato’s “Dialogues” around 400 BCE — to simultaneously draw out others’ thoughts and concerns, surfacing pre-existing knowledge and the lack thereof.
This “Socratic method” of shared dialogue was further refined by the leadership luminary Peter Drucker, who high-graded a style of change agentry that was — and still is — alien to many leaders. Drucker commented, “My greatest strength is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.” And, “The important and difficult job is never to find the right answers. It is to find the right question.”
Applying this to safety, Mickey and Craig have each, in their own ways honed approaches of questioning they’ve found superior to lecturing for reducing defensiveness, engagingly energizing, and increasing others’ sense of being well-regarded (vs. treated as either an unknowledgeable “student” or, worse, an “idiot” or “dummy.”) That going back and forth with workers or other leaders can significantly elevate safer mindsets, which cascade towards considering-then-adopting higher-level skills and actions.
Even more, eliciting responses in safety can help step up culture. Referring to an after-incident meeting, Mickey Hannum wrote, “If we are disciplining/terminating people for not following procedures when they are injured without diving into understanding why they felt it was ok to do so, we are not learning. We are only disciplining because of consequence — ‘it went on the OSHA log.’ We need to be looking at behaviors and what drives them because the behavior exists before the consequential OSHA recordable. That made most of them in the room get more engaged in the conversation.”
This article originally appeared in the November/December 2023 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.