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Discretionary Effort

By Josh Williams, Ph.D. and Madison Hanscom, Ph.D. Leaders are looking for direction to manage employees during COVID re-entry. Leaders need to juggle business realities, employees’ physical safety, and emerging mental health struggles that people are facing. Our leadership competency model is a useful framework to guide leadership behaviors as we begin getting back to work.  Five leadership competencies Safety leadership competencies represent the knowledge, skills, and abilities that contribute to increased discretionary effort and improved organizational safety culture. Anchored in years of research and experience, our team has identified five core competencies to optimize safety culture: Actively Care, Walk the Talk, Build/Live the Vision, Recognize Often/Foster

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. The world lost a great safety champion last week in former Treasury Secretary and Alcoa Chairman and CEO Paul O’Neill. O’Neill was a fierce advocate of employee safety and took big risks (and won!) going “all in” on injury prevention. He took the bold step of saying there were no budget constraints for safety at Alcoa, even if that meant lost revenue and an unhappy Board of Directors. O’Neill famously stated, “I was prepared to accept the consequences of spending whatever it took to become the safest company in the world”1. He told staff that there was no

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D.For years, organizations have used IQ tests as a selection component for hiring new leaders. Psychologists have studied leader emergence for centuries and found IQ to be near the top of the list for predictive traits. This should be no surprise. Strong analytical skills are needed to deal with a numerous, competing challenges at higher organizational levels. However, many believe EQ, or emotional intelligence, may be equally important. In fact, one study showed 71% of executives value EQ over IQ with their leaders (https://www.careerbuilder.ca). Emotional intelligence reflects our ability to recognize our own emotions, and those of others, and

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. In this time of trouble, leaders need to be more transparent than ever managing the complexities of business. This includes open dialogue about the state of the organization, current challenges, and plans moving forward. Employees are understandably anxious about their health, the well-being of loved ones, and the security of their own jobs. Failure to openly communicate how the organization is navigating these rough waters is a failure of leadership. In some cases, leaders need to simply acknowledge they don’t have all the answers for what’s ahead. They also need to demonstrate they’re doing everything they can

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by Martin Royal I was discussing with a friend last week about how, in the early stages of the COVID-19 crisis, her 1,000+ strong global architecture company established a crisis management team. They established this team to explore how they would respond to the unfolding crisis. The team evolved organically as different stakeholders were brought in to understand the impact the crisis might have on different parts of the business. The team began holding, and continues to hold, daily huddles to monitor progress, projects, and deadlines and assess any changes. It was a rapid response to the unfolding crisis that allowed

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By Eric Michrowski There's an old aphorism that is apocryphally attributed to Abraham Lincoln, which deals with the subject of cutting down a tree. 'Give me six hours to chop down a tree,' the saying goes, 'and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.' Various other versions of the saying exist, changing the times involved, but all with the same central thesis: use the majority of the time allotted to prepare for the task. Lincoln – or whomever the anonymous woodcutter at the root of this statement is – has oft been credited with an insightful observation about the necessity

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