Coaching Courage on the Front Line
From leadership development courses and culture workshops to human performance training sessions and OSHA refresher programs, our industry spends countless hours talking about safety. There’s one question I find myself asking each time I attend one of these events: How can we coach courage in ourselves and others? Because often, safety failures stem not from a lack of knowledge but from a lack of courage.
Now, I know electrical workers rarely lack physical courage. What I’m referring to is the inner strength that enables a person to speak up, challenge a respected coworker, stop a job, admit confusion and care more about protecting people than their pride. This is an ongoing battle in our industry because despite having more advanced equipment, stronger regulatory standards and better training methods than ever, human beings still crave comfort, which we know can come at a cost. Comfort tells us to stay quiet, avoid making waves and get the job without embarrassing ourselves or anyone else. It protects our social acceptance; courage protects real lives. Somewhere between the two is where your safety culture takes root and begins to either thrive or wither.
Fortunately, much like muscle, courage can be strengthened through repetition. Consider that we repeatedly train workers on rubber glove procedures, grounding methods, switching orders, rescue techniques, minimum approach distance calculations and equipment inspections. Now imagine if we intentionally trained employees on contributing to job briefings; respectfully challenging unsafe behavior; intervening during moments of complacency; checking on coworkers’ well-being; and navigating peer pressure. This is what cultural development looks like.
Stop-Work Authority and Job Briefings
Most industry employers promote stop-work authority. This sounds great on paper, but invoking our authority in the real world can be deeply uncomfortable. For instance, an apprentice who spots an unsafe activity or condition may hesitate to point it out, fearing potential ridicule, retaliation or a missed production deadline. Even seasoned journeymen sometimes struggle to use their authority because doing so requires social courage in addition to procedural understanding.
Logically, this means our industry must normalize courage and actively develop it within our employees, which requires management to foster working environments in which speaking up is expected and respected.
Job briefings are a great place to begin. We sometimes treat them like paperwork exercises, but a truly effective briefing establishes the psychological safety necessary to make every worker feel comfortable voicing their questions and concerns. “If something feels wrong, your voice matters here” should be the underlying message to crew members. This is critical for workforce safety. Risk increases among even the most technically skilled crews when crew members do not feel comfortable challenging one another. Remember, real brotherhood is intervention, not blind agreement. A true brother’s keeper is willing to create and tolerate temporary discomfort to prevent permanent tragedy.
Leadership Vulnerability Needed
Instructors play an enormous role in creating psychologically safe working environments. Young workers need authentic trainers who model accountability, humility and emotional maturity under pressure – not those who pretend to be flawless. An instructor who openly discusses their mistakes, including those times they failed to speak up, gives young workers permission to be human.
This type of candor typically creates trust that elevates workforce communication, which we can leverage to address our industry’s continued celebration of toughness. Right now, the workforce suicide rate is high and heartbreaking. Our employees have been conditioned to suppress anxiety, fear, exhaustion, loneliness, depression and more. But consider a worker who has been coached in courage. Developing the inner strength to stop an unsafe job is the same fortitude required to ask a coworker if they’re feeling OK – or to admit to a colleague that you are not.
Our trade must stop making the distinction between emotional safety and physical safety. A worker distracted by a personal crisis, mental exhaustion or hopelessness increases risk in high-consequence environments. To truly protect our people, we must culturally emphasize communication over ego.
Conclusion
Many incidents begin to percolate in moments of hesitation long before they occur: an unasked question, an unchecked assumption, an ignored instinct. This is why I repeatedly return to the idea of coaching courage over comfort – because safe workers demonstrate character under pressure, not just compliance. Our industry’s future depends on developing skilled, courageous electrical workers who are willing to mentor, challenge, care for, lead and protect each other despite their discomfort.
Speaking of which, we must never forget that young workers are closely observing crew behavior every day, noting who gets respected, mocked, listened to and ignored. They are learning whether concerns are welcomed or if production overrides safety principles. Simply put, culture is transferred from worker to worker long before it becomes written policy, which means that every journeyman, foreman, instructor and supervisor carries cultural responsibility – whether they realize it or not. The onus is now upon us to ask ourselves, how are we teaching our workers to consistently choose courage when comfort is the easier option?
About the Author: Daniel Cooper, CSP, CUSP, serves as an area and off-site coordinator for American Line Builders Apprenticeship & Training (https://albat.org). He was named the 2024 IBEW Instructor of the Year and has 20 years of combined operations and safety experience in the electric transmission and distribution industry.