We're joined this episode by a distinguished guest and global expert: Senior Vice President Health, Safety, Environment & Carbon at bp, Dr Fawaz K Bitar, known to many as "Fuzzy." Together, we explore the supportive relationship between a culture of inclusion and belonging and safety performance.
Fuzzy has been with bp for over 30 years and worked in the UK, US, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Egypt and Indonesia. More recently, he held the position of Head of the Upstream Executive Office and prior to this he was bp’s Head of Global Operations, Upstream for eight years. In March 2020 he was appointed Senior Vice President for HSE & carbon. Fuzzy has a Doctor of Engineering degree from the University of Aberdeen and a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Newcastle University.
He is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Chairman of the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP) and is an Honorary Professor in the School of Engineering at the University of Aberdeen. He also serves as a member of the McKinsey Crisis Advisory Board.
Along with these many accomplishments, he has also championed Diversity, Equity and Inclusion as part of the fabric of his organizations and has seen first-hand the interconnected relationship between trust and safety. This is a special that is quite dear to our hearts, chock full of lessons for leadership and life.
Transcript below:
Erica D'Eramo 0:05
Hello, and welcome to the Two Piers podcast. I'm your host, Erica D'Eramo. And today we will be talking about inclusion, belonging and the impact on safety. So we have a particularly special guest visiting us today and joining us. I'm really excited about this. So his name is Dr. Bitar, known affectionately by me and most of my former colleagues as Fuzzy. So Fuzzy's been with bp for over 30 years. He's worked in the UK, in the US, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Egypt and Indonesia. More recently, he held the position of Head of the Upstream for the Executive Office. And prior to that, he was bp's Head of Global Operations, which is when I worked with him pretty closely. So Head of Global Operations for the Upstream have for eight years. And then in March 2020, he was appointed Senior Vice President for HSE & Carbon.
So Fuzzy has a Doctor of Engineering degree from the University of Aberdeen and a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Newcastle University. He's also a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, chairman of the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers, also known as IOGP. And he's an honorary professor in the School of Engineering at the University of Aberdeen. As if he doesn't have enough on his plate, he's also a member of the McKinsey Crisis Advisory Board. So quite a busy and illustrious man. So we really appreciate you spending some time to join us and share your expertise with us Fuzzy, thank you.
Fawaz Bitar 1:51
Very generous introduction. Appreciate it. Thank you.
Erica D'Eramo 1:54
Yeah. So I, when I started brainstorming about this idea, like for a long time, I've been thinking about the connection between culture, safety, inclusion and belonging and how those interact. And you came to mind immediately, because of the work that I I've seen you do in this space over, I mean, decades. And you are kind of, in my mind, like the world class expert on this. So it's really great that we got like you you didn't delegate this, you came in to share your expertise directly. And and this is something that I think you share expertise with, sort of around the industry as well.
Fawaz Bitar 2:33
Yes, yes, indeed. Yeah, I think, Erica, I mean, the the subject of inclusion, and it goes, obviously, it emanates from many different things. So for example, the research that we did was really around, if you like, trust, the ability to have trust between the leadership and the workforce. And the question is, how do you build trust, you build trust through care, right. And care and inclusion, obviously, are very linked that people have a sense of belonging they're feeling cared for. So what our research showed basically, is where we have that very strong, caring relationship between management and leadership and the workforce at large, we actually have better safety outcomes, better reliability outcomes, and better business performance in general. So it just shows that, you know, safety is not something that is bolted on the side, it is firmly integrated in our day to day and it all goes in hand in hand.
Erica D'Eramo 3:31
Yeah, I, it's funny, you said that, because I literally have those words, it's not bolted on the side, in reference to DEI and I often use this parallel between diversity, equity and inclusion and safety, that they both need to be integral to how you do business, they aren't something that you can just tack on to the side, they're interwoven into the very elements of decision making, and how you operate in a business, especially something like energy where it can be, you know, hazardous environments with high stakes. So yeah,
Fawaz Bitar 4:07
I think when it comes to decision making and DE&I I mean, there's numerous studies, have been cited for the quality of decision making when you have a more diverse group of people making that decision, and it takes all forms of diversity. It's not just gender diversity. It's also ethnic diversity it's diversity of thought. And certainly my experience. My firsthand experience of this is when we have teams that are more diverse, we make better decisions.
