Looking In The Mirror

Not long ago I was invited to serve as the guest speaker at a safety awards luncheon for leaders in the construction industry. This was a first for me. In my four-decade career in the agricultural, chemicals and mining businesses, I’d sat in the audience at many of these gatherings, and on more than one occasion had the privilege of going on stage to be on the receiving end of an award. But never once was I the one on stage, making the big speech to a big audience.
 
Honestly, being a guest speaker isn’t something I love to do. For this audience, I didn’t know their business. For those of us with careers in management who start out being good at something before we get promoted – I was an engineer – public speaking isn’t one of those things. But it was a good client asking, and I do care passionately about safety and leadership. So, of course I said yes.

I can tell you that, from my days in the chemical business, I was a huge customer of the construction industry – and took a keen interest in the work they did for us. I always considered their folks working for us on our site as important and valuable, and from the safety perspective, no different than anyone working directly on our payroll. 

As I see it, that’s a management best practice.

On the other hand, as I’ve seen and heard it in the time I’ve served as a consultant and teacher, that is not necessarily how every client sees things. What they fail to recognize is that building an informal hierarchy around the thinking that “the customer is always right” in a very subtle but powerful way causes those who are hired for their special expertise to clam up and never give us their best advice. 

A big mistake.

When it comes to contractors, we as their customers cannot be successful without them – and they cannot be successful without us. That starts with safety performance.

Listening to a Speech

Come my turn to be the speaker, I imagined the audience for my speech sitting there listening to someone who’s had success as a leader, thinking I’m going to give them some magic potion that will solve all their safety problems. There are two issues with that. First, in a complex work environment, no leader has all the answers. Even if someone did, a speech puts the audience on autopilot; listening but not necessarily absorbing.

At best, telling informs. By comparison, questions engage, get people thinking differently, and transform thinking so that it turns into action. As a management practice, using questions to lead was something I came on to late in my career. Leadership is ownership: you’ve got to own it. I’ve seen questions create ownership in a powerful way.

Even when I understood the technique intellectually, I found that leading by asking questions was hard to do well in practice. Leaders are always pushing people to move ahead; something it doesn’t feel like you’re doing when you’re asking questions instead of telling people what they think.

But don’t be fooled by appearances: there were times in my career when the best leaders I ever worked for would intentionally draw back and not volunteer their opinions. The impact on me and my peers was powerful. 

I’ve also watched other leaders use questions to make a big impact: for example, there was a superintendent who turned a problem jobsite around simply by asking, “Why are we doing this job this way?”

A foreman did a masterful job building trust by asking, “What do you need from me that you’re not getting?”

So, I decided to take a different approach with my speech at the awards lunch. If I tell them something, it’s my message. If they answer questions I ask them, my message can become their conviction.

Questions for Leaders

As I look at safety leadership, no matter what the business, people are promoted for what they know: their technical know-how.  They’re put in a new role they know very little about – leading and managing – rarely are they given any new knowledge about doing that and how to do it well.

A performance appraisal might point out what’s not being done well, and coaching might help a weakness. As I was preparing for this speech, the thought struck me that the best thing I could do for my audience was give them questions they could use to evaluate their own performance. 

Let my questions hold up the mirror for them to look at themselves – as leaders.

Looking back, if someone had done that to me more often, it would have helped me become an even better leader. Looking ahead, that seemed to me to be the best thing I could possibly do for this audience. 

Of course, like a lot of things in life, the details are what make the difference between a smashing success and a dismal failure. When it comes to self-evaluation, what are the right questions for leaders to ask themselves about their effectiveness as leaders? 

A simple question to ask; just not an easy one to answer.

I came up with ten questions. 

Three Important Questions

There’s not enough space in this newsletter to take you through all ten questions. If I had to choose three questions that were most important, impactful, and useful, it would be these:

 Am I the safety leader my people would choose to follow?

Working now as a consultant, I’m teaching safety leadership best practices. A fundamental principle we teach is what makes someone a leader: the answer is “their followers.” It’s such a simple idea, but so powerful in terms of the insights it begins to give into the process of leadership. 

The word “choose” plays a vital role in shaping the question: it forces a leader to confront the difference between their positional authority and their influence. Sure, followers will go along with some things simply because they have not choice but to follow. However, there’s a world of difference between grudging compliance and willing followership. 

Without thinking about it quite this way, followers answer this question every day, by how they behave and by how they do their job when their leaders are not present. If the leader wants a different answer, they need to change their example.

People follow credibility, consistency, and character – not titles. 

“Do I insist on operational discipline – doing the right thing, the right way, every time?”

It’s been my experience that most major incidents don’t come about from a lack of knowledge by those involved. They come from “drift” – the slow, often barely perceptible difference between what’s supposed to be done and the way it’s actually being done. In some circles, that’s known as “normalization of deviation”: it’s simply not doing the right thing, the right way, every time. Disciplined execution is the antidote to drift: doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

Note that my question uses the word “insist.” That’s the level of performance it demands. Drift is simply the product of normal human behavior: it requires effort on the part of the leader to counteract that natural tendency. It falls to the leader to act: if the leader walks past it when they see it, they’ve approved it.

The leader’s tolerance becomes the organization’s tolerance.

Do I ask Darn Good Questions that reveal risk before it reveals itself to us?

We call one of my favorite safety leadership tools I’ve been teaching “asking Darn Good Questions.” Questions are the most underrated tools we teach. That’s basically what I decided to do in my speech. Telling informs; questions engage and create energy.  

Out on the job, the right kind of questions expose blind spots that checklists never catch. Checklists are a good aid but can easily become the route to stop thinking. Questions challenge assumptions and hazards that would otherwise never come to light. That’s a much better way to find out about problems than to suffer in regret.

Of course, this question causes a leader to reflect on how they use questions with their followers. Best to ask questions that make people think – and ask them with genuine curiosity.
 
Curiosity is the most underrated safety system we have.

Looking in the Mirror

If I were to summarize the heart of the entire presentation, it all comes down to one defining question: When I look in the mirror, am I modeling the behaviors I expect from others?

That really is the essence of leadership, and in particular, safety leadership.

As to how a leader should answer these questions, the answer is not quickly; not defensively; and not publicly. These are mirror questions meant to be wrestled with personally, not simply checked off.  

The value of the questions is found in the reflection, not the speed of the response.

Van Long
March 2026