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Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost. For the C-suite, it’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today I’m very excited to have with me Becky Ray. She leads an organization called Culture Kick. A very interesting background, so very excited to the conversation, but lots of experience in operations, in engineering, which makes her practice in safety very, very tangible and real. So maybe let’s get started there. Becky, welcome to the show. Tell me a little bit about your background and your story and how you got into safety.

Oh, brilliant. Thank you very much, Eric. So, I started my career sort of on the tools using my hands. I did a modern apprenticeship, and I qualified as a forklift truck engineer. So, I used to fix forklift trucks and big earth move in sort of construction equipment. So, I did that for 10 years. I had a van, I had overalls, and it meant that I drove around to lots of different sites. So, I got to experience the culture on lots of different kinds of businesses. And again, they’re all sort of high risk, fast paced, dynamic places. And typically, when I get asked to go in, something’s broken so their operation is paused. In some ways people can be a bit sort of stressed and a bit frustrated. So, I got good at kind of being able to calm everybody down and sort of enable. Yeah. That to take place. I then moved into health and safety leadership, typically working in again, high risk domains like rail construction, manufacturing, a bit of military aviation, those kinds of places, the railways. So got to understand firsthand the kind of often the conflict that exists between operations and getting stuff done.

And obviously trying to do that in a, in a safe way. And then now I’ve been running Culture Kick for almost five years. That kind of brings all that together. So operationally focused kind of interventions and approaches. Because that’s where my background is. I really understand the need for operational teams to get stuff done. But to balance that with let’s create the right culture where we can set people up for success and we do that with a safety kind of people kind of focus.

Excellent. So, tell me a little bit more because I think one of the things that impressed me in Our initial conversation was how you take big picture ideas, a philosophy that is common in the safety world, but make it very real and tangible. Because that’s often what I see is big ideas that don’t really land because they don’t get operationalized, and they don’t get real. So, tell me a little bit about how you take philosophy and bring into practice.

Yeah. And I often think that my job now, and I get to work with loads of businesses, big and small, is I can’t tell anybody how to be safe or to change their culture or create these kinds of environments. They must do it themselves. But I can only empower them. So, I feel like I offer up a load of ideas and suggestions and people must pick up something that goes, okay, I resonate with that. I see why that’s important. I can then go and try that. So, I really encourage the leaders I work with to pick from almost like a big buffet of ideas and say, I’m going to go and try that. So, I’m going to spend more time with my team out where work gets done, for example, and I’m going to go and do that with no agenda, no checklist, no big form, no clipboard. I’m just going to go and spend time where the work gets done, and I’m just going to observe and ask questions and little tangible things like that that go from like, that’s a big idea to actually, let’s make it work. Let’s take some time to be more reflective at the end of a project or a job or a day shift and go, right, let’s just pause for 10 minutes and let’s have a chat about, what did we do well?

What didn’t we do well? Really encourage that appetite for operational learning doesn’t have to be a big thing. It doesn’t have to be a big rollout. We can go for the next two weeks, we’re going to stop at the end of every day and we’re just going to have a chat as a team about what we did well and what we didn’t do well, and then it makes it more palatable, more tangible. And that’s something that any operational leader could try tomorrow.

And I like this because it’s also very, very much about continuous improvement. It is about learning environment, but very adjacent to a lot of themes in the operational excellence space of, like, how do we get better, how do we remove things that impact us from. Prevent us from having a perfect day?

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. This idea about, let’s set people up for more success. And we can’t do that perfect straight off the bat, but we can incrementally get better at that. So, I frame all my work around creating a high-performance culture, but that’s often kind of utopia that we’re all striving towards, and it might feel like it’s too far away, but what we can do, let’s get a little bit better at doing this. Let’s get a bit better at doing this. And then it feels like more tangible steps we can take to get a little bit better.

Yeah, it’s baby steps towards this. Big goal, big vision. But I think often we want to get the solution in one shot and that’s what prevents us from getting there as opposed to these small tangible improvements. And I remember I was reading a case study a while back, this was in healthcare and a horrible scenario on the back end leading to fatality in the operating room. But all of it had been could have been prevented from a signage. So, a small change to the signage, $50, probably 40-pound change to sign and the system, the process by which people took bookings and appointments, which was done on posted notes and essentially one posted note got lost. So tiny little things can have a big impact, but just like how do we drive these small continuous changes day in and day out? So, love that. It brings me to a concept that you’ve created, which I think is quite cool, around the culture cake. Tell me a little bit about what the culture cake is and what it means.