Erica D'Eramo 4:36
Yeah, we did a recent podcast episode on introversion and extraversion. And I was joking that when it when push comes to shove and I'm sitting on the airplane, I want to know that the team that designed the safety systems for the airplane was not all extroverts and not all introverts. I want a good mix.
Fawaz Bitar 4:55
Absolutely.
Erica D'Eramo 4:56
The quiet voices right? So I'm interested, you know, this gets a little, I don't know, to the core of, of our belief systems, perhaps. But when I witnessed your leadership, your commitment to safety was always crystal clear to me. And I'd be interested in hearing a little bit about why safety was important to you. I think we sometimes take it for granted. But I think we all have our own story around that.
Fawaz Bitar 5:22
Yeah, I mean, my story, which I have shared previously, is I actually always thought I was a good safety leader. But my relationship was completely transformed after a couple of what I would call pivotal moments in my life. The first one was around 20 years ago, I was working in the Gulf of Suez on a dive vessel, and we had a diver in the water, and very sadly, his helmut came off and, and he drowned in front of us on the monitor. It was too late by the time we sent him a rescue diver. And, you know, the impact that incident had on me was, you know, going to the funeral and speaking to the families, seeing the orphans left behind, the children left behind fatherless, the impact on the team were devastated obviously. You know, it's, it's incredible that impact, that impact stays with you forever. And it wasn't the only fatality that I that occurred under my watch. There was one in Indonesia when someone fell from height, and then in the North Sea when I looked after global operations. So I think it's very easy as leaders, because we're far from the epicenter of an incident. To move on pretty quickly, you move on pretty rapidly. But the you know, these these deaths, you know, they're not numbers, they're real people with real lives, and now they represent vanished dreams and mourning families, you know, forever lost, but never forgotten. And I think we as leaders have to wake up every day, just thinking about those people, and how they are. And I think that just reinforces that, you know, safety is something that you could never have momentum on. You have to be on it all the time, every day.
Erica D'Eramo 6:58
Yeah. I think that's one of the reasons that folks who have worked in these more hazardous environments sometimes have a very different viewpoint on kind of what's important. And the noise is less important. And the real thing is, do we all go home? At the end of the day? Like, do we all go home intact at the end of the day? And do our people go home intact at the end of the day? So when we talk about safety, we've kind of talked about like the extremes of it. But what does that word even mean to you? The word safety?
Fawaz Bitar 7:36
Well, I think, you know, we've heard people talk about safety in different ways. And I think this is something I've learned is, you know, you hear people say safety first, you have people say safety is not a priority. You know, it's not a competing priority. And actually, what's important is, is not to debate this philosophically, but to use what resonates with the people. And I think sometimes you do have to say safety first. Because, you know, if that resonates more with people than then for example, saying it's, it's not a priority, it's a core value that's always there. So I think the message I would give is, first of all, is when we're messaging safety, be crystal clear on how you're doing it, make sure it's reaching your audience at all levels of the organization often we'll think of, you know, especially if we work in the office, we'll be thinking typically, of engineers, and so on, but we need to reach every level, every level of the org, which is a challenge. And it's a challenge, to communicate through so many layers to everybody, we could talk about that best how to do that in a minute. But it's really, you know, communication is, is absolutely fundamental. So I think for me, safety is really looking out for each other, it's about caring for each other, treating people almost as if, you know, just as if they were part of your family. And I think when you do that you just have a much better environment for everything to thrive, not just safety.
Erica D'Eramo 9:04
Yeah, I think I would say I was trying to think of like when I started to see the language shift, at least from my own perspective in the field around safety and how we talked about each other as humans and safety left this really like cerebral technical realm and was more about treating each other as humans that we care about and who have families and who we want to go home at night. And so, you know, boards, cork boards with photos of folks' kids or loved ones, just to remind us that these people that we only see in this context, sometimes, of say offshore or the office, they have full vibrant lives outside of that and they're fully fledged humans that we care about and want to go home to partake in their the other elements of their life. And that like "one team" kind of treating each other or as a family I saw, I think maybe the late aughts, I really started to see that language develop. And by the time I wrapped wrapped up at bp, I felt like that was pretty embedded.
