Carol Hymowitz has an excellent piece in the April 23 Wall Street Journal about the things bosses can do to increase workplace safety.  The title of her column is: "Bosses Have to Learn How to Confront Troubled Employees."

The fact is that bosses need to confront all employees, not just troubled ones.  The work of controlled confrontation is central to what bosses are supposed to do.

We're not talking about nuclear-weapons, Jerry Springer confrontations here.  We are talking about the regular, routine conversations that should be a natural part of life in the workplace.  Those conversations should be about performance and behavior.

Performance is the measurable output of work.  Behavior is what people say and do. Bosses need to talk to their people frequently about both.

Bosses should use those conversations to set clear expectations and check for understanding.  They should address specific incidents and use the opportunity to coach, counsel, correct and encourage.

Those conversations, that I call "supervisory interviews" are gateways.  Sometimes they're the gateway to growth and development, and success.  Sometimes they're the gateway to documentation, discipline, and termination. Most of the time, they're not very dramatic at all.

The very best bosses, the ones whose teams have both high productivity and high morale, are the ones that touch base a lot, that set clear expectations and check for understanding, and use every contact to make things better. They're the bosses that are more likely to have a safe workplace, too.

That's because they follow what I call the Dinosaur Principle.  Problems and trouble are like dinosaurs.  They're easy to deal with when they're small.  But if you let them get big they can eat you.

It turns out that the behaviors that make a boss a great boss are also the ones that make the workplace safer.

Wally Bock has helped people learn to be great bosses for more than a quarter century. His latest book, Performance Talk: The One-on-One Part of Leadership, makes learning key leadership principles almost effortless by teaching through a story and providing lists of resources for further growth.

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