Efficacy and Safety Leadership

 Making a safer workplace happen – the importance of efficacy

You have a clear vision for what a safer, healthier workplace, have mapped out the culture that will underpin the vision and devised a strategy to bring it all into reality and yet you detect if not quite an unwillingness to bring about the plan, an inertia that seems to be holding us back. You personally are of the firm belief that we can do this and intellectually others seem agree it is worthwhile but you suspect they don’t really think it is doable. Where you see mere hick ups along the pathway others see brick walls. You can’t quite put your finger on the cause of the malaise and yet it is there. It could be you need to develop individual, collective and organisational efficacy to be able to successfully execute the vision.

Efficacy – I first heard the word when Dr. Albert Bandura presented at our annual conference some twenty years ago. Efficacy, he explained was our belief in our ability to bring about or cause that which we want to have happen and that we won’t let ourselves want what we don’t think we can cause or bring about. People (and teams) with efficacy Bandura explained, based on twenty years of research around human agency, “…think and act differently than those who lack efficacy.” Bandura went on to say if you think you can bring about that which you desire the chances of success are pretty good but if lack efficacy the chances of failure are equally good.

The easiest way to assess where your and our collective efficacy is right now (and it be measured via a questionnaire) is to pose the question, “Is the challenge or safety goal we are going after bigger than us or are we bigger than it?” If you decide that the challenge is too big then you will be intimidated and exhibit withdrawing behaviour. If we decide that we are bigger than it then we will come out over the top of the challenge.

For example, a team’s estimation of their collective efficacy affects:

• The type of future they seek to achieve
• The plans and strategies they construct
• How much effort they put into their endeavours
• The strength of their commitment
• Their staying power

Our efficacy determines how long we will try, how many setbacks we will suffer and how quickly we bounce back. There is a direct correlation between the size of the goals we set and our level of efficacy. Further, people and teams with high efficacy display a very low vulnerability to stress and when they do experience a defeat they bounce back with increased energy and try a new tact. Individuals with low efficacy have low energy levels, are quick to be disillusioned by the obstacles, prefer not to set big goals because they suspect they won’t realise them anyway and verbalise that lack of belief with statements such as, “We should never have gone after such a big goal in the first place.” (There is also organisational efficacy – you cannot execute a strategy that you don’t think we can bring about).
Also “…individuals with low efficacy tend to believe things are tougher than they really are, and this creates stress and a narrow vision on how to best go about solving the problem.” (Bandura).

Individuals with high efficacy on the other hand, are more motivated, accountable, resilient, better under pressure, possess a strong locus of control and ‘can do’ attitude – precisely the attributes we need to bring about the safer workplace. High efficacy can also create the ‘winning streak‘ feeling.

Efficacious people are likely to do something about what they are seeing because they have a ‘can do’ attitude and believe that they can alter their circumstances and environment, for example, if they are feeling unbalanced or things are a bit negative they think they can do something about it whereas those with low efficacy accept the status quo with ,”It is what it is,” and play the victim card to themselves with internal dialogue such as, ”What can you do?”

As an aside people with efficacy are more likely to stick with their healthier behaviour they have adopted essentially because they think they can whereas people with low efficacy are likely to start but know that sticking to the healthier regime is a bridge too far for them and is not sustainable.

So, it is in everyone’s interest to develop their own efficacy and our collective efficacy. There are a number of strategies to build efficacy namely:

1. Personal Mastery
Your past experiences, your appraisal of the origin of your ‘wins’ and how you have dealt with challenges including setbacks is a strong determinant of your efficacy and as such, your personal mastery – the level of control you feel you had in these events. The more successes you have had that you appraised to be the result of your efforts the higher the efficacy, so the best source of efficacy is consistent success, which is easier said than done.

