Has this ever happened to you? After several grueling, multi-layered interviews, you land a job as the new OHS manager for a manufacturing plant. You’re happy, and rightly so. Congratulations!

So you now mentally move towards envisioning your initial approach. Based on what you learned throughout the hiring process, you know that the organization is facing some tough occupational health and safety-related challenges. After a thorough and comprehensive gap analysis to identify what is driving poor safety performance and defining a new vision for safety, it is time to craft the strategic safety improvement plan that you’ll use as a road map. Hence the question: Where should you start? What this means is: What’s the first action you should take in your strategic improvement plan?

But it’s critical for your future success to not wander down the “wrong roads”. That is, think again:

• if you think that you need to start by looking for a new safety program, or new safety rules.

• if you think you need to create new draconian safety rules or to start enforcing existing ones with a procrustean approach.

• if you think you need to start by developing a near-miss reporting, a behavior-based program, or launching an incentive program.

In any organizational setting, as in almost any human activity, leadership, like progress starts from within. So, your mindset is the starting point. The first move toward transforming a safety culture or achieving desired safety outcomes is developing an inward-examining mindset that it is up to the task. You cannot be physically ready to lead change and make progress if you are not mentally ready first. Author Sylvester McNutt III said it best when he declared, “Everything in life starts with your mindset first and your actions second. Your actions follow your thoughts, beliefs, and ideas. To make a shift, to free your energy: start with getting your mind right and then, take action”. Think of your strategic safety improvement plan as a process-based series of actions aimed at your desired safety outcome. If you think of those actions as a series of arrows, before directing these arrows externally, you first have to accurately aim them from within.

When the author joined the health and safety department of his former employer, he knew the company was facing difficult safety challenges but did not recognize their magnitude. To say that the employer was besieged with serious and deep trouble is an understatement. Within days of the author’s arrival at the manufacturing plant and attaining more knowledge of its operations, the signs of trouble were too great and too many to miss.

The 350-person manufacturing plant specialized in motor vehicle components. The round-the-clock plant operated at an anemic 49 percent efficiency (corporate management expected a minimum of 85 percent), had a total case incidence rate (TCIR) of 12.6 (3.5 points higher than the industry average), high worker turnover, high workers’ compensation costs, and a strained relationship with Michigan OSHA (MIOSHA). Several years of ineffective safety management had fostered a culture of mistrust and disrespect that was so deeply rooted in the plant’s DNA that it was pathological. Honest mistakes by workers had historically been viewed as crimes; performance reviews focused on productivity and did not value safety-related actions, and a lack of consistency existed between statements and actions by management.

The poor culture wasn’t just about safety, although safety seemed to be a focus of worker vitriol. Hourly workers voiced persistent criticism of virtually every aspect of the plant. No matter what plant management did, the leadership group could not shake the perception that they were indifferent to employees’ safety and welfare. In addition, several OSHA citations originating from employee complaints led to several MIOSHA visits and citations.

These persistent OSH-related problems were detrimental to productivity, quality, and employee morale. The CEO recognized the need for a culture change and figuratively sounded the panic alarm. And, in an attempt to reverse the trends above, the author was hired to transform the safety program.

To make headway towards this, during his first 2 years on the job, the author developed and implemented initiatives to turn things around, and the company began making progress toward achieving safety excellence, as defined in the following paragraphs. The company worked these initiatives into all phases of manufacturing and saw positive effects on efficiency, quality, housekeeping, and morale, as well as the bottom line.

The overall performance incrementally improved. In fact, two years after the implementation of the new safety strategy, the company’s safety performance jumped from the fourth quartile of its industry into the first quartile. The facility’s OSHA incidence rate dropped dramatically to 3.2, half of the then industry average. In 2 years, the company reduced its injury rate by 75%. Workers’ compensation costs dropped from $1.5 million to $300,000, an 80% reduction. The previously strained relationship with MIOSHA became a cooperative one with more openness, respect, and trust. Management and employees had a better understanding of each other’s viewpoints, and workers began showing initiative instead of silently following orders. They grew more comfortable engaging their minds before their hands.

What are some of the transportable lessons here? This relates to a critical question challenging many in our field:  How can an OSH professional help make such a dramatic turnaround in a unionized manufacturing plant whose safety performance nearly landed it on OSHA’s severe violator’s list? Several leadership tools, techniques, and tactics were developed and used by the author to reverse the negative trends at this facility. This article presents the first of them, the one that made everything else fall into place: Developing and leveraging “An Up To The Task Mindset,” a mindset that suits the challenges at hand and works as an ally, not an enemy.

What is a mindset?

The author was unable to find a common definition of “mindset.” Some define it as an inclination and set of beliefs, some as thoughts or attitudes, and others as a set of cognitive procedures. German professor of psychology, Peter Max Gollwitzer, defined mindset as, “the sum total of the activated cognitive procedures” (Gollwitzer, 2011, p. 528). In their book “Teaching the Entrepreneurial Mindset Across the University: An Integrative Approach,” authors Lisa Bosman and Stephanie Fernhaber defined mindset as, “[a] mental attitude or an inclination” (2021, p. 4). In “Getting Results the Agile Way: A Personal Results System for Work and Life,” Meier, J. D., & Kropp, M.  posited that, “A mindset is a mental attitude. It shapes our actions and our thoughts” (2010, p. 179). Meanwhile, Lisa Auster-Gussman and Alexander J. Rothman said, “A consistent pattern of thoughts about a specific topic can become a mindset, which represents an established set of beliefs that shape how people think and reason about this topic.” (Auster-Gussman & Rothman, 2018). To put it another way, a mindset is a way of thinking, a mental inclination or disposition, or a frame of mind. Your mindset is a set of beliefs and thoughts that shape how you make sense of the world and yourself. It influences how you think, feel, and behave in any given situation.   