Sure. Thank you. So, I mean, I’ve just collected over the years, I’ve collected, there’s loads of awesome resources out there, there’s loads of people in this space doing fantastic thing, and I pretty much collected all my favorite pieces, put them together with my kind of personal experience approach and just built what is essentially a five layered framework, which I believe if you build these and bring them to life inside your businesses, inside your teams, then you can then be on this path to create a high performance culture. Now if it was just called a framework, I just thought personally it was a bit boring. So, I put these five layers into a cake, and it’s become kind of my sort of brand icon, which is this culture kit, Culture cake. And again, it’s memorable. Most people like cake. You’re not going to argue with that. So, I’ll explain what the five layers are then. So, the first one is really simply we want to make it easy for people to get work done. So regardless of what your business does, people want to be able to show up to work in the morning and do what they do best.

And we’ve made it easy for them to do that. And as leaders, it’s our job to set our workforce up for success and give them what they need when they need it, and then take a step back and let them do what they do best. And if we all had that kind of mindset around, what are we doing today to make it easy for work to be executed? What are we learning from when it’s not so that we can make any little tweaks and adjustments to do it differently tomorrow? It needs to be happening on that really sort of frequent scale to make it easy. Yeah.

Link back to what you were mentioning seconds ago really is about this element of how can we make today better than yesterday? How can we make tomorrow better than today? In these small changes, I think that’s a very powerful thing because so many times that’s missed is this element that we get into our work pattern, and we execute for years as opposed to us actually can make anything better day in and day out.

Yeah, definitely. The second one is about creating a speak up culture. So, I know that from an academic point of view, we call it psychological safety, but I’ve known from experience that that term doesn’t always land with frontline workforces. So, a speak up culture, because we genuinely want to know what people’s ideas and suggestions are. Because if your business is going to get better, you’ve probably already got the answers to the problems that you’re facing, but it’s often trapped within the workforce. And equally, we want people to speak up about any concerns they’ve got or worries or frustrations. And that’s a big one for me. I really like to use the word frustration because if you’re frustrated at work, then you cannot do your best work.

Right.

Something is getting in your way. So, we want people to be able to speak up. And that leads into the third layer, which is frustrations into focus. Now, I’ve worked with loads of leaders and they’re like, oh, it’s Bob, it’s just Bob. He’s moaning again. Invite Bob this planning meeting because he’ll just be negative. But some people get a bad rap for being the moaning negative one. But if we’ve taken the time to go and speak to Bob, Bob, you seem frustrated. What is getting in your way of you doing a great job? And let’s put a focus on it. And I really encourage people to one identify what’s frustrating them, because we all get frustrated from time to Time. Are we just going to moan about it or are we going to do something about it? What can we do? Because ideally you want to remove it where we can remove these things that are causing frustrations, reduce it in some way. And if we can’t remove or reduce, then we need to reframe it. If the business needs to keep this thing, then we need to reframe it and have a different perception of it.

But when you’re frustrated, you cannot do your best work. And that’s bad for people and really bad for business.

Yeah.

You need to put a focus on these frustrations.

And I think the other part is that frustration also keeps your brain out of the equation. Right. Because you get a distraction that starts lingering in the back of your mind where your mind goes somewhere else as opposed to in the task at hand. And we know distractions kill ultimately.

Yeah, definitely. And also, that frustration is a heavy negative emotion, but actually it’s quite contagious. If I’m frustrated at work, the person next to me is going to know about it because it just oozes out of me. And then that resentment frustration can then turn into resentment if it doesn’t get resolved. And then you get this like a kind of. You can get a whole team that are just like. And then again, they’re not going to do their best work, are they?

Right, absolutely. And I speak up. I agree with you. The element of psychological safety academically makes sense, but I’ve never seen that resonate with frontline craft employees. And it really is the action that we want is that you’re comfortable speaking up, stopping work, escalating an issue if you see something that’s wrong.

Yeah. And my kind of beef with the whole trying to encourage the workforce to speak up is that it’s not, it’s not a one-way thing. Like create a speak up culture. Yes, we can encourage workforces and people to speak up, but they have to be met with leadership at all levels that are prepared to listen. They’ve got the time to listen and then they’ve got the sphere of influence to actually do something about it.

