CEO's MESSAGE
by Nirad Tewarie - CEO of AMCHAM T&T
LINKAGE Q3 (2023) - LEARN, EMPOWER, SUSTAIN
All around us, there is uncertainty – chaos some might say. Our nation is besieged by unacceptable levels of criminality, cost of living remains a concern, wars are not limited to the states involved, and adverse weather systems continue to inflict severe damage and destruction to property and businesses everywhere.
As disruptive as these events are, none of them are new to us. The fact is we have faced similar threats before and found a way to move forward. Today, I see no reason why we cannot accomplish this again. The challenge though is understanding why we are still struggling to find the solutions to the same age-old problems.
Perhaps we aren’t approaching the process of learning from our past failures in the right way. If we change our approach, maybe we can more effectively build better and more sustainable solutions to empower our people and transform our country. After all, isn’t that what we want for our citizens, our businesses, and our society?
Not being an HSE professional myself, I find the conversations and learning about HSE best practice extremely fascinating. In fact, I use them for my own development as a leader.
In this discovery and learning process it appears as though, just as we see this as a problem at the national level, a large part of the problem stems from our unwillingness to collaborate and learn from each other. If as industry, we share more, we can learn more from each other. Our HSE Committee provides a safe space to do this and we have facilitated dozens of sharing and learning experiences over the past few years but we can do more and we have to widen the audience.
To create the conditions for more sharing, we have to allow our workplaces to be safe spaces and not defined solely by the consequences of our mistakes and accidents. We aren’t robots. Mistakes will happen. This is what it means to be human. If choosing to focus only on consequences, then we aren’t allowing for the conditions that allow for real process improvement and discovery to prevent future mistakes. It’s tough. I often get it wrong myself. So, creating this culture is a journey. But if we get it mostly right and continuously improve as leaders, we will develop sustainable practices that will empower our people to perform better and be their best.
That’s why we’ve been advocating for more workplace cultures defined by honesty, openness, and a willingness to share and learn from each other – especially in those difficult moments when mistakes happen, and things go wrong – so that we can prevent these mistakes from happening again in the future.
It’s one of the reasons why psychological safety and mental health have greatly influenced how design HSE policies in today’s workplace. It’s no longer only about focusing on process safety and risk analysis but also paying more attention to whether we are creating safe spaces for our people to talk about their difficulties, challenges, process deficiencies, work as done vs work as imagined in policies, bad days, and perhaps even an injury that they are inclined to ignore or hide.
When we know the rationale behind every decision that may have contributed to an undesirable outcome, then we open ourselves up to truly learning why accidents happen and how we can build sustainable policies to empower our people to make more informed decisions and establish a safe workplace culture. This will also positively impact efficiency across the organisation.
I believe the same logic applies to our bigger problems impacting our society. Issues such as crime, poverty, and climate change aren’t new. But if we continue to make the same mistakes and refuse to engage and collaborate more with each other on these issues then the problems become bigger, and the solutions get further away.
We do have some options here. We can either go at it on our own or work together towards a common goal to strengthen what we learn, who we empower, and how we sustain these valuable lessons to create a better world for everyone.
As the old African proverb says, “if you want to walk fast, walk alone; if you want to walk far, walk with others.”
I hope we choose to collaborate more so we can achieve these desired outcomes, and I hope you enjoy the content that we have compiled for you in this issue of Linkage Magazine.