Together, Drs Tristan Casey and Xiaowen Hu are the founders of The Culture Effect consultancy and research group. They are both Senior Lecturers, Casey is a Lecturer at Griffith University’s Safety Science Innovation Lab, and Hu lectures in Human Resource Management at QUT Business School. They took the time to present to NZISM their PARADOXES UNLEASHED BY COVID-10 webinar.
Leadership Paradoxes
Casey and Hu define a paradox as ’a person, thing, or situation that combines contradictory features or qualities’. They’ve recently interviewed twenty-five safety practitioners working in twelve different industries across Australia and New Zealand. Their focus was on the paradoxes they have faced during COVID 19.
As a profession, workplace safety has always faced goal conflicts, such as:
- Are our processes speedy or are we focused on getting the details right?
- Are workers autonomous or kept tightly under control?
- Do we want our systems to be flexible or stable?
- Do we focus on internal goals or external regulatory controls?
COVID 19 has presented a whole new set of paradoxes:
- Do we keep the business alive (saving money) or protecting our people?
- How do we maintain social distancing when it makes the job impossible?
- Do we make centralised decisions or get our workers engaged and involved?
- How do we balance reassuring our workers with providing reliable information, when we honestly don’t know what the answer is?
What is I.C.E.?
Casey and Hu argue that a paradox does not have to mean trade off’s or an either/or mindset. They’ve developed the I.C.E. methodology so that leaders can reconcile both:
I Involvement: Set up a communications plan where workers are given set opportunities to assess proposals and give feedback. Decisions can still be made quickly and people will feel like they got a say in what happened.
C Certainty: Be transparent. It’s ok if you don’t know the answer, just keep people up to date with accurate information rather than making promises you can’t keep.
E Engagement: An organisation can still be a ‘business’ AND show compassion. Take the time to listen to people, acknowledge their challenges and you can still keep your professional boundaries.
What’s the Benefit of I.C.E.?
Based on their research findings which are soon to be published, organisations that were assessed and found to have high I.C.E. scores had higher worker engagement, decreased levels of worker exhaustion, and lower worker ‘turnover intention’.
Conversely, a lower I.C.E. score meant workers were less likely to follow the rules, engage in the development of COVID 19 protocols, and were looking for employment opportunities outside the organisation. If you want to see how your organisation is doing, you can follow the link to download a Free I.C.E. Toolkit.
As always, if you have any thoughts on leadership paradoxes or anything to add to this blog, please call me on 0272 007 680 or email sarah@employmenow.co.nz.