The Measurable and Thus Repeatable Affects of Risk-Aware, Accountable Line Managers

Most companies still use lagging incident-based metrics to drive line management behavior. Often times this goes so far to include lagging metrics as part of pay incentives for line management and supervision. Such an approach typically perpetuates a focus on lagging metrics in monthly management performance reports and thus offers top leaders little insight into the effort taken in the field to proactively improve QHSE performance.

By balancing these lagging metrics with a carefully chosen short list of “actionable” leading metrics, line managers are afforded guidance to lead their organizational focus in the key areas that positively affect QHSE outcomes. And top leaders are afforded the measurements to hold them accountable to assure organizational effort in these key areas is continuously improving.

Through researching a vast data set of routine QHSE events (such as near misses, incident investigations, observations, audit findings, hazard reporting, action item management, etc.) and employee engagement in the processes underlying those events, it became apparent that field supervision / line management was the organizational role that most directly influenced QHSE outcome performance.

The areas that best predicted the QHSE outcome performance of an organization included measurements of (a) proactive event reporting, (b) the discipline and consistency in execution of QHSE process steps, (c) the timeliness in closure of important corrective / preventive actions, and finally (d) the responsiveness and accountability of supervisors and line managers. In each of these key areas, solid performance can be attributed to the tone set by leadership and the influential day-to-day behavior of field supervision and line management.

This session will review the measurable leading factors that have been found to be uniquely strong in the organizations with top-level QHSE lagging performance. We will discuss the affects of risk-aware, accountable leadership in each of these leading areas. And finally, we will demonstrate a process for implementing practical, “actionable” leading metrics in each key area to drive line manager / leadership behavior and ultimately improve QHSE performance outcomes.