The Heads Up I Wished I'd Been Given When I Developed My First H&S Strategy

Over the last year, The Person Factor had the pleasure of working with South Port New Zealand. One area that we focused on was the development of a H&S strategy for South Port and a coaching programme that included teaching and learning opportunities for their H&S Lead, which would allow independent development and amendment of the strategy as they progressed through the iterations of this over the years.

As a H&S professional who has been responsible for developing these strategies in the past, and implementing projects driven by the supporting tactical plan, there were many lessons I had the opportunity to impart. As we moved through the coaching sessions, I had many nostalgic moments, reflecting on lessons I had sometimes learned the hard way; failing as graciously as possible and picking myself up to try again.

In my experience, we as leaders and organisations in general, tend to take it for granted that everyone knows these lessons and will therefore avoid pitfalls and failures. Yet, many conversations have been had about how difficult many of us find strategy development and implementation. So much so that its more common than not for organisations to pay external consultants to do it for them. Give us the recipe and we’ll bake the cake so to speak. I’m a big believer, that your internal team has the best recipe. Where I think we come unstuck is we have a lot of pastry chefs in the kitchen, with their ideas on how to bake the strategy cake and what flavour the cake should be. These are things I hadn’t accounted for when I had my first go at developing and delivering a strategy for the organisation I worked for. It came as a surprise to me when I couldn’t land it and couldn’t make any meaningful traction with it. The learning opportunities were abundant.

So today, I thought why not share some of those lessons. If you’ve got any good ones, please feel very welcome to leave them in the comments.

1. Different stakeholders are looking for different things from your strategy. Invest the time in identifying who your stakeholders are and what they are looking for.
2. Whilst most H&S professionals make risk-based decisions subconsciously, and a strategy would be no different, we don’t always communicate that very well – like the math whizz that can breeze their way through a complex equation and assumes you understand how they got the answer because it's obvious right? Same same with the risk-based approach to H&S strategy development. You must be able to explain how you quantified the risk and arrived at your strategic objectives and how this translates to the tactical plan.
3. A strategy is a marathon, not a sprint. It's an aspirational map of where you want to get to. Your tactical plans are the splits. Are we still heading in the right direction? Are we progressing as we planned to? Have we got enough resource to get us there? Where are the climbs? What’s our plan for those?
4. A strategy requires a change of behaviour from within your organisation. You need an implementation plan or strategy for the strategy. Asking something different of people, with the expectation that the change will be sustained needs to be planned for and people need to be brought along on the journey. Is your strategy something that’s being done with your people or to them?
5. Closely related to the implementation plan, you need to consider how you are going to communicate with people. Your stakeholders are all looking for different things and because of this, they will be listening out for particular messages from you. If you had five minutes to explain it to each stakeholder, what would you say? Hopefully not the same thing each time!
6. Strategies don’t have to be perfect to support progress and improved performance. Doing something and heading in the general right direction is better than doing nothing. Sometimes, it's better to get started and play small while you get comfortable with the process, then you can circle back and go bigger as capability and resourcing allows. A leader once told me that sometimes all we can do is the bronze version and maybe in a year or two we will be ready for the platinum version. An imperfect strategy can be looked at the same way. A bronze version of a critical risk management programme or a mental health programme is always going to be better than no programme. And bronze might mean its scaled back, with only a few key elements being done well. Platinum might mean its fully integrated within your HSMS and you’re pulling insightful data you can use to predict future hotspots. Small and simple doesn’t necessarily mean sub-standard or that it doesn’t add value.
7. Strategies are only as powerful as the willingness of the organisation to support their implementation. Having a strategy and not supporting the tactical projects that are needed to realise the strategy, doesn’t make your organisation any safer. This is where its sometimes more sustainable to start small. Do a couple of things very well, focusing on embedding that plan-do-check-act cycle and the accountabilities within it.
8. Relying solely on your H&S team to deliver the organisation’s H&S strategy will not give you sustainable change to H&S outcomes. There needs to be collective accountability at senior leadership level to ensure a sustainable delivery of tactical projects. This makes a lot of sense when you think of things like critical risk management programmes – senior leaders should be supported in learning what critical risks exist in their area of accountability and what the critical controls are for those risks. They may be supported in this learning journey by the H&S team, but ultimately, the management and monitoring of these risks would sit with the accountable leader. In an organisation where the H&S team are held solely responsible for delivery of a strategic initiative of that size, it sends mixed messages to all stakeholders and accountability is lost.

So there you have it. Some lessons learned on strategy development and implementation. Not ground-breaking revelations by any stretch of the imagination, but very common (and often frustrating) experiences, shared by many leaders. It would be interesting to know who has received formal strategy development and implementation training as part of their leadership development journey, and who has learned through trial and error. Feel free to share in the comments.