The Cool Kids Win Sometimes

I was trying to get my boy to wear his elbow pads and knee pads when skateboarding at the skate park. I had made it a point to show him all of my PPE I put on while I was mowing and doing other yard tasks with him. I thought I finally got through to him as he began to try out the skateboarding PPE!

Later that day I drove him to our new, local skate park where the town had converted old tennis courts with ramps, verts and other obstacles for tricks. This place was quite popular with many of his pre-teen friends who would huddle together watching the older kids, high schoolers and college kids, do tricks that they were scared to try.

I hung around a little, hiding behind the bleachers to investigate this scene. These older ‘cool’ kids of my son’s admiration were not wearing elbow pads or knee pads! Much less, they didn’t wear helmets AND they spit and cussed! Soon there were a bunch of pre-teen kids, including my son, spitting and cussing as they attempted their amateur kicks and slides.

It hit me. My boy wanted to fit in, he wanted to be part of the “in” group. He saw how the older kids treated the younger kids who wore pads. They were put in the “out” group, made fun of as ‘dorks’ and ostracized. No kid allowed themselves to be seen hanging out with these kids deemed ‘uncool.’ Right there in front of my eyes was a kid, skating alone, who had been friends with my son’s crew since childhood, all because he was laden with ill fitting, abominable pads. My son, instead, decided to mimic the cool kids and ditched his pads.

Who are the cool kids at your worksite? Is it YOU, the PPE laden vestibule of virtue and wisdom? No offense but I highly doubt it. You might as well go to the costume shop, buy some fairy wings and a halo before walking out in front of the workforce. Regardless, you and your leaders (if they are mindful of their actions) often go out and earnestly try to influence worker behavior.

If you are not the cool kid, then who is? My bet is that you could go through each department and pick out the most influential of the bunch. Social Psychologists call these folks the ‘Popular Opinion Leader’. While they may have no real power, their opinion can run the shop. They are a direct indicator of your safety culture in their department.

Unfortunately some opinion leaders are the Citizens Against Virtually Everything (the CAVE Dweller) holding court after the manager leaves cutting small jokes about how no one was going to comply with requests or calling out the new procedure as the ‘flavor of the month’. Behind the scenes they use these sly verbal tactics to build team resistance to engaging the safety systems and initiatives often suggesting how to get around compliance without getting caught or in trouble. They are against everything brought up by management almost as a knee-jerk reaction.

CAVE tactics are cunning and evasive. During meetings they suck the wind out of the conversation by bringing up old grievances from many years ago taking the meeting down the rabbit hole with no bottom. Cracking jokes and having loud side conversations minimize the importance of the meeting. They may just stay quiet, arms folded during the meeting and then hold their own meeting afterward. When forced to comply with management processes they promote pencil whipping suggesting folks fill out the forms without really doing anything yet being sure not to reveal anything that will draw attention.

CAVE dwellers know how to complain to the right manager to get deadlines pushed back long enough until the next flavor of the month arrives. Even some subterfuge is used to promote their agenda by causing some type of upset in production to draw attention away from other issues, filing trivial grievances with the union, or getting folks to call-in absent on critical shifts during rollout of initiatives. I’ve actually been quite amazed with some of the innovation in CAVE tactics I’ve seen over the years! Smart folks.

Doing these tactics alone is not as impactful as getting others to join in. They will attempt to use their status to pull the rest of the team over into the CAVE. Sometimes they are unsuccessful recruiting their peers and they stand proudly in singular defiance amusing the others. Too often, however, a crafty CAVE Dweller will recruit a whole CAVE full of people. Most on the crew will not actively join the CAVE but are perfectly content to sit back and let the CAVE put up their resistance. Heck, why not, less work for them.

Where is the CAVE full of the cool kids at your site?