Wynand, I’ve encountered extreme organization dysfunction myself. Here’s my personal experience. This was by far the worst example of a dysfunctional organization, and is not exemplary of my overall industry experience, but it helped me realize that dysfunctional leadership often manages to convince people that it is not the problem, and successfully shifts the blame elsewhere, and safety is an all too common scapegoat.

As an already experienced HSE Advisor, I once went to work at a land-rig in the Middle East, and upon arrival, the HSE superintendent for the group to which my rig belonged quite proudly told me how lucky I was that he’d just managed to gain authorization for the rig-site HSE personnel (my position) to issue written warnings for safety infractions. I told him I would not issue any warnings to any personnel, and would leave that to the people who wrote their performance appraisals or who provided them with their daily work instructions, and supervised their tasks. Further discussions with this guy revealed that he was incredibly frustrated with the overall unwillingness of personnel to comply with basic reasonable safety requirements, coupled with a general unwillingness of site supervisors to monitor and enforce compliance. I am not talking stupid, nonsense requirements etc, but stuff which was genuinely of value in preventing easily avoidable injury and illness. He was simply frustrated with a lack of action from those who were meant to be showing their guys the right way. This superintendent of mine was certainly on his way toward becoming a brute himself if he was not careful, but I saw him more as a symptom of a deeper dysfunction. And it sure was deep.

A few days later, while I was still receiving a handover and orientation from the guy who was to be my back-to-back, we had a visit from the operations manager. During a meeting with rig-site supervision, the operations manager threatened the job of my back-to-back due to poor quality of written risk assessments for various tasks conducted during the days leading up to his visit. He did not threaten the job of those who wrote them (and who had received documented training in doing so), nor did he threaten the job of the supervisors of the jobs for which these risk assessments were written, and who were required to review, approve and sign these documents. My colleague and I had already pointed out the need to improve on these risk assessments, based on requirements specified in the management system. No, the safety guys’ (me included) jobs were at risk due to the disregard and poor effort of people who do not even report to them. I challenged the operations manager on this, and he was rather taken aback by my openness and began to back-pedal, saying that we have to be the ‘gate-keeper’, and other misinformed, patronizing euphemisms by which he revealed his character. I told him that we can only advise, and that responsibility lies more squarely with those who are required to write and sign/approve such documents. He disagreed, and stood by his threat.

At a nearby rig in our group, during the night, a senior drilling supervisor instructed the forklift operator to lift something out of the cellar (the pre-excavated pit through which the land-rig drills its hole), and the forklift tipped over due to being overloaded. No injuries. During the morning call, the operations manager instructed all rig-site site safety personnel to listen up to what he was about to say, and he informed us that the safety person at that rig was fired due to this incident. The problem with this is that the incident happened while the safety person was fast asleep, off-duty. The senior supervisor and the forklift operator, none of whom take orders or instruction from the rig-site safety person, kept their jobs. The operations manager stated that he chose to make an example of the safety person for reasons along the lines of reminding us ‘safety people’ to watch the personnel more carefully (while we are asleep?)

We were Permit To Work Coordinators at the site, a common duty for HSE people in the drilling industry, especially at jack-up or land-rigs. The rig-site manager once entered the safety office in a little tirade, ranting about how a whole pile of permits were not properly signed off after the jobs were closed, throwing a whole pile of permits across our desk. A review of the permits revealed that it was he himself who had not signed many of them off. He was that out of touch with the system for which he was the ultimate authority and signatory, that he somehow felt we were to blame for him not doing his job. After pointing this out to him, we were angrily reminded to remind him more frequently. The pile of permits with which he entered our office, and which he threw across our desk, was the pile of permits we would leave next to his computer keyboard every day, once they had been returned by the supervisors responsible for overseeing the tasks covered by the permits, after completion of the task. If such a senior supervisor/manager requires such frequent reminding of something so simple, they are beyond unfit for a leadership position.

I could go on and on about this particular organization, and other places I’ve worked at, but my experience tells me that it’s not ‘safety’ which is the ‘brute’, but ‘safety’ is simply a weapon of choice for ‘brutes’ who don’t really care about the safety and well-being of workers, at least not nearly as much as they do about performance. These ‘brutes’ see ‘safety’ as something which is separate from, and outside of production / performance. They fail to internalize the simple idea that safety is inextricable from performance as a measure of success i.e. if you produce an end product, or deliver a service, but you hurt people along the way, then you were not as successful as if you produced a product, or delivered a service without hurting anybody.

As I’ve said in other posts, sociopathic brutes will always find a way to be sociopathic brutes, and I’m all for having safety systems in place which are not so open to abuse by such brutes. But safety itself is not the brute.