I’ve been in the safety consulting and training biz for a staggering twenty-five years now, despite having the flawless, smooth skin of a thirtysomething.
It would be impossible for me to count the number of times clients and prospective clients have approached me to perform some employee training, or create an eLearning course where the problem and the fix had little to do with training.
For example, “Hey Patti, we need you to do Permit Required Confined Space Entry and Rescue training. We had to fire someone for violating our policy last week, and this is one of our corrective actions.”
Then, true to my nature (my husband calls me “The Queen of the Follow-Up Question”), we start to do a little digging. I ask to see their written program and procedures and permits so that I can customize the training to their needs.
What becomes obvious very quickly is how easy it would be for someone to violate their policy. It might be unclear at best, or relies on employees making risk decisions they’re unprepared or unqualified to make, or perhaps mandates a single solution (for example, a permit) for every type of entry, regardless of classification.
Then comes what I refer to as The Awkward Conversation.
I gird my loins, buckle my seat belt, and tell another safety professional, often one I’m hoping to get or keep as a client, that theirs is not a safety training problem.
It is a procedure problem, or a process problem, a lack of thinking-it-through problem, or a failure-to-lead problem. Trust me, there are a lot of options that I’ve experienced over the years.
What happens from there depends on that safety professional’s reaction, or in some cases, the culture of their organization.
“I know, I know, you’re right, can you help us with that?”
[Why yes, yes I can. Let’s talk about it.]
In other cases, the conversation is short and fairly curt, and I know the prospective client goes off in search of another consultant who is willing to slap a bandaid on a wound that requires stitches.
Now that I’ve been doing this for a long time, I see that rejection, such as it is, as a gift.
Like a bad first date, this wasn’t a match.
If I attempted to perform training for a group of employees when the basics are not already in place –and believe me, I have (when I was younger and had fewer ruthless boundaries)– the consequences are these:
- I end up disclosing, unintentionally, the glaring gap in my client’s programs and procedures, or
- I leave a room full of people baffled, attempting to match what I’m teaching them with what their own policies tell them to do, or
- I look a wee bit like of an idiot.
It’s usually a mix of the three.
If you, or your organization, tends to knee jerk react to “more training” as a solution, take a breath.
Ask yourself what else might be going on and if someone looking in from the outside would be able to look at your programs and procedures and easily lay out the steps to be followed, rules to be complied with and when to stop and ask for help. If the answer is no, or you see the areas that would create misunderstanding, start there.
If you work with me, you’ll get stuck doing that anyway.
PS As my old algebra teacher told us on tests, “please show your math.”