There are several suggested steps in developing an “Up To The Task” Mindset:

1. Gap Analysis

To determine the underlying causes of these challenges, the plant’s history was put under a microscope and minutely studied. A true understanding of a culture can only come from understanding the history and circumstances under which the culture formed.  All the facets of the safety program, employees’ practices, and tribal beliefs were closely examined with a critical and unbiased eye. The assessment included walkthroughs, observations, document reviews, and interviews with labor and management, followed by focus group discussions, to identify and explore factors shaping attitudes and behaviors.

2. Safety Vision: Desired Future State

For any organization undergoing a major change in safety, a vision of the desired future state is of the utmost importance. You cannot define an organization’s strategic safety goals or start any strategic planning if you cannot envision where the company wants to be. You cannot map out directions if you do not have a destination in sight. Imagine asking your favorite navigation app to give you directions without stating your desired destination. And, as Roman stoic philosopher Seneca so brilliantly put it, “To the person who does not know where he wants to go, there’s no favorable wind.”

Crafting a company-wide safety vision should be a group effort with several stakeholders, like production managers, union representatives, safety committees, the Maintenance Department, and others, that is completed in a participatory way. After multiple brainstorming sessions and  some wordsmithing and written iterations the collaborative effort led to the following desired future state:

Through caring, coaching, collaboration, teaching, training, accountability and continuous improvement, within 5 years, we will create a workplace that’s uncluttered and organized, with visual controls, signs and postings in which every employee, every day feels A.C.H.I.E V.E.R.S (Appreciated; Cared for; Heard; Included; Engaged; Valued; Empowered; Respected; Safe).

After developing an understanding of the plant’s current state of safety and identifying gaps between the “as is” and the desired future state, the next logical step was to use the results of the assessment to develop a suitable road map to use as a guide, a model to turn the situation around.  Stated differently, it was used to craft an aggressive strategic safety improvement and action plan that aligned with the plant’s unique conditions, core values, and guiding principles.  Its implementation would redefine and set in motion long-term safety success.

3. Mindset realignment and recalibration

The first questions the author considered were, “Where should I start? What should be the first step in the strategic improvement and action plan?” As soon as the author started jotting down some ideas, he found himself mentally going back to a Dr. Martin Luther King speech that he was introduced to in junior high school. The speech, which was delivered to an assembly of junior high school students on October 26, 1967, is popularly known by the title, “WHAT’S YOUR LIFE’S BLUEPRINT?” In his speech, Dr. King first explained that a blueprint serves as a guide for erecting a building, and like a building, life cannot be well built without a strong blueprint.

The message the author takes from Dr. King is that improving life starts with a healthy, positive mental attitude or mindset. Success, like progress, starts from within before it manifests itself outwardly. Occupational health and safety are no different. Thomas Jefferson stated the need to begin with an inward focus this way: “Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; Nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.”

To create a high-functioning safety culture, actions such as adding more safety rules, enforcing vigorously existing rules, searching for a new safety program or policy, or purchasing a new piece of equipment, were not the right starting point. Instead, the circumstances demanded a completely new mode of operation. The number and magnitude of the challenges required a certain dose of creativity, situational readiness, and an ability to find coherence in many moving parts. The author realized he could not simply rely on the same game plan that had worked for him in the past, because conditions in this plant did not support the implementation of those remedies. The situation required a multifaceted mindset that views previous typical safety practices as hypotheses to be tested and adopting a starting point that would inspire stakeholders at all levels to give the safety strategy purpose and meaning. The approach would reassure employees that the plant’s poor past safety performance did not dictate its future or define the employees. The status quo was challenged as a condition to be faced, dealt with, turned around, and learned from.

The situation required a multifaceted mindset that views previous typical safety practices as hypotheses to be tested and adopting a starting point that would inspire stakeholders at all levels to give the safety strategy purpose and meaning. The approach would reassure employees that the plant’s poor past safety performance did not dictate its future or define the employees. The status quo was challenged as a condition to be faced, dealt with, turned around, and learned from.

The situation required engaging in a kind of mental jujitsu: embracing a challenging situation, flipping it on its head, turning it around, and dissecting and interpreting it in a new light to find new, refreshing ways to think and act. The internal language of safety had to become more positive and inclusive to create a sense of energy and group togetherness in employee achievements, as well as to convince employees to reexamine their beliefs, adopt a mindset of safety as an integral part of operations, and ingrain safety into every activity so that it cannot be ignored.

As Dyer (n.d.) says, “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” The author realized that the way we perceive and talk about problems determines how we approach them, as well as the tools and tactics we use to solve them. We can adopt a perspective and mindset that allows us to see things more clearly in a way that empowers and inspires us.

Conclusion

As an OHS professional, the first move toward transforming a safety culture is adopting a multi-faceted mindset that will help you successfully spearhead the plant’s efforts to achieve a new, vibrant, positive, outlook. This mindset should be rooted in humility, and the servant leadership principle, while blending hard-earned experience with the mental fluidity and vitality of a rookie. This mindset should also be grounded in gratitude and challenge past successful methods, techniques, and routines to ensure they are still relevant and have not outlived their usefulness. A mindset with the above-mentioned facets that blends harmoniously and is congruent with the desired safety outcomes, can become the most powerful weapon in an OHS professional’s mental arsenal.