Labels

It’s quite easy to give ourselves labels, isn’t it? Let me explain.

I live up in the mountains and I drive very curvy roads to work and back, to go to the grocery store, kids’ basketball games, anywhere. I can go an entire trip without even seeing another car.  I’ve gotten pretty good handling these roads. I have to, they are hazardous.

I live a full two hours from a major city. It’s where I head when I go to the airport, big concerts, and to vacation. On this occasion I was doing all three and my family was coming with me. I’m a mountain driver and the multi-lane highways, constant lights, and excessive traffic had me unnerved. Sure enough, I got confused and blew right through a big red light. I drove right into five lanes feeding the intersection in four directions. It was sheer luck that no one else was in the intersection. You know that moment when you knew you screwed up? I knew I just I screwed up. Just in case I wasn’t aware of my error, an SUV coming from my left laid on his horn and came up right up beside me. I looked over at him. He stared at me with an angry face yelling at the closed windows. All I could do was point at my head with a crooked face and mouth “I’m stupid.” He seemed to accept that. He nodded, and then he went on. I had interpreted my own behavior with a label, “Stupid,” and that simple adjective seemed appropriate. Incidentally, my wife and kids agreed as well.

Labels are Easy

I had stamped myself “stupid.” It’s quite easy to give ourselves a label, isn’t it? We look at our behavior, see the outcome of it, and we give ourselves a label. In fact, labeling is quite popular in modern business where management training often involves some personality test like the Colors or the MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Inventory) where we learn everyone’s label in hopes of better collaboration. We are taught to describe ourselves: “I’m an ‘Introvert’ which explains my discomfort working in big teams;” or “My co-worker is a ‘Judger’ which explains why she is so critical.” Somehow these labels seem to be the magic elixir that makes business work better. We have the impression that if we just “know” ourselves and others better then our work together will be more collaborative and productive. That somehow through a label we can better anticipate how the boss will react to our request for a budget increase for a safety project or we can better manage the resistance we experience from workers given a new safety process.

But, in the end, labeling doesn’t impact our ability to manage the behavior of others (or ourselves for that matter). After the labeling event—where we take a survey, learn our color or type (our label) and discuss our tendencies in a group kumbaya, trust-fall session—everyone goes back to the same work environment they came from. We go back to the same deadlines, confusing instructions, boring repetitive tasks, bureaucratic requirements, inferior tools, degrading facilities, and dealing with the same ambiguity that make human interactions complicated.

The environment is the context of all we do. It is not one thing, it is a multitude of present realities and artifacts of past events of varying levels of importance that our brain has to navigate and engage with. This dynamic and complex environment triggers our actions and afterward lets us know if our actions made a difference, or just screwed up things more. After labeling, we may feel enlightened, but the environment doesn't change and we end up acting the same way as in the past as the environment dictated. Nothing changes.

We are all labelers. We do it all the time. It is literally human nature because of our cognition (yeah, other animals don’t do it). Modern cognitive psychology differentiates between our initial “Fast” System 1 intuitions and the delayed “Slow” System 2 analyses of the events happening around us.  System 1’s job is to get the ‘gist’ of the event—is it a threat? Is it a treat?  When we watch other humans our ‘gists’ are labels, often encumbered with our own stereotypes, biases and self-serving attributions.  Too often we get stopped at System 1 and do not do the extra analytical work to come up with a reasoned explanation for the event, one that we can actually turn into a solution.

So we overuse labels when dealing with the safety of our work crews and managers.  For example, if workers can’t follow rules and procedures that are clearly written in the manuals and training, and then they get hurt, they’re “Stupid,” “Noncompliant,” or “Lazy” or “___________” (you can fill in the blank – please keep it rated “PG”). Shoot, we even label when folks don’t get hurt, such as when their work space is disorganized or PPE disheveled, when they have blank eyes during a safety meeting or hide their errors.

Telling folks “Don’t BE insert label…” simply does not work. You can’t fix a label; that would be like fixing a person. Instead of asking a person to BE or NOT TO BE something, focus on how you can help them DO what is required to be safe.

We label a lot… and it's a dysfunctional practice. Labeling is a human tendency that results in a dysfunctional practice that not only hurts your safety culture but also does little to reduce the risks that get people hurt.

Instead of asking a person to BE something, focus on how you can help them DO what is required to be safe.