Fawaz Bitar 10:12
Yeah, I mean, if you think about the model that we went through safety, it's not too dissimilar to the model that most people will be familiar with the Bradley curve for the DuPont model for how safety culture evolves, you know, you go from this very top down safety leadership to very generative or interdependent safety leadership, and you go through through that entire gamut. Of course, I think you need to use different approaches for your different different contexts. And, and it's really important to adjust to that context. But it is clear to me that whenever we can aim for that culture of care that culture speak up, and by the way, creating that requires leadership to shift their behavior. So for example, how we respond to failure really matters, we recognize that people make mistakes. And, you know, other than blaming the individual, we're going to focus more on the system, you know, these typical human performance principles, you know, if we adopt those that is going to lead us to that culture of care. And in time. I do want to say, Erica, one thing about communication, because it is, it's something definitely that has been a big learning for me. You know, we in, as you know, in bp, we had the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and we had, you know, that's when we created the operations function. And we really drove safety hard, but it was, you know, four years later, there was a fatal incident. And we really searched hard to understand how can that happen when when we had focused so hard on safety. And one thing, which became clear to me is how we communicate so that the messages leave, are received at every level of organization is really important. And it takes time, and you have to be systematic about it, you cannot just say things and expect them to occur. And key to that is the role of supervision and the supervisors, because the supervisor is the key interface between the frontline workers and the senior leaders. And there's now numerous studies that have shown that you get a better safety culture, a better safety environment, you get better safety outcomes, when that communication is robust, both ways, both up and down. So communicating is really important. You talked about posters and things. Yes, I think making safety personal, hugely important. That's the way you win hearts and minds. But also we have to be careful, you know, we found in a in I think I read somewhere in a study, that if you put up a poster on a wall, 2% of people are likely to change their behavior. But actually, if you have that informal, genuine, genuine discussion, face to face with some there's more like a 70% chance that people will change.
Erica D'Eramo 12:56
Wow. Yeah. I mean, I think the posters end up just being wallpaper, like just the generic posters that are that come through from communication style. So yes, they, we we ended up being becoming blind to them almost in that conversation becomes critically important. But I love what you said about the two way communication, because that is something that I see as a big tension, when you have the command and control style that is often necessary in hazardous environments to react to react quickly to emergencies, there is the balance and the blind spot that can occur of losing access to the communication going the reverse way. And, yeah, that's why like, right for emergency response training, they, they've, they train you to ask the room, what have I forgotten? Like, what have I missed here? And you have to wait for the response. But I'm interested in your thoughts on that.
Fawaz Bitar 14:01
Well, my thoughts are different communication styles for for your, your context. So for example, you know, if if you are in a place where the command and control emergency response, I think is a somewhat of an exceptional example, because I do believe in an emergency response, you do need pretty direct communication. It's a very short, you know, it's a very time based scenario that you're in and out of, whereas ongoing operations is continuous our projects go on for a long time. So for example, if I was in, you know, the security I was leading a project in, in Papua Indonesia, I was a project manager for bp's Tangguh LNG project there, and we have 10,000 people on the ground. And they would leave you know, there'll be semi skilled or unskilled labor, they'll leave for six weeks and sometimes they won't come back. So my ability to build culture is almost zero. So and meanwhile we're having significant safey incedents, people falling from height, so actually the communication style for that scenario is actually quite different to a more mature safety culture. So it is likely to be more top down. And I think that is appropriate. But if you were in an operation, which has matured safety culture, I think you'd always want to aim for the culture of care, even in the project example I gave, you want to aim for a culture of care, but sometimes you do need to take different approaches. So my message would be, know your context and adjust your communication style for your context, always with a view of going to that interdependent safety culture where care is at the heart of it.
Erica D'Eramo 15:33
Yeah. And that becomes even more effective, if you are understanding, if you're implementing those behaviors of inclusion and belonging, where you understand the different cultures that you have you understand the different humans that you have in your organization.
Fawaz Bitar 15:48
Yeah, I mean, that is, that is a very good point you make Erica, you know, not all, you know, you're gonna need different approaches for different cultures. And what typically works in the West may not necessarily work in the East. And again, it's part of understanding your context and adjusting your communications, your approach to suit the environment you're in.
Erica D'Eramo 16:09
Yeah, yeah, I love the distinction between kind of, we're in the emergency now and we're reacting, versus we've exited and we're in standard operations, because I think sometimes we sort of gets stuck in, "this is the way we do it." And that hierarchy, that hierarchical kind of structure, can challenge that upward communication.
