PS: You've been part of major safety culture initiatives at large companies such as GE, GM and New Jersey's PSE&G. What do you find most surprising at the start of the change process at huge organizations like these?
Steve:
People often don’t know what they’re getting into with real culture change. Change leaders tend to apply familiar models based on the implementation of other initiatives in their organizations. But such models don’t usually engage them in the kind of direct interaction among people at all levels that enables true culture transformation, as distinguished from programmatic system changes. There are also unanticipated demands on leaders—not so much for conventional resources (e.g., staff time, budget, training), but for putting more of their own skin in the game.
PS:Your expertise is in psychology. How much does the successful implementation of culture change hinge on understanding the psychological aspects of the different roles in a work environment?
Steve:
Respectful attunement to people's differing experiences, perspectives and beliefs counts far more than training in a particular academic discipline when it comes to mounting a successful culture change initiative. My educational background buttressed my development of the methodology, but what is to be prized in facilitating large-scale culture change is less academic preparation than the people skills it takes to work up, down and across an organizational community.
PS:Grassroots Safety Leadership is a methodology you developed for implementing large-scale culture change in manufacturing organizations. How did this methodology evolve? Was there one seed idea or incident that sparked it all?
Steve:
When I started work in safety culture almost 30 years ago, I realized that culture change was not a program but a journey and that it had to engage all members of the organizational com-munity. There's a difference between employee involvement-already a popular theme then and employee leadership. If cultures are shaped by leaders, then the only way frontline culture can change is if it is driven by the frontline leaders, the grassroots. That's not as simple to implement as it might sound. Genuinely empowering grassroots leaders is the product of a complex set of interventions.
PS:Can you identify the four key phases to the process of culture change and share a best practice for each?
Steve:
Phase one is enlisting and educating lead-ers. Crucial here is taking it slow and providing a broad grounding in organizational and safety culture to a critical mass of the joint leadership.
Phase two is assessing the culture. No assessment is complete until you've spoken directly with enough individuals across the workforce to ensure that you've captured the unquantifiables, or the culture's history, narratives and underlying assumptions.
