RBS is steeped in a flawed leadership philosophy that is a top-down approach. Leadership is about influence, but when a person has a title of position, but doesn’t have the ability to influence, bad things happen. Positional leaders revert to leveraging their positional authority and become dictatorial in their leadership style. This is where they practice telling people what to do. In my research, I found this practice of telling people what to do to be the single most significant cause for a leader’s dysfunction and ineffectiveness to influence people, but more often than not, they got results! For me it was a revelation that it’s the norm for these types of leaders to be everywhere, they talk at their people instead of with their people, they make people suffer with their endless monologues at safety meetings, make constant emotional appeals, and the worst thing of all—they are so happy with themselves. They feel the struggle is real. Life as a safety leader has a purpose and meaning for them. However, if you measure the results, it only works at a great cost. It’s “actually” not working. In the safety leader’s reality, it seems to be working, but in the actuality of the people, and the results, it’s not working long term. RBS is short-term, and BBS is long-term.
BBS gets blamed for RBS, and that’s the confusion. RBS is not BBS. Here’s a simple way to tell the difference—RBS is about results, and BBS is about behavior. Results are an indicator that you are reinforcing safe behavior: 1) fluently, through expert level Performance Safety Coaching©, and 2). Frequently, to achieve habit strength. BBS believes that people are the solution, and RBS sees people as the problem.