Fawaz Bitar 16:34
And I would just be careful a little bit on culture, because I've seen people sometimes also use it as an excuse to take a hard approach. Like, and because they say, look, in certain parts of the world, you know, they only understand that you go, you know, you have to be edgy, you have to be this. But actually, my experience, our experience is actually even in the research that we did that, you know, culture is important, but leadership actually is what defines that. And if you have good leadership, and if you go to the cultural approach, it pretty much works everywhere. It's not just something or one part of the world is for everywhere.
Erica D'Eramo 17:12
Yeah, yeah. I love that myth busting, actually, because I've certainly heard that in the past, that you need this like really hard edge, like top down in certain environments. And maybe it works in the short term, right? Like maybe in that instance, you get the behavioral change that you want, but what is the long term impact of that? Like, what does that do to the trust and the engagement and the buy in of your group over the ark?
Fawaz Bitar 17:39
Yeah, you're right, building a sustainable safety culture is gonna have trust at the heart of it.
Erica D'Eramo 17:44
Yeah, some of the things you're mentioning here really remind me of this, like, very typical case study that you get in every MBA kind of leadership class around the Mount Everest, Mount Everest summit that the book Into Thin Air was based on. And it's essentially just a case study about the effects of psychological safety, on team dynamics, and how in this one instance, it was really tragic. They lost like five members over two different teams, because like, they had a very command and control structure. And people didn't feel comfortable speaking up when they noticed things going wrong. And, and that, that kind of like stands out as this typical, typical case that people fall back on. And yet, you see it so clearly, when you're in the hazardous environments that psychological safety and trust really make the difference between everyone kind of coming home alive or tragedy occurring? Are you familiar with any other good like case studies or learning?
Fawaz Bitar 18:58
Yeah, let's talk a little bit about psychological safety and speak up because,
Erica D'Eramo 19:04
Yeah
Fawaz Bitar 19:04
In the safety space, they can be a little bit. I don't know if the right word is confused, but typically in safety are, you know, if you think back several years, the "speak-up" was always around, if you see an unsafe act, speak up, I hope that we're in a place where that now occurs, and people do not worry about if something unsafe is about to occur, you know, they feel comfortable to speak up and, and take action. And I feel that is far more advanced than what we call psychological safety, which really was introduced into our vocabulary, probably fairly recent in the last couple of years. So I think, you know, not to, not to overdo this, but what is the definition of psychological safety? Well, I think it's, it's the belief that you know, a person one you know, will not be punished or you won't be humiliated for speaking up with your ideas with your questions, concerns or mistakes. And, and the team is actually safe to take some, you know what I would call into personal risk taking? I think it was Amy Edmondson who said that, came up with this definition. So it's a much broader definition than if you like, speak up in the, in the traditional safety vocabulary. And the question is, is what are we trying to achieve. And what we're trying to achieve is, is that, you know, people can work without fear or embarrassment, that we have a very strong, you know, safety culture, where we can encourage and recognize speak up, we are able to take risks, in what we say, we're able to innovate, we're allowed to admit our mistakes when we make them and learn from them. And we can highlight, you know, problems, we can highlight dangers and opportunities, but most of all, it's about, it's about being being inclusive, we're creating that environment where everyone can come to work and be their best and do their best work ever.
Erica D'Eramo 21:05
Yeah. So I love the work around psychological safety. I think that people have probably written entire theses about this. But the the work around inclusion and belonging, I think, is highly tied to that. I'm curious, when you hear those words, inclusion and belonging, what do they, what does that actually mean to you as a leader?
Fawaz Bitar 21:28
Well, you know, I think inclusion and belonging means to me that everyone is feeling valued. They're feeling part of the team. They're feeling respected. They can bring their voice equally to the team. So it's creating that sense of belonging where people feel that their input is valued, no matter how controversial or how challenging it may be, to the status quo. We need people who can challenge and, and often, sometimes those, those people are put aside and actually, you know, challenge and provocation is healthy, and it leads to progress. So for me, belonging and inclusion is about everyone being able to bring their fullest self to work without any fear of reprisal.
Erica D'Eramo 22:20
Yeah, and like we mentioned earlier, that's really how you access all of the benefits of diversity, like we can talk about the benefits of diversity. But if you have a diverse set of people who are there, despite being different, and not because they are different, and bringing those different viewpoints, then you're, you're not really leveraging all of the, you know, the fruit that comes along with a diverse workforce.