What is easier said than done though is more training you undergo and skills you have, the greater your appraisal of your personal mastery and efficacy, that is you believe you are able to do that which you need to do and that you can ‘master’ the challenge. So, the more formal training you complete the higher the efficacy and simulations both ’real’ and on the computer are of particular value because they inject experience into you. So, when we practice our response to a fire on the site floor or a chemical spill from a tanker, we are building our efficacy so when the situation arises, we appraise ourselves to be able to deal effectively with the challenge.

Flying out from any airport it is not uplifting to see, as the wheels tuck into the undercarriage a burnt-out fuselage on the perimeter of the airport. It is, though a great efficacy builder for emergency services because it has been used by fire services to practice their response to a disaster. With Alcoa we were invited to metropolitan fire station where there was shell of a four story building in which was set alight regularly and the fire brigades practiced not only dousing out the fire but also rescuing trapped occupants. Continual practice in close to real life scenarios not only heightened efficacy but injected valuable experience.

The military have long appreciated the value of the simulator to prepare their forces for urban warfare and hostage situations to develop efficacy. A former Special Forces person who was involved in rescuing hostages from a terrorist held embassy in London said at a conference that they cleared the 55 rooms in the seven minutes that they thought it would take and they believed with their training that they could go in to a terrorist held embassy, get the hostages and come out alive. That’s efficacy.

An example of building efficacy and injecting experience occurred on Qantas flight 32 when ”…a few minutes after take-off, the pilot, Richard de Crespigny, activated the plane’s autopilot. When the plane reached 7,400 feet, however, the pilots heard a boom. Then there was another, even louder crash, followed by what sounded like thousands of marbles being thrown against the hull.

A red alarm flashed on…(the) instrument panel and a siren blared in the cockpit. Investigators would later determine that an oil fire inside one of the left jets had caused a massive turbine disk to detach from the drive shaft, shear into three pieces, and shoot outward, shattering the engine. Two of the larger fragments from that explosion punched holes in the left wing, one of them large enough for a man to fit through. Hundreds of smaller shards, exploding like a cluster bomb, cut through electrical wires, fuel hoses, a fuel tank, and hydraulic pumps. The underside of the wing looked as though it had been machine-gunned.”
“The plane began to shake. De Crespigny reached over to decrease the aircraft’s speed, the standard reaction for an emergency of this kind, but when he pushed a button, the auto-thrust didn’t respond. Alarms started popping up on his computer display. Engine two was on fire. Engine three was damaged. There was no data at all for engines one and four. The fuel pumps were failing. The hydraulics, pneumatics, and electrical systems were almost inoperative. Fuel was leaking from the left wing in a wide fan. The damage would later be described as one of the worst midair mechanical disasters in modern aviation.

De Crespigny radioed Singapore air traffic control. “QF32, engine two appears failed,” he said.”
The chief pilot had pre-flight used a process of mental modelling to prepare for the unexpected which enable people to remain seemingly calm and poised under pressure. “Even before Captain Richard Champion de Crespigny stepped on board Qantas Flight 32, he was drilling his crew in the mental models he expected them to use. “I want us to envision the first thing we’ll do if there’s a problem,” he told his co-pilots as they rode in a van from the Fairmont hotel to Singapore Changi Airport. “Imagine there’s an engine failure. Where’s the first place you’ll look?” The pilots took turns describing where they would turn their eyes. De Crespigny conducted this same conversation prior to every flight. His co-pilots knew to expect it. He quizzed them on what screens they would stare at during an emergency, where their hands would go if an alarm sounded, whether they would turn their heads to the left or stare straight ahead.“ (From the book,’ Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Productivity in Life and Business’, Charles Duhigg).
The flight team eventually against the odds successfully landed the damaged plane and that landing has since been unable to be repeated on the simulators.

