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E80: Is Your Boss Just "Peacocking"? The Science of Leader Walkarounds · Safe As Podcast

• 0:00
  On paper, a leadership walk around is the perfect tool.
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  Bosses get out of their offices, talk to the front line and fix
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  problems. But in practise, you can either
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  be a force for good or a symbolic peacocking exercise
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  that helps makes things worse. Good day, everyone.
• 0:15
  Welcome to SAFE as I'm Doctor Ben Hutchinson.
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  Today we're unpacking several studies on the effects of
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  leadership walkarounds. References will be on the screen
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  and in the show notes. Now there's varied terms here,
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  so I'll just call them walk arounds.
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  The focus is on healthcare since that's where I found most of the
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  studies. But check out the video on the
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  screen to look at walk arounds in oil and gas and how it can
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  lead to calamity in healthcare leadership walk arounds were
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  introduced to increase the clinicians awareness of safety
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  hazards, demonstrate senior leaders engagement with safety,
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  and educate employees. And probably pretty similar in
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  other industries. So what was found in the
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  research? Foster and colleagues conducted
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  a systematic review of the evidence.
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  Out of 1400 studies, only 12 met their inclusion.
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  They found that generally, walk arounds help staff to feel
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  psychologically safer to report, discuss and learn from errors.
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  In one of the cited studies from Thomas and colleagues, nurses
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  who participated in the walk around programmes saw
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  significantly higher safety climate scores.
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  Another study cited by Foster ET al found that near miss incident
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  reports jumped 44% following the programme and units have
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  participated reported a 21% increase in perceptions of
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  performance. For clinical outcomes, Purvis
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  and colleagues reported a 65% decline in the number of
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  infections. However, just walking around
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  doesn't automatically fix things.
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  Lorea and Morag argue that the practise often lacks a system to
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  facilitate organisational learning.
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  They tracked a three year case study using a formal information
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  system to capture the data. This created a leadership
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  pipeline where employers eventually performed five times
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  as many tours as the managers. As leaders got more involved,
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  their active correction of hazards jumped from 14 to 50 per
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  quarter. But there may be unintended
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  consequences. Rot how and colleagues found a
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  disjuncture between the theory and how leaders actually behave
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  in the field. Some sort of visibility as an
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  end in itself. 1 senior later admitted, I do always want to
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  appear as if I'm interested. Another described body language
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  that says, look, I think we should just listen and then
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  accommodate them and get out. This attitude often depended on
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  the leaders background, those without clinical experience with
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  the most dismissive, characterising staff concerns as
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  stupid, trash or even polluting. One leader even dismissed staff
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  feedback is whining. This of course created intense
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  pressure for staff to perform during the rounds, as in they
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  had to feel like they had to put on a bit of a show.
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  Disillusioned staff felt they poured out their hearts and then
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  got nothing in return and concluded that the whole thing
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  was just an exercise. The Peacocking, another study
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  from Singer and Tucker had some pretty interesting findings.
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  In their words, while walk arounds may expose minor issues,
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  other significant problems remain latent or undiscovered.
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  Also, leaders may be tempted to disregard the majority of issues
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  identified in favour of a small subset more directly related to
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  human medical errors. So while walk arounds may be
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  more effective of finding relatively minor issues or very
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  obvious infrastructure related issues like equipment problems,
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  they seem to be less effective in identifying the latent issues
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  more connected with complex failures or matters of complex
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  or potentially contentious communication or interpersonal
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  issues or difficulty accessing electronic info and assessing
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  clinical decision making. So they really struggle with the
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  soft interpersonal level factors.
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  And there's the issue of symbolism and peacocking.
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  When leaders embark on a visible leadership programme but fail to
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  address the issues raised by workers, this of course can lead
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  to frustration. Finally, while many studies
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  highlighted improvements in many facets, mostly survey measures
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  or smaller safety climate studies, some of the larger,
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  more robust studies found to decline in safety climate and
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  perceived performance after the safety walkaround programme was
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  implemented. Another study found improvements
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  in some areas but decrements in other areas.
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  While a walkaround sounds easy, go for a walk, talk to people
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  and fix a few problems, this simplistic view is misleading.
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  That is because while walkarounds can improve some
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  facets of safety, they must be implemented authentically and
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  with full commitment and ability to resolve frontline staff
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  concerns. These half hearted, insincere,
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  ineffective safety walk arounds can backfire, eroding rather
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  than improving safety. You can't actually fix the
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  issues, or you don't really care about understanding the issues.
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  You're better off not asking the question in the 1st place.
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  So overall, the evidence suggests there is some positive
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  association between walk arounds and various things like safety
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  climate, but the human element is the wild card.
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  As Ratao and colleagues conclude, better preparation of
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  senior leaders may help to avoid the counterproductive attitudes
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  and dynamics that were identified in the research.
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  That's it on Safe As. Please like and subscribe and
• 5:06
  leave a message on the video. It really helps.
• 5:08
  Feel free to share the video also.
• 5:10
  Finally, links in the show notes to support the channel.