Justice and Responsibility Take Root

My direct responsibility with anything truly related to human resources came slowly, very slowly. Since the behavior-based safety role I had held for so long was being filled internally, the process took a few months. Most of my time during that ordeal was dedicated to keeping those plates spinning and just a toe in the HR waters. I remember sitting in on a couple of interviews for other positions being filled internally and less than half a dozen with external candidates. I got involved in a different phase of the new employee orientation process, but I had been in that mix for years so the only thing that was different was the policies I covered and the paperwork I needed to collect. Otherwise, I can’t remember much in the way of on-the-job-training.

June to August of 2012 was something of a whirlwind, for several reasons. My successor was finally allowed to move into the behavior-based safety position so I did what I could to help him get acclimated. Our facility experienced the most turnover we had ever seen at the management level; nearly half of the local executive positions were filled with new faces, and several of those came from the same external organization. And during that same time, Cindy and I were beginning to hear rumblings of some potential issues in our side business.

Mike was one of several extremely qualified candidates for the BBS role. While it took longer than anyone would have liked for him to get released from his previous department (because he was extremely effective there too), he hit the ground running. My initial goal was to allow him to take ownership of a process so many in the facility correlated so closely to me but still provide him with the support he’d need to get his feet under him. In complete transparency, I thought my biggest struggle there would be letting go of something I had invested so much time and energy into. I had no idea what was in store for me…

In early August, during one of the rare times that Cindy and I actually took a vacation, I got a call from my HR manager the day before we came back. She told me that she had submitted her resignation and her last day with the company was just two weeks away. Those two weeks passed so quickly I can barely remember it. What I recall vividly was how fast I went from just having a toe in the HR waters to being over my head in the deep end of the pool. Gloria, the only other person in human resources locally at that point and had effectively become my work-mom over the years, already had more than she could do on any given day so I took on anything the plant manager didn’t specifically tell me not to do. We had some support from our corporate office, both in filling the department manager role and in keeping me from screwing up everything I touched, but that was on an every other week basis since that guy had a job of his own to fulfill.

One of the responsibilities I took on almost immediately was the grievance process for employees who felt they had been issued disciplinary action that wasn’t consistent or didn’t align with company policy. Remember that tenth leadership attribute, the “Willingness to Assume Full Responsibility”? Not everyone does… That said, I soon learned that not every supervisor or manager administering disciplinary action was doing so justly or consistently either. And that resulted in me getting more involved in every aspect of the disciplinary process than I could have ever imagined, which wasn’t all that big of a stretch since I had some involvement in that through the incident investigations I had been a part of for years. There were numerous incident reviews where I pushed back (hard) against write-ups being given to employees who were injured; not because they hadn’t violated some sort of safety policy but because no one routinely addressed the contributing behavior otherwise.

Building on that experience in safety, the peer review process forced me to lean even further into that “Keen Sense of Justice”, Hill’s third leadership attribute. It also pushed me to dig deeper into the mastery of detail I had started developing through those years of scarcity, ensuring any disciplinary action given was specifically written and administered consistently. I still had no positional authority but the influence I worked so hard to earn for years played a crucial role in every piece of my new role, and I still had no idea just how much I’d need to draw from all of that experience soon after.

Before we look at the storm that had been brewing in our side business, I’ll stress that a keen sense of justice isn’t (always) loud indignation. I somewhat quietly refused to accept less than I was worth in the global behavior-based safety role and the HR role became a platform for frequently pushing for that same kind of justice for the folks I worked with. Whether it was me personally or one of the team members who had been issued some form of disciplinary action though, owning our part in the result is mandatory - whether that’s the societal norm or not. My challenge for you right now is to revisit the negotiation you listed before where you may have been driven more by fear than principle. What seed of greater purpose might (still) be hidden? Identify one thing you can do right away to nurture that seed.