Absolutely.

Because I’ve worked with lots of organizations that are good that we get to the point where people are raising stuff and then the second nothing is done, it just goes away.

Absolutely. It’s a little bit like surveys. A lot of people say, oh yeah, there’s survey fatigue, but at the end of the day it’s not survey fatigue. It’s I’m tired of telling you stuff and you’re not doing anything about it, which creates the fatigue. Same concept, really.

Yeah. And that’s that resentment that people carry around. They were probably enthusiastic when the first survey came around and hopeful that something would be done. But when nothing asked, then you’re like, yeah, I’m not playing this game again.

Exactly.

And it’s such a shame because it’s such an easy fix for a business to do that. 

It is.

And have different conversations. It’s really. Yeah. It’s frustrating for me to see. To see that play out in so many businesses. And then the final two layers all about learning. So, learning from failure, which naturally a big place in the health and safety kind of sphere. But I still think lots of organizations are not quite getting there with the whole learning from failure. I think we investigate and report and look into failure, but I think too many businesses are still not really grasping that we have to reframe our opinion of failure. Of course it’s inconvenient. Of course, it’s not actually great for the business because there’s been some kind of loss. Whether that’s injury, damage, time, reputation, it is bad. But we need to move past that perception of it and go, this is an opportunity to learn so much and then be better tomorrow, be better next week. And I think we still are losing that opportunity to really learn and also shutting people down because of the way we go about investigating failures.

Yep, absolutely.

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And then the final layer is about let’s not wait for our failures to learn. Let’s learn from every day. And this is something I’m so passionate about because like you said, that getting better daily, we can only do that if we’ve really got a strong appetite to go. I’ve just finished this day. I’ve just finished this task, this project. How did it go? And often we’re like, it was successful. Nobody got hurt, we delivered on time to budget. Let’s crack on to the next one. But what are we learning? There’s so much learning to be had to make the next one even better. Or if we did that well, let’s replicate that until we analyze the nuances of how it happened and what people did to make it a success again.

There’s way too much learning that’s missed because it’s there to take him. People just crack on with the next piece of work, don’t they?

Yeah, absolutely. This learning as a gift is a change in philosophy. So, if I got it right, it’s essentially how do I make it easy to do the work really in terms of driving continuous daily improvement, how do I create a speak up culture, how do I turn frustrations into focus and then learning from both failure but also normal everyday work?

Yeah. And I think all those things coupled together and they naturally overlap because you can’t really have one without the other. That’s where these layers you need to build. I think all of those things combined will set you on a path to a high-performance culture where people are really thriving and then your business is growing and then achieving the kind of success it wants to achieve, whatever that looks like for your business.

All of these ideas, principles, sound simple, but I think part of the magic from your experience in operations, in engineering, in HSC is really this, how do I make it very tangible? So, tell me a little bit about some of the ways that you make this very real. Because in my experience in operations is unless you turn it into a daily habit, a routine or something that’s high frequency from occurring and you make it simple, it’s a concept, it’s an idea, learning, training and then I move on. It’s philosophy as opposed to something tangible.

Yeah, definitely. And I like the way that you use the word habit then because these are new habits that we need to form. And again, it’s easy for me to just say all this stuff but it’s the people inside businesses about the hard job to bring it to life. Like I said earlier, I’m just going to supply loads of ideas and options and people must, you can’t do it all tomorrow. You must pick something that you’re going to give it a try. And I’m up for this term called micro experiments. So go and try something different for the next week or two weeks that you’re not doing now. See how it goes. And then I love people to come back to me and go, let’s have a, discuss how it’s went. So, whenever I deliver workshops I always back them up with kind of a group coaching scenario because I want them to be let free back to their business to do some of this trying and then come back. How did it go? Well, that didn’t work because of that. And when I did. That helped. And they get to learn from each other.  

