Safety Culture & Virtue 10: Mentors (7 mins)

What exactly is the value of experience? Will a good mentor help improve safety? How can you measure mentor engagement at the organizational level? Today's episode explores the role of mentorship in safety culture.

Key Points:

-Witnessing mistakes

-Knowledge management

-Undocumented wisdom

Transcript

Some of my favorite words of advice come from Vizzini in The Princess Bride, when he exclaims, “You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous of which is ‘never get involved in a land war in Asia.’" After centuries of unfinished land wars in Asia, it is easy to chuckle at this statement of wit.

In fact, we have a lot of rules to live by – things that were learned the hard way by some and are now obvious to the modestly observant. Everything from basic hygiene, relationship tips, to geopolitical maneuvers have a known list of wise sayings. And if someone decides to counter common knowledge, they are seen as either insane or brilliant depending on the outcome. Needless to say, we’ve all saved ourselves a lot of trouble and pain by listening to wisdom like “don’t touch the stove when it’s hot.”

Some people, like young children, seem to learn from making mistakes themselves. They hear the warnings, but they don’t heed them. They just don’t give them credence until it’s too late. Others are able to see people around them make mistakes, or just read a story about how it could play out, and they learn from it.

Well, people with experience have seen mistakes. They’ve witnessed the best and worst in the industry and when they have a piece of advice, it’s golden. That’s one of the reasons they are so valuable in the workplace. They have seen an unexpected death. They have witnessed a casual oversight that went south and got someone fired. They’ve testified before the board about their work. They not only know the regulations, but they know why the regulations exist. Listening to that level of experience means you can learn from other’s mistakes rather than repeat them yourself, and if you listen, you might even find out why all of those crazy rules exist. It’s amazing what a little bit of history and practical wisdom can do for the workforce.

On the flip side, I’ve seen organizations rid themselves of the people who know the work best. In healthcare, a large swath of organizations have been purchased by hedge funds that quickly replaced their clinical leaders with investment gurus who believe in their knowledge of numbers even if they can’t explain what the numbers mean. For example, I’ve seen organizations cut all of their most burdensome work because it is inefficient, only to find that the burdensome work was the only reason they were hired as a vendor. Doing the easy work is easy, so why contract that work? The easy work was just the icing, but the business need was the inefficient work – the heavy lift that was difficult to staff locally. That’s the sort of decision that leads to bankruptcy, all in the name of enhancing profit. But it takes experience to understand the business need, the customer’s interests, and the value of the SMEs who know the frontline job. 

That’s why experienced mentorship is today’s topic. And, for the sake of conversation, I want to ask if you currently being mentored by a leader? And if you have ever experienced mentorship, can you think of any other sources where you could have gleaned the knowledge you received from that mentor? When I look back, the information my mentors gave me was unavailable from any other source. There were no books on the subject, no organizations to guide me, no resources to help me get my footing in some of the most challenging areas of the job. But it was amazing what a short conversation at the desk of my mentor could do to improve the situation. I also saw them model techniques for managing themselves, their words and behavior, in a stressful situation. I saw them give credit to people beneath them without fearing for their own status, and I saw them walk carefully around legal issues while still striving for an ethical solution. There were so many great lessons gleaned from mentorship that never resonated in writing, but it made perfect sense in the chaos of real life on the front lines.

Mentorship can take a lot of different forms and there are many ways to foster those relationships through training, preceptorship, committee involvement, special projects, etc. But if it is not present in the organization, it is palpable. There is a sense of fear about revealing any weakness, particularly when it pertains to job knowledge. One of the reasons that I wrote the book Healthcare Quality for the Rest of Us is because I had heard so many leaders confide to me that they didn’t know where to look for answers, and they feared for their position if they were to reveal any limitations in their workplace. I knew what that was like, and sometimes the information was not available because no one else in the organization knew either – but it was a void that was not obvious right away because no one wanted to admit it.

But how do you know if you have a culture of experienced mentorship in your organization? How do you know if your safety culture is supported by experience? Give yourself a point if you are currently mentoring someone by meeting at least bi-weekly to discuss their work and share advice. If you are not currently mentoring someone, I’m afraid there are no points for this item, even if there is a mentorship program at your institution. Why? Because it is too easy to create a façade of support, but if it’s not part of your own daily experience, it is likely that others are lacking that support as well, no matter how many times the company newsletter features warm stories about their phenomenal professional development programs. It doesn’t mean that those development programs have no value; it just means they have no engagement.

Creating visible change in this trend requires a personal investment by mentoring someone else in your field. It may also include teaching classes at work or in the community and finding ways to be available for questions in your area of expertise. The great thing about mentorship is that it will also make you pause and think about your decisions and choices and why you do what you do. Isn’t that the heart of safety culture after all?