Guest Post by Bill Pomfret (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
Recently, I was talking to the Managing Director of a large recruiting firm for safety professionals in Toronto about the importance of communication skills.
It was very clear that safety leaders are just expected to be experts in the technical aspects of safety, but it’s the ability to communicate about safety that sets apart the great safety leaders from the mediocre.
There’s a growing demand for sophisticated safety professionals who can influence and engage on safety. And you know what that means – dollars. If you want to earn great money in safety, then you must improve your communication skills.
But what are communication skills? So many safety professionals think it’s all about writing in a way that would make their schoolteacher proud of them. This means being grammatically correct, no spelling mistakes and using lots of big words. After all, that’s how you get an “A” at school or in academia.
In fact, I had a safety professional on a Linkedin group debate with me about how good he was at communication by throwing the word “loquacious” into his defense. What he didn’t realise was that he was just confirming what I already knew (i.e.: he couldn’t influence his way out of a paper bag, oh, and no-one would want to work with an ego like that, so zero points for turning off the workplace).
But guess what? Focusing on the technical aspects of your writing makes you bore! Yes, boring. It means you’ve omitted the most important part of writing in business. And that is being able to coach, influence and engage.
You’re not going to influence anyone with a massive document that goes for 10 pages that could have been written in one. As Winston Churchill rightfully said: “This document, by its very length, defends itself from being read.”
To be a great leader, you must be a great communicator. And by that I don’t mean a big talker. Or in the words of my boring, outspoken social media friend, “loquacious“. In fact, that’s quite the opposite of what a good communicator needs to be on safety.
So, what makes a great safety communicator? One of the most important things is to consider is that words are extremely powerful. Words can be walls or they can be bridges. As a safety communicator, you need to be constantly building bridges. Constantly working on letting people know they can trust you.
This is so important because if you inadvertently use words the wrong way, people will turn off from you and your message. Your safety communication will be blocked from flowing throughout the organisation.
You will never accomplish an excellent safety culture if people don’t like or trust you. And the only way to build trust is to carefully choose your words and do what you say you will do. Remember, actions speak louder than words. Effective safety communication is the hallmark of a great business leader. Like so many underpinnings of leadership, our capacity to communicate can be developed through practice. With careful attention, executive communications can amplify and refine any leader’s message. And there are plenty of foundational practices that I have observed in my career as an executive safety coach.
In my consultancy practice, I often work alongside seasoned media trainers and experts in public speaking, and I have witnessed the impact that effective communications training can have on a business leader. Following are four insights garnered from my experience that illustrate how you can accelerate performance by tailoring safety communications initiatives to your team.
Client service is increasingly a differentiator that organizations are hoping to master, and it is a shift we are seeing across many different industries. Consistent executive communications are an important part of delivering excellent client service. Consequently, many of our trainings are conducted with client teams striving to position themselves as leading service providers in their fields. A common challenge they face is organizing communication efforts among teams with a wide range of experience levels spread across geographies, cultures, and generations.
Successful Safety leaders use communications charters to outline health & safety processes and techniques. Charters define and align those process communications and function as a playbook that might do everything from describing the process for organizing a conference call to outlining a social media plan. Establishing these communication protocols encourages practices that support a pro-active safety culture of exceptional client service, Interpersonal Communication Spurs Leadership Behavior
Effective communication involves not only polishing your presentation techniques but also exhibiting leadership through communication that motivates, influences, and engages others. To do so, safety professionals must continually develop interpersonal communication skills, enabling them to navigate conflict and change among diverse cultures and management styles.
A simple way that many organizations support safety executives’ development of interpersonal communication skills is by institutionalizing deliberate feedback processes. A practical place to start is organizing pre-and post-meeting debriefs where feedback is exchanged around individual and team performance. Debriefs are a simple way to ensure executives are exposed to a diverse set of perspectives. These interactions provide executives with opportunities to practice interpersonal skills, including listening, reading nonverbal cues, and establishing trust.
In today’s business environment, few job functions exist in a silo. An effective safety executive must be able to communicate and manage cross-functional teams and have the ability to align themselves with each team’s objectives and constituents quickly. Doing so requires sharp, clear messaging that translates well across disciplines and promotes team agility.
Effective safety practitioners can hone such messaging by collaborating during internal working sessions. Providing opportunities for ongoing exchange of sharpened messaging helps teams streamline workflow, build consistent narratives for internal and external use, and dynamically move toward objectives.
As you transition into leadership positions, it is important to continually refine your skills to elevate your brand as a leader who conveys authentic and compelling messages and spurs others to action. This takes ongoing practice to polish your delivery and develop a commanding presence.
For example, we all use different filler words while our brains are buffering, including the words “um” “uh” and “like.” We also have different habits when it comes to body language, eye contact, vocal pitch, and intonation. A coach can help you tweak these areas through role-play activities along with videotaped sessions to allow you to observe and alter behaviors.
Recruiters, HR specialists and executive coaches alike tell me that, increasingly, demonstrated agility and fluency with safety executive communications is a critical differentiator when evaluating high-performing executives and teams. And great executive communications programs with specific guidelines can positively impact every level of an enterprise. It’s a win at every level.
Bio:
Dr. Bill Pomfret of Safety Projects International Inc who has a training platform, said, “It’s important to clarify that deskless workers aren’t after any old training. Summoning teams to a white-walled room to digest endless slides no longer cuts it. Mobile learning is quickly becoming the most accessible way to get training out to those in the field or working remotely. For training to be a successful retention and recruitment tool, it needs to be an experience learner will enjoy and be in sync with today’s digital habits.”
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