That’s why group coaching is great amongst peers. And then I get to kind of nudge them in the direction. So, a couple of things, I mean they can take the layers of the cake and go, right, I’m going to start every day and I’m going to ask myself am I making it easy for my team to do what they’ve got to do? And maybe we’ll have a prestart meeting and I’m going to ask that question, say I’ve got five people in my team, whatever you’ve got to do today, are we making it easy for you to do that work? And maybe it’s just one simple thing, it’s one question and then the plethora of stuff that you’ll get from that will be amazing. Okay, well I can do something about that. So let me help you with that then. As a leader, seeing that your role is to, is to support and to enable people to get work done and it’s your job to make it easy and then asking that question is naturally going to encourage that speak up culture because you’re asking a question, you’re asking for a contribution and then if there’s something frustrating them about what they’ve got to do that day or that week, they’re more likely to tell you so that you can put a focus on it and that we’re learning from, we’re learning from everything that’s going on.

So, I would encourage maybe pick a question or pick something that you can kind of focus on. I love the idea of pre job briefs and post debriefs but I think that they can be used in a. We just do it to go through the motions but turn those activities into more of a conversation. It might take a bit more time, but I always think it’s worth it. What different questions can we ask in a pre-start meeting for the next week and we’ll see how it goes.

And how do I engage the group more? How do I get more dialog going? Because sometimes the prestart is very top down in terms of here’s a message and I’m cascading as opposed to what I’m hearing from you is very two-way communication, more dialog and really learning at the end of the day. And these are very powerful things that you can operationalize quite easily.

Yeah. And it’s not a massive time commitment and maybe if you try it and you know, this team is too big. I can’t get that level engagement with that many People. So, I’m going to find a way to branch off. I’m going to take half of them and I’m going to say, can you guys come over here before we crack into this? I just want to try something new. And I think if you’re honest as a leader and say, look, I want to improve things around here, I’m going to slightly tweak up and change how we set you guys to work. I want to try this. Humor me and let me know if it’s not working right.

So, I also love your micro experiments, microlearning. I love the coaching circles to get back to reinforcing. What have you tried? Because I think that’s really the key for habits is this element of something that triggers it, drives the habit and then reinforcement and learning from it. But also, it’s accepting that to your point before, some things may work, and some may not work. And that experimentation is key across the board.

Yeah. Because I think too many companies go, right, I’m going to have a big initiative. I’m going to roll out a load of training, get loads of materials published, and we’re all going to do this. And then it feels too big. And then they try one thing, and it fails. And they’re like, oh, see, that’s no good. But it’s got to be incrementally. Let’s try some stuff on a small scale with a smaller team. If you’ve got a big organization, let’s start it in one area, get some learning. So, we can essentially fail fast, and we can take learning before we roll it out. And I don’t even believe in the whole blanket rolling something out. I believe in these are some fundamental things that you could consider doing. Take one that feels right for you as a leader. Try it with your team. You get unwell with that; it turns into a habit. You’re seeing the benefits through your team. Let’s try another one into the mix. And then slowly we tweak it. And I always like to ask the question at the end of the workshops I do, is what are you going to do differently when you get back to your day job tomorrow?

And I like that, I like the phrase what you’re going to stop, because what you’ve heard today it’s not serving me, it’s not serving my team. What are you going to stop doing? What are you going to start doing? So what new thing are you going to start doing? And I like people to commit to at least one new thing they’re going to try and then reflect on and what are you going to continue doing? What do you know that is working well that you want to continue doing? And then that continued one can then inspire other people in the room. Oh, they’re doing that and that’s working for them. So that’s an idea that I can try.

Love that. In a very action-oriented bite size in terms of takeaways, which works with the cadence, the frequency. Because if learning is an event, one-time thing, nothing comes of it. It becomes a philosophy which is unfortunately what I see in too many businesses. They have a new philosophy, but it doesn’t change anything.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Any other ideas in terms of how you bring this to life? I know when we talked about you had lots of different concepts and ideas, but this element of making it very tangible to me is really, key and important.

It needs to be something that you’re just again, you’ve got an appetite, you’re going to go try something new, you’re going to do something different today. And I think lots of people just get started stuck on that train of doing the same thing day in, day out. So, I like this, we all can be better. Not to say we’re not great now because of course we are. But everyone has the capability to be better and just add in another little thing they can try. So, one of my favorite ones is the power of the pause. Again, because we live in this busy especially lots of organizations that are operating, they’re trying to get something done. Everything needs to be done now, we want everything tomorrow we can get stuck on that kind of train of just do, do, do. And so, introducing the power of the pause. And you can do it lots of scenarios. But I say to leaders, when somebody comes to you and they’ve got a question or need you to decide or to look at something, whether it’s by phone, email or in person, we feel the need to respond immediately.

