Choosing to lead on health, safety and wellbeing is not only the right thing to do, from a people perspective, but also the strategic thing to do, says Karen J Hewitt
If there were ever a crisis more requiring of great leadership, it’s the Covid-19 pandemic. And if there were ever a topic more fundamental to business, it’s keeping people healthy, safe and well. Arguably, the Covid-19 pandemic has ignited the need for both great leadership and a focus on health, safety and wellbeing, and nothing short of excellence in both areas will be acceptable to employees, post-pandemic. The bar has been set.
Recognise the new motivational drivers
Being excellent at health, safety and wellbeing, and at leadership, are also two areas which can boost employee engagement, to levels never seen pre-pandemic. If we look at Maslow’s hierarchy of motivational needs model, health, safety and wellbeing as a function (represented by physiological and safety needs in the model) sits near the bottom of the hierarchy. And that’s where it was in most people’s priorities, near the bottom, because it was something we all took for granted – unless we worked in that discipline.
Now, however, it has shot into focus for every single one of us, eclipsing other areas higher up in Maslow’s model, like self-actualisation, because all of us have faced a direct threat to our own health and that of our families and co-workers. Forced to stay away from others for long periods of time, we may also have converged round Maslow’s need for ‘belonging’, in the middle of the model. Suddenly, we found a moment in time where humans found themselves motivationally on the same level in Maslow’s hierarchy.
Business leaders across the globe have had three realisations:
- Without our health and safety, our ability to work is under threat.
- The fallout of a global pandemic has brought the bubbling issue of worker wellbeing well and truly to the surface.
- Our people are our most important asset, our jewel in the crown, and we need to work proactively to protect it.
Armed with this knowledge, what can managers, and leaders, do with it?
Know when to manage
When we are busy, and under pressure from urgent deadlines, or when in a crisis situation, we need to use all management tools at our disposal. From objectives, to strategies, to processes, rules and clear and direct communication, we just need our teams to do what is expected of them, and quickly. Being more transactional in our approach in this context will get us fast results, at least in the short-term. Our people will comply, because they have to, and whether they want to or not. We may even decide to give them a nudge – carrot and stick style – rewarding our people for going the extra mile in extraordinary circumstances or imposing sanctions for those who don’t.
Know when to lead
Transactional leadership, and carrots and sticks, are tools to be used in urgent and critical situations, or in situations where tasks follow a simple and well-defined process. Daniel Pink discusses this and more in his excellent book Drive (2010). Where more creativity, innovation or thinking outside the box is required, we need our people to give a bit more, and to do this, they need to want to do it – to be motivated to get involved. They need to believe in the cause and be prepared to put aside their own personal agendas for it and go that extra mile.
This is also ‘transformational leadership’ in action, a term first coined by James McGregor Burns in 1978 and describes how through its use as a leadership style, individuals within a team or an organisation raise each other to higher levels of performance. And this happens no matter the size of the ambition or the challenges in achieving it.
Find a reason to lead
Leadership comes easier when you have a topic to lead on, and feel passionate about it, like health, safety and wellbeing, for example. All you need to do then is talk from this position of belief. Tell people what kind of world you want to live in, what it might look like, and what you believe in support of it. Simon Sinek talks about this in his much-acclaimed book Start with Why (2011) and about the kind of cause that keeps people motivated for the long-term in his later book The Infinite Game (2019).
Once you understand your own ‘Why’ and know how to describe what you believe in and how you want to make the world better through your work, don’t keep it to yourself – shout it from the rooftops. When you do, something amazing will happen. All those who believe in the same thing, who want the same thing as you, will follow you – in the thousands. Now you have a genuine and heartfelt reason to lead.
Find a challenge to lead
All you need now, then, is a challenge to lead. ‘Why does it need to be a challenge?’ you’re thinking. ‘Why can’t life be easy sometimes?’ I know what you mean, but ‘easy’ is achieved simply by staying in our comfort zones, and challenge is what happens outside of our comfort zones. Challenge is when the real learning occurs, and when we learn from others, and about ourselves, we are inspired. Remember when JFK gave his famous ‘man on the moon’ speech, he said something like: ‘We choose to go to the moon, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.’
Leading health, safety and wellbeing is hard, mainly because it involves imposing rules to protect people, and others don’t always see the value in those rules until it is too late. It is also hard because to keep people safe always, people need to be prepared to speak out on the ground, and organisational barriers – perceived or real – often get in the way. It takes real psychological safety for people to feel comfortable sticking their heads above the parapet on thorny issues of health, safety and wellbeing.
As I always say: ‘If you can lead health, safety and wellbeing, you can lead anything.’ What better reason to choose this topic as your reason to lead?
Use leadership to turbocharge engagement
The benefits to leading with health, safety and wellbeing can be numerous and unexpected. The very challenges that face those of us passionate and courageous enough to lead with health, safety and wellbeing – resistance and fear of speaking up – are the things that inevitably hone our people skills. What happens then is twofold. Firstly, the leadership skills we are forced to develop to lead on the ‘hard nut to crack’ that is health, safety and wellbeing, are the same leadership skills that will win us promotions and accolades on other business issues. And the same engagement produced among teams when they are able to work together to solve health, safety and wellbeing issues, is the same engagement that will bubble over into the enthusiastic problem solving and status quo challenging needed for success in other business areas.
Choose to lead on health, safety and wellbeing
Choosing to lead then on health, safety and wellbeing is not only the right thing to do, from a people perspective, but also the strategic thing to do. As a manager or leader you have numerous items on your plate – from employee engagement to health, safety and wellbeing, to quality to diversity, equity and inclusion. Talented as you are, you can’t possibly keep all these huge plates spinning in the air at one time. Neither are you allowed to drop any of them. It makes more sense, then, to focus on the one thing that drives all of these things – a focus on people. Health, safety and wellbeing is the way you can do it. It affects all of, and we all care about it. And if there is one thing the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us – from a health, safety and wellbeing standpoint, we are all equal. Human suffering transcends any hierarchical, cultural or geographical barrier, and only strong, focused, passionate and transformational leadership, will bring us through it.
Karen J Hewitt has spent the past decade creating leadership movements for health, safety and wellbeing that save lives and boost business performance.
Fluent in five languages, Karen uses transformational leadership, coaching and cross-cultural approaches to inspire employees and challenge the paradigms on leadership, health, safety and wellbeing, and employee engagement.
Her first book, Employee Confidence: The New Rules of Engagement, was a finalist in the leadership category of the Business Book Awards, 2019. Her second, People Power: Transform your Business in the Era of Safety and Wellbeing, is out now.
