Hi all, a bit of a woolly question here, apologies if I'm unclear.

I think we could do a better job of the way we handle some issues on site. I'm thinking of the kinds of things which are usually dealt with face to face (and which I probably never hear about unless things go pear-shaped).

In the old days this would have been one person giving someone else a swift boot up the rear, and to be honest there's probably still a verbal equivalent going on. Has anyone done any successful training or other development that's helped managers improve the quality of the conversations they have?

We have some ideas for new tools to help site managers improve H&S issues, but it strikes me that we need to make sure the right approach is taken first.

Thanks, sadlass, good advice. I'm actually reading Tim Marsh's Talking Safety right now, having spotted it on my colleague's shelf just after I posted this. Nicked it while she's on holiday.

In my ideal world I'd like to bring in someone to run a 1-day course for site managers, plus train maybe 4-6 people to support with follow-up, and bring the external back in for a day six months later, but it's such an important area to get right it hugely depends on the trainer. I'll check out Michael Emery (not heard of him).

Thanks again.

About 8 years after I joined HSE as an inspector in the late 1970s I went on a 4 or 5 day "Influencing Skills" internal training course for inspectors. It was quite interesting and enjoyable and covered aspects like negotiating and persuasion with role play scenarios, etc. I think most of us who were on the course thought it ought to be offered to newer inspectors. However, it seemed to reaffirm my preferred inspection style about matters like inadequately guarded machinery, i.e. rather than directly say "that's not guarded properly", it was usually more effective to act as a catalyst and ask the employer's representative (rep) accompanying me if he thought the machine involved was effectively guarded. I would also ask/discuss about likelihood of harm occurring and hint at the associated adverse consequences - e.g. compensation claim, loss of production, reduction in workforce morale, adverse publicity as well as HSE enforcement action. Ultimately the conversation would turn/be turned to the rep identifying and agreeing what should be done to improve the guarding to an appropriate standard. In such situations, there was probably more likelihood of the rep taking the necessary action than simply being told what to do by an inspector.

Goodness knows what this style of interaction is called. I've still got my folder of papers from the course but it's safely in a box somewhere in my loft and I'm currently too busy with other matters to bother finding it. Also, it's possible that the course was a fairly new one. Can any other former/current HSE inspectors who use this forum advise if they ever attended such a course and approximately when?

More pertinently, is there scope for IOSH and/or other organisations to provide "Influencing Skills" type courses - or do they already exist under different names or as part of larger longer courses?

Whilte Alex Haslam (and his colleagues, Steve Reciher and Michael Platow) offer a very interesting application of the Social Identity Approach to leadership, the subtitle of their book 'Identity, Influence and Power' reflect its concern with taking the context of behaviour into account in persuading people wot work cohesively by influencing how they categorise themselves and others as 'in' or 'out' of a group. The actually make no mention whatsoever of 'safety' or 'conversation' and the words are not even mentioned in the index. Although the volume of research on the social identity approach has grown exponentially in recent decades, the only publication to relate it explicitly to safety was a paper at the 2014 conference of the BPS Division of Occupational Psychology in which the author presented data which illustrated how the EHS Manager systematically sabotaged conversations with Operations and Production managers to the stage that they literally replied 'Your safety leadership isn't worth laughing at!'. As avoidable injuries, which the parent company costed at £8K each, repeatedly occurred, the EHS Manager continued to avoid conversations face to face with managers and the parent company eventually sacked senior managers and sold the company.

The original question was a little 'woolly' as the questioner himself indicated. The safety and health profession has neither given attention to tough questions of social identity and categorisation discussed by Haslam and his colleagues nor to the even more radical discipline of conversational analysis, CA. This was started by Howard Sacks at UCLA in 1965 and is well explained in 'Discourse and Identity', B Benwell and E Stoke, Edinburgh University Press, 2006. They go far, far beyond the questions begged by Tim Marsh in analysing how the listeners to questions he raises actually respond, or don't. For CA conners turn-taking in conversation which is analysed as itself a form of action as well as interaction. Until safety/health professionals can apply such analysis to conversations about business strategy and operations they oversee, how can they be well equipped to influence and negotiate resourcefully?

quote=KieranD] was a paper at the 2014 conference of the BPS Division of Occupational Psychology in which the author presented data which illustrated how the EHS Manager systematically sabotaged conversations with Operations and Production managers to the stage that they literally replied 'Your safety leadership isn't worth laughing at!'. As avoidable injuries, which the parent company costed at £8K each, repeatedly occurred, the EHS Manager continued to avoid conversations face to face with managers and the parent company eventually sacked senior managers and sold the company.

quote=KieranD]Good, fair and far-reaching questions, Chris

As reported the critical problems lay in the behaviour of the EHS Manager, and with the General Manager and the HR Manager.

He was reported as sabotaging conversations by repeatedly failing to answer questions put to him by the Production and Ops Managers who questioned his priorities and the excessive emphasis he placed on what they perceived as relatively minor in-house regulations (e.g. lines remarking the workspace) of operatives, and a meaningless poster in the most prominent space inhale factors (the intention of ELIMINATING all hazards) along with gobbledegook records of committee meetings on the Safety/Health noticeboard, which the managers (including General Manager) indicated they habitually ignored. When hosting a meeting with managers for a safety consultant, unknown to most of the managers, the EHS Manager left it to the consultant to introduce him/herself, although he/she was unknown to most of the managers present.

This is far, far below the standards of 'talking safety' advocated by Tim Marsh as well as voluminous research on safety leadership.

Such an example is not necessarily typical but this EHS Manager is a CMIOSH and was reported to be industrious but unwilling and unable to have a meeting with managers to discuss the recurrent conflict with them, after taking the consultant for a 3 hour meeting (for which the consultant was not paid) to explore how to resolve his recurrent disputes.

His 'kick up the rear - blame and ignore' behaviour amounted to a form of sabotage, surely?