And most of the time we’re well versed on what the response needs to be, and we’ll just deal with it. But often we do all that unconsciously, without really thinking about, really reflecting because we’re just onto the next thing. What I want to encourage more people to do, especially leaders, is to go, I’ve been asked that question, I’m just going to sit with it for a minute, I’m just going to, I’m just going to sit with it, I’m going to think about it before I respond. And you can even do that if someone stood in front of you Just go, let me just have a minute to think about that. And you can. I think we’re afraid of the silence and the uncomfortableness of it. And we’re in this. We’ve got to respond immediately. But taking a minute to pause and give yourself time to kind of switch, like nudge yourself into conscious thinking, to go I’m considering all the angles of this before I respond. Or it might make you realize, I need a bit more information, I need to understand more. And it’s that listen to understand rather than listen to respond, because we’re so programmed to respond.

But asking yourself to take a pause might make you go, oh, I need to understand that a bit more before I direct them that way. Or to say yes or to say no.

Sure.

So little things like that, which are almost mindset things, but then habits that you need to build.

Yep.

And you need to catch yourself when you’re not, especially if you’re not used to doing it.

And I think going back to your idea of the micro, the micro learnings, the micro actions, it’s also this element that you’re constantly with the coaching is you’re getting back to this review cycle so that if you didn’t do your homework, you think, okay, I’ll have to do my homework, and I need to try.

Yeah, yeah.

This is excellent. Thank you so much, Becky, for sharing ideas on this. Tell me a little bit more about Culture Kick and the work that you do within Culture Kick, and if somebody wants to reach you, what’s the best way to do that?

Yeah, sure. So, I typically work with leaders and its typically operational leaders inside businesses, small, medium and some larger ones. I’m in the UK, I work all over the UK and I do some stuff online. I’ve got some sort of clients that are further afield. I typically do some kind of workshop. So, I like to bring to life these ideas and these suggestions and the layers of the culture cake to get people to really think about, am I making it easy? Am I creating this speak up culture? Because like I said, operational leaders have the mindset they’re doing, they’re doing all day long. That’s the. Their bread and butter. So, getting them in a workshop environment, and I prefer to call it a workshop than training, because training is often sort of one way. A workshop is more of a dynamic conversation to get them to pause and reflect on their role as an operational leader, their role in setting people up to work and what they can do to tweak and adjust their approach to be better, essentially, to help create that culture, because every conversation, every interaction they have with senior leaders, with workforces, with clients, with stakeholders, is what’s creating the culture that they’ll work in.

I want them to see their role in it, and if they take the time to kind of try and implement some of these ideas and to tweak the way that they do work, they’ll feel better in their role. Because often the level of leadership I’m dealing with are busy and they’re frustrated, and they’re overwhelmed. They’re decent and loyal and technically amazing. They want to do a great job, and they are, but they’re feeling the strains of it and that will naturally come out in their interactions. So, I like to do a combination of a workshop and then a group coaching session, because it can’t just be one thing, it needs to be this continual thing. And then I encourage the business to set up a bit of a cycle where they can go and try something, then they’ve got the space to come back and discuss it. And I want to get them to the point where I can then step away from that, because they’re having those conversations organically, like me. Because typically when an operational leader will go into a meeting, they’re just planning the next job or looking back in a transactional way.

And I want to just filter into that, this reflection piece and go, how are we doing? How do people feel about working here? And add in some of those more reflective pieces.

Yeah, and I think that’s excellent, really, with this element of making safety and some of the elements around culture very tangible and into your daily routine and operations. And if somebody wants to reach you, tell me maybe about the website for Culture Kick.

Sure. So, it’s www.culturekick.co.uk and I’m also very active on LinkedIn. I pretty much post every day on LinkedIn because I want to give, obviously, these ideas and suggestions to as many people as possible. And I’ve got a couple of sorts of online courses I do, and I do some webinars and stuff. So, yes, plenty of ways people can. If this feels like, sort of relevant to them and they like the sound of the culture cake, then they’re more than welcome to swing by and have a look.

Excellent. Thank you so much, Becky. Really like the concept of the five layers of the kick and the simplicity of it.

Brilliant. Thank you so much.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.