Demonstrating Felt Leadership

Leadership is about constantly improving your, and therefore other people's perfor

Felt leadership is a concept made famous by the DuPont organisation in the field of safety.
Dupont are an exemplar company in safety performance and they believe that felt
leadership is an essential component for developing a positive safety culture. Felt
leadership is essentially about the leadership of people within organisations and can be
defined as "respect through action for the well-being of people"
There are essentially two components to felt leadership:
1. Visible leadership behaviours
2. Showing a concern for the well-being people.

Felt leadership can be demonstrated by anyone at any level of the organisation. But
managers, particularly senior managers have a greater responsibility to demonstrate visible
felt leadership.

DuPont suggest that to practice felt leadership leaders must FEEL and BELIEVE in what
their organisations value. And most importantly, they must ACT according to these values.
Dupont have proposed a 12-point checklist to help leaders put their beliefs into actions:

1. Set a good example.

2. Know the operation.
3. Anticipate risks.
4. Discuss hazards.
5. Be alert for unsafe conditions.
6. Follow up.
7. Inspect often; inspect intelligently.
8. Take effective corrective actions.
9. Investigate incidents (accidents).
10. Maintain discipline.
11. Know your employees.
12. Make safety part of your business.

But there are other ways in which felt leadership can be demonstrated.

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How do people view being shown consideration and care?

Recognition for most people is not praise but:

To be shown respect
o To be recognised for ones efforts is to be respected as a human being
in the organisation
o To be shown respect by verbal and non-verbal supervisory behaviour

To be provided with understanding, support and a two-way dialogue

o The employees need to understand how well they are doing in relation
to the resource limitations and system obstacles they must overcome in
their jobs
o Recognition is not about praise or awards; it is about awareness and
appreciation of the details of resourcefulness, innovation and
persistence it takes to get the job done

One important mechanisms for demonstrating felt leadership to people comes from a
meaningful performance dialogue with their supervisor. The performance dialogue provides
the basic building block for meeting an individuals basic needs and for improving individual
employee engagement.

The key elements of felt leadership' are:

1. Be present and available in the workplace
2. Initiate authentic give and take interactions with subordinates
3. Provide positive, negative and neutral feedback
4. Use this three step approach tell people what is expected of them, ask how
performance is progressing and provide feedback on performance
5. Focus on performance related discussions not simply work related discussions
6. Use open questions
7. Ask more than tell
8. Identify any roadblocks to performance and take action to remove them

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Research indicates that to be a good leader:
1. Managers need to interact authentically with their subordinates
2. Such interactions have to be about performance related issues
3. An important element of such interactions is about asking/enquiring (including
identifying roadblocks to performance and desired behaviours)

Employee engagement is a key component in building a positive safety culture and

improving safety performance. Engagement is both a mechanism itself for improving
performance and an enabler of other safety improvement mechanisms. Research suggests
that engaged employees expect six things from their leaders to ensure that their basic
needs are met. These are:
1. Focus me
2. Equip me
3. Know me
4. Help me see my value
5. Care about me
6. Help me grow

Felt leadership is about addressing each of these six areas during the regular 'give and
take' interactions that take place between leaders and their people.
Research indicates that one of the most important things to influence the level of employee
engagement is how much management particularly senior leaders demonstrate that
they care about their employees.
How do we demonstrate that we care about our people?

1. By ensuring that we deal effectively with poor performers

2. By ensuring that the right people are promoted
3. By ensuring that we do not allow fear and stress into the workplace e.g. By
allowing bullying and harassment in the workplace

One of the critical management systems for ensuring that these objectives are achieved are
the organisation's gate keeping processes - the selection, recruitment, performance
management and disciplinary procedures that get the right people into 'onto the bus' and
into the 'right seats' and get the wrong people 'off the bus'.

