If you asked your internal customers “how good is my HSSE organization,” what would they tell you?
If you are courageous enough to ask the question, the responses typically look like something like this:
“Your team is really great. They work hard. They know their stuff and they are stretched too thin. I’d really like them to better understand my business and help me see around the corner. You know, help me with my journey and be an advisor. We have a lot of change in our organization, and I need them to be a partner with me. Engaging my team and the front line. I could really use their help in building employee engagement and ownership around safety. They need to build capability and not be just the subject matter expert.”
What’s likely missing from your HSSE organization isn’t determination, technical skills nor the desire to do the right thing. It’s likely that they are missing a unique set of skills. These skills are typically:
Coaching and capability development – This entails moving your organization from ‘telling” what needs to be done to “influencing” others to achieve the desired outcomes.
Engagement skills – This requires your team to engage and involve leaders and employees at a different level. It means less prescriptive approaches and more discussion on the best ways to reduce operational risks. In many cases, this means engaging entire groups of people to generate their own solutions.
Change management skills – This is about the Identification of stakeholders and understanding where they ‘are.’ Once you know who they are and where they ‘stand,’ then the challenge is how to move them to where they need. It’s also about knowing how much effort needs to be allocated and what approaches should be taken.
Knowing the business – This is about more than “understanding” the business. It’s about understanding the costs and return on investment for HSSE efforts. It’s about helping leaders to make resource allocations based upon risk and anticipated risk reductions. It’s about describing risk tolerance and making difficult decisions on how to allocate CapEx and OpEx.
If you’ve had a success story building these skills in your HSSE team, I’d love to know more. if you’d like to know more about my approach to building these skills, send me a note… I’d love to have the conversation!