Fawaz Bitar 22:45
Absolutely. people no matter who you are, where you're from, you know, what your orientation is, and so on. Unless you're able to be able to come and actually speak and, and bring yourself then you're not going to leverage that value.
Erica D'Eramo 22:59
Yeah. So when you when you talk to leaders about what they can be doing to foster these environments, do you have any kind of key takeaways that you think you'd want our, our listeners?
Fawaz Bitar 23:12
Well, with respect to safety?
Erica D'Eramo 23:16
Or yeah, I guess, in this conversation around fostering an inclusive environment that, you know, really underpins a safety culture?
Fawaz Bitar 23:27
Yeah. Well, I think the biggest thing for me is that for leaders is that we need to really invert the whole safety leadership conversation. And rather than see our people as a problem, to be fixed, we need to treat them as a solution to be harnessed. And what I like to see as a change, if you like, and how we lead from, from compliance, to commitment from imposing to involving, and from controlling to caring, and, and my biggest message would be for leaders is often we talk with them, this is with respect to safety, specifically, is we talk about safety, but culture is culture is not what we say. It's what we do. And people know the difference between saying and doing and they will, and people will call us out if we don't match our words with actions.
Erica D'Eramo 24:30
Yes, that culture will eat your strategy for breakfast every time. Yes,
Fawaz Bitar 24:37
Are we just talking about safety, or are we making decisions every day that make us safer? Are we leading by example? Where are we focusing our time? Right? What are we asking people to do? Do we try and help? Do we provide that servant leadership where actually we are in service of our of our people, rather than our people being service of us.
Erica D'Eramo 25:02
Yeah, that servant leadership really helps to visualize that inversion that you speak of kind of the flipping of the hierarchy a little bit that you are supporting, rather than, you know,
Fawaz Bitar 25:14
The model is that everyone is in service of the leaders, but actually, it's the leaders are in service of our people.
Erica D'Eramo 25:20
Yeah. Oof! Gives me goosebumps. So, you know, you have really worked through the realm of academia and research and gotten deep into the weeds of this. For folks who are maybe not pursuing their doctorate in this area, do you have resources that you feel are, you know, accessible, that people could look to if they want to deepen their knowledge?
Fawaz Bitar 25:45
Yeah, I mean, I think the main area that as an industry we've been focused on recently is the area of human performance, because I think we've all realized that, you know, people create safety. We even talk about inherently safe design as a way to get safer, but actually, it's people who design, and who design and hearing right, and so people create safety. And so I think that what we realize is to make the next level of safety performance, we have to really focus on human performance, because that is that is one of the keys, it's not the only key. Okay, you know, there's technology, and there's learning and collaboration. But for me, human performance is a lever that we still need to pull much harder on. And the reason you know, there's plenty of resources. You mentioned at the beginning, I'm a part of an organization called IoGP, the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers, they do a lot of work on, on on safety, there's the Energy Institute will have similar. In fact, there's a module that bp created and gave it to the industry. And it's free for everyone to use on on human performance. I would encourage people to go through that if you're especially if you're in the beginning of the journey of human performance. I think those are probably two areas that would be a very good, very good start.
Erica D'Eramo 27:08
Excellent. Thank you so much. Any, any parting words that you would like to share with our audience?
Fawaz Bitar 27:14
Well, I only that, you know, as leaders, you know, we have the ability to change outcomes. Okay, that's what leaders do, we change outcomes. And I think, you know, our industry today is suffering, still, too many fatalities. One is one too many. And I think we all need to work just tirelessly, every day, to change that trajectory, and I'm confident that we will, and by creating the environment, the culture that you, we've been talking about here today, I see that as the next step change. So thank you very much for having me.
Erica D'Eramo 27:55
Thank you Fuzzy. Thanks for speaking to us today, but also for the leadership that you've displayed in the energy industry and beyond not just around safety, but also around diversity, equity and inclusion. You've really been a voice for change that has impacted me directly and many of my peers directly. So I appreciate that.
Fawaz Bitar 28:14
Thanks, Erica, for having me.
Erica D'Eramo 28:16
And for our listeners, you can find our podcast and lots of other resources available on our website and on our social media platforms where we share as much as we can to help you on your diversity, equity and inclusion journey. So thank you for joining us, and we'll see you next time.