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Felt leadership is a critical part of an organisations Safety Management Systems. Safety
Management systems are structured and systematic means for ensuring that an
organisation or part of it is capable of achieving and maintaining high standards of health
and safety performance. Management systems usually include three elements:
organisational sustaining systems (e.g. 'gatekeeping' systems), safety enabling elements
(e.g. Hazard identification and risk assessment) and managing the working interface (e.g.
Specific workplace precautions and risk control such as machine guarding and safe working
systems). Felt leadership is about 'living' the safety management systems through active
support and participation.

For Dupont the leadership elements include strong management commitment, safety
policies and principles, challenging goals and plans and high performance standards.
Organisational or structural elements include implementation of safety performance
management techniques and use progressive motivation. Operational elements include
effective communications, continuous training and meaningful auditing and re-evaluation
processes.

Felt leadership is about what you do not what you say. Research indicates there are three
underlying ways in which leadership behaviour is demonstrated:

- A focus on action: initiating activities, driving for results, getting things done
by personal effort

- A focus on people: showing concern for people, supporting them in their

development, being sensitive to their needs and relationships

- A focus on systems: coordination of activities, integration of outputs, 'living'

the safety systems

Therefore felt Leadership behaviours should be focused on action, systems and people;
they are not interdependent so can be developed independently.

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Felt leadership is an important part of developing a positive safety culture because people
tend to do what their leaders systematically pay attention to. The key word is systematic,
whatever you choose to do to demonstrate your concern for your people's well-being and
safety - participating in incident reviews, undertaking plant audits - you need to do it
systematically, with rigour, consistency and discipline. Much is talked about the importance
of management commitment is improving performance and building culture - making safety
'first amongst equals, providing resources, building safety into the organisation. But
management commitment is also about demonstrating committing behaviours, binding of
the leader to behavioural acts. Some behaviours are more binding than others. Research
suggests that the degree of commitment depends on the extent to which a persons
behaviours are binding. There are four characteristics of behavioural acts that make them
binding:

1. They are clear and unequivocal

2. They are irrevocable and cannot be taken back
3. They are freely chosen ( e.g. not mandated or imposed)
4. They are demonstrated in public for anyone to see

Commitment is important because commitment to one behaviour has implications for other
subsequent behaviours. People will tend to behave in ways that are consistent with the
implications of their past behaviours. The effect of commitment is to make an act less
changeable and more predictable. The implications of a behaviour are not given but are
invested into a situation by a persons own beliefs or by the beliefs and expectations of
others. So implications can flexibly link one behaviour to other behaviours.

So felt leadership is a potentially powerful mechanism for social control. By committing one
set of behaviours with salient implications attached to them, you insure you will do other
behaviours that are expected by your people. Choice of behaviour is not enough, the choice
itself must be committing and the leader must be bound to the choice.

If leaders, take actions that are PUBLIC, IRREVOCABLE and CHOSEN, they tend to be
held responsible for those actions by themselves and others. Once they are held
responsible for the acts, people then expect that the leaders who did those acts must have
done them for good reasons. If the reasons are SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE and reassure the

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observers that the leader is a credible, competent and RATIONAL person, then the reasons
are likely to persist and guide future choices. Thus values are born and changed. When it
becomes hard to disown an action, it is often easier to accept the values and assumptions
that are seen to support it. It is this sense in which culture is something an organisation has
and something it can change.

Ultimately felt leadership is about commitment - demonstrating to your people what you
stand for with respect to safety. It is often repeated truism that actions speak louder than
words but we there are many references to the power of this effect in organisational
change. Like quality and excellence, commitment is a word that enters our conversations
every day. But the true strength of the word is the combination of the elements of both
vision creation and focus on action that it contains. In describing the essence of the
commitment of a leader to a vision J.F.T. Bugental wrote, Commitment is, in a paraphrase,
the statement, "this I am; this I believe; this I do It is the embodiment of the vision, the
doing of leadership that personifies commitment giving it life and making it possible for that
vision to become a reality

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