So, an effective strategy is the use of imagery and visualising to inject experience and create a mindset of calmness in the face of adversity as witnessed on Qantas Flight 32 and it is something professional sporting groups do when in their imagining sessions pregame the players and coaching group are tossed scenarios and respond with the actions they will take if the scenario materialises. For example, “What if we lose our best forward in the first five minutes to injury? What if the opposition goes ‘tall’ in their forward line? What if the other team gets a run on and kicks three unanswered goals?” And so and essentially it is building our efficacy so that if the situation occurs we believe our selves able to cope.

Further with the safety training, break it down into bit size chunks so they don’t get the whole enchilada at once. When a manufacturing site was developing the emergency skill of staff and commenced with abseiling for the first abseil it was only a few metres then ten metres and then from the plant roof top. They were eased into and built their efficacy as they progressed.

So increase the training, use simulators or practice using imagery techniques including affirmations and revisit how you define safety success in their immediate area of control because it is not efficacy building to be held accountable for things and events, we have no mastery or control over.

2. Vicarious Experiences
Watching other people achieve success (or fail) builds our efficacy if we appraise ourselves able to duplicate their efforts (or avoid the failure). Which is why leaders need to be good role models of the safety behaviours because they are being watched and it has an impact. Also visiting other teams or areas to see what they are doing can also build efficacy if we believe we can introduce the techniques and processes into our own area.

3. Social Persuasion
Peer support and good coaching develop efficacy. If personal mastery injects experience social persuasion via constructive coaching transfers experience. Also having an experienced person in your area to call on or being paired up with them works too. Social persuasion only works because the person we hold in regard believes in us and our ability to play our role.

4. The assimilation of our successes
Bandura’s 400 odd pages on efficacy can, I believe, be summarised in the following:

“We have a tendency to pass through our successes to quickly and too lightly.”

We are so task focussed on times that we take our successes for granted and pass through them so quickly or so lightly that these successes fail to impact on our efficacy. We need to encourage people to dwell and reflect on their successes. For most individuals and groups there are lots of wins that we fail to acknowledge or recognise. Working with a State Health and Safety organisation I asked them to list all the wins they had had in the previous 12 months on the whiteboard. We filled up two whiteboards before we stopped. Some in the group were incredulous asking, “When did we win that International Health and Safety Award?” ‘When did we hit that milestone and why didn’t we know?” The answer is the success was taken for granted and we had passed through a great opportunity. In contrast, when a smelter site was awarded international recognition for their work in the environment rather than the statuette sitting on the GM’s desk as a paper weight, a replica was made for and handed out to all site staff. We all need to make a pact that no one will pass through a success to quickly or too lightly again.

Just a note on the threats to our efficacy to be mindful of the following:

• Giving praise for mediocre or indifferent performance
• Providing no feedback for a faulty performance
• Subjecting staff to regular fault finding and criticism
• Suggesting that they were only hired because of their gender, contacts or the organisations diversity program. Any of those will do it.

It pays to grow the efficacy of all, but you don’t need any more efficacy than you, staff or the organisation possess right now if nothing is going to change in the future, there will be no greater challenges presented and the level of performance we are currently producing will suffice into the future – that is a risky strategy and bet. In the next chapter we will explore the role leaders can play in the development of individual, collective and organisational efficacy.

If high efficacy can create the winning feeling effect low efficacy borders on pessimism in that when things are going well it is the result of luck and it won’t last – “Someone will get hurt next month,” is the expectation.

Bandura didn’t strike me as having a great sense of humour, but he certainly possesses a nice sense of irony. His book is so hard and intimidating to read that it requires persistence to wade through it, that is, it requires efficacy to read his book on efficacy.

Steven Ball | Leadership & Team Development Expert 

With over 30 years of experience working with more than 200 organisations, and over 30,000 people in seven different countries, Steven Ball excels in facilitating to all areas of an organisation, from Hi-Vis staff to Executive teams and one on one coaching senior leaders.

Steven’s professional Socratic style has enabled him to work effectively with a large array of people, from senior executives to those less fortunate. If you would like to read more about Steven and his workshop on Essemy, click this link.