Green Flags of Leadership
by Robin Evans
LSS practitioners serve as leaders on their project teams. Some new GBs and BBs have limited experience in a leadership role. For many practitioners, leading teams can be one of their biggest challenges. In this month’s blog TMAC Events Coordinator, Robin Evans, shares her insights on effective leadership gleaned from her father who worked to improve safety at his company.
I grew up with an engineer Dad. Coming from a low-income, rural family in the Deep South, he worked his way through college by “co-opping,” as Dad would say, with “the power company.” Work one quarter, school one quarter, and at the end of five years, he graduated with a degree in one hand and a job offer in the other. He retired with the same company 44 years later.
The cake for his retirement party read, “Our Target Zero Hero.” The room filled up with co-workers, former employees, and bosses he’d had over the decades. All of them had a story to tell about the Father of Target Zero.
How he became the Father of Target Zero has a lot to teach us about Green Flags of Leadership.
As a young crew supervisor, Dad traveled around his region meeting with substation workers. He heard the stories of their injuries, sat in hospitals after accidents, called to check on them during their recovery, and as engineers tend to do, he started asking questions. Was there a program for safety? What about recognition when safety protocols were met? Was anyone doing anything to make sure these crew members were going home whole every night?
He quickly found out there was not. And being a man who believed most anything was fixable with the right tools and calculations (there’s that engineer coming out), he set out to start something. With a Zero candy bar as the reward (and I’m not kidding, it was literally a Zero candy bar), he started offering the tiniest of recognition to his crews who went a month without a safety incident. From there, the program grew and eventually, Target Zero was adopted company wide.
Seems crazy in the safety conscious world in which we operate now, but back then there weren’t a whole lot of safety rules in place. And the ones that were in place were not monitored. But it was the 80’s. Turn and ask your favorite Gen Xer about being a latch-key kid and how often they were dropped off at the mall for the day with ten dollars. Safety wasn’t as much of the thing.
What was true then and now are our basic needs. We all want to arrive to work healthy and leave the same way. While at work we want to feel challenged, appreciated, and a part of a healthy team.
In this post-pandemic workforce, we see evidence many employees don’t feel their basic needs are being met. They wave their Red Flags to leaders saying, hey, we’re not happy. From Quiet Quitting to The Great Resignation and Office Peacocking (also, not kidding, it’s a thing), as leaders, you are bombarded with how not to lead and what employees do not want.
How can we turn those Red Flags to Green? How can we create a work environment where team members can focus on solving real business problems? More basically, how do we lead to make sure our team members leave each day feeling healthy, challenged, and appreciated?
(Our own Dr. Alberto Yanez wrote a blog on the Red Flags of LSS. He wrote two actually! Read them here and here. I’ll wait.)
(See? Excellent, right?)
Looking back at the lessons Dad taught me, here are three Green Flags of Leadership.
Green Flag Leaders Empathize.
Today’s workers are as complex now as they were when New Coke tried to be a thing. They are employees, yes. But they are also parents, caregivers, partners, and volunteers with full, complete lives outside of their careers.
Empathy, however, is an emotion. A warm-fuzzy feeling of yeah, me too. It’s our action because of that emotion that’s the Green Flag. We start by listening.
Not just tacit listening, but active listening.
As Stephen Covey famously said in 7 Habits of Highly Effective Leaders, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
Active listening takes energy. Listening to learn, to understand, and not listening to defend or respond. It’s a skill, developed through discipline and practice. Focus not simply on the words spoken, but also the speaker’s body language, tone, and facial expressions. Even the outfit they chose to wear communicates. Active listening considers the entirety of communication, both verbal and non-verbal.
Dad knew he didn’t have to experience the same injuries and uncertainties of recovery his team did to understand their need to return home safely. But he did have to understand their challenges and why accidents happened. That required active listening.
Taking notes, looking at them, shutting down all outside distractions, and offering understanding without judgement creates empathy and builds trust, giving you a relational foundation on which your employees can succeed.
Green Flag Leaders Pursue Clarity.
Honestly, I can’t imagine how Dad’s first conversations with his bosses must have gone. How do you ask people if they care about employee safety (yes, of course, we do) and then ask what they’re doing to ensure it (crickets)?
Humans are messy. Conversations about metrics, goals, and vision can be smothered by a long list of unmet expectations, unresolved conflicts, and basic human emotions. Green Flag Leaders cut through the mess and pursue clarity, working to set attainable goals.
Brene’ Brown quotes in Dare to Lead, “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” And we can only be clear when we sit down to have conversations. To be fair, it’s not easy and it’s uncomfortable but that’s not a “Get Out of Leader Jail Free” card. You must persevere to pursue clarity.
Dr. Brown also says, “Not getting clear with a colleague about your expectations because it feels too hard yet holding them accountable or blaming them for not delivering is unkind.”
Clarity is kindness.
If your team isn’t clear on the goals and vision, you’ll know through your active listening. Conversations will be messy and you’ll be challenged.
This is where potential Red Flags change to Green. You stay in that mess, participate in the uncomfortable, and accept feedback. Don’t get defensive. Thank them. Set up a time to circle back. Spend time processing and then respond. You’re a messy human too.
Green Flag leaders appreciate the clarity these moments bring to their role. They understand building trust requires empathy, active listening, time, and allowing for the unsaid to be spoken. They pursue clarity because they want to lead with kindness.
Green Flag Leaders Applaud Accomplishments.
Dad started with a candy bar. He said people need their contributions to be acknowledged. They want to know they matter to their team, supervisors, and the company. A candy bar was a humble beginning; a simple, inexpensive way to applaud good work he and the crew saw in each other.
Today, companies are using a variety of creative ways to recognize and reward their teams. One company with a facility in our area, Alexandria Industries, has “Shine Bright: A Continuous Improvement Program” where they give their employees cash bonuses based on the savings generated by an idea. Plus, they get a bright yellow sign next to their workstation bragging about their idea and the savings.
In their book The Leadership Challenge, James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner say this about applauding accomplishments, “… recognition is about acknowledging good results and reinforcing positive performance.” For leaders, they note, “Your real job is to get results in a way that makes your organization a great place to work – a place where people enjoy coming to work instead of just taking orders and hitting this month’s numbers.”
The spectrum of applause from an “Atta boy” to a candy bar to cash bonuses is wide and varied. Applause can be public or private, written or actual applause out loud. The goal is to create “a great place to work.” You know your team. You’ve actively listened to them. You’ve pursued clarity.
All that remains is the celebration of what you have accomplished together.
What are some Green Flags you would add to this list? What Leadership Qualities are your employees looking for these days? We’d love to hear from you!
Interested in starting your own Target Zero program? TMAC’s Nate Sisler is available to perform a Safety Walk at your facility. You can reach out to him, nate.sisler@tmac.org, to schedule a visit.
