Articles & Blogs by David Libby

3 Questions Board Members Should Ask About Serious Injury and Fatality Prevention

Categorized under: Serious Injuries & Fatalities

It was 1993 and Paul O’Neill was attending his first board meeting as a Director at one of the largest companies in the world.  Just as the meeting was coming to a close, O’Neill asked, “Where is the safety report?”  As the story goes, no safety report was planned but the question had profound effects. It set the company on the path to creating safety excellence and embedding safety as a cultural value. Board member influence can do that — uniquely — and it saves lives while creating business value. Powerful Questions Here are three powerful questions board members should...

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How to Transform Business Results by Getting Safety Right First

Categorized under: Safety Culture, Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Insight 1

Over the last few years, I’ve led dozens of safety leadership workshops and discussions, and one of my first questions is always, “Does getting safety right first help the business overall?” Most people readily agree safety is a good business practice, but what they mean by that and the degree to which they truly understand the connection between safety and business success is often highly variable. An Exemplary Leader We recently began a project where the CEO truly exemplifies a deep understanding of why “getting safety right first” is morally, operationally, and fiscally, important to his organization. In our first...

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“Fixing Stupid” Starts with Personal Reflection

Categorized under: Behavior-Based Safety, Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Behavior, Insight 6

Over my many years of helping organizations improve safety and overall business results, I’ve heard countless managers and even front-line employees say (usually after an incident), “You can’t fix stupid!” This statement bothers me on many levels and, in my opinion, reflects the very mental model that keeps organizations from improving and advancing their safety culture. Sometimes the comment is made by the injured employee as a self-deprecating explanation of something they knew better than to do. Much more often it is a degrading comment made by a supervisor, manager or executive, one I’m sure the speaker wouldn’t want the...

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Connecting the Human Resources Function to Your Organization’s Safety Strategy

Categorized under: Improvement Strategy

Tagged as: Sustaining Systems

In some of my client work, it quickly becomes apparent how well, if at all, the Human Resources (HR) function is connected to the overall safety management strategy for the organization.  Too often the two are not well connected.  It’s rarely an issue of motivation in my experience, but more so an issue of capability: HR professionals don’t understand how to get involved or with what to get involved. Let’s first look at the ‘how’ of engagement.  If the organization’s leadership team is strategically governing the safety improvement agenda, HR needs to be a key part of that effort.  As...

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Decision Making for Safety Leaders: Part 2

Categorized under: Improvement Strategy, Safe Decision Making, Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Organizational Safety, SIF prevention, Thomas Krause

Decision Making for Safety Leaders Part 2: Organizational Improvement Strategies Introduction In the first part of this series, we introduced new research findings that point to site leaders having the greatest potential to impact serious injuries and fatalities (SIF).  Part 2 reviews the most significant situations and types of decisions for effective safety leadership. It also presents a new perspective on incident causation leading to improvement strategies aimed at SIF prevention. Let’s examine one case from the study of over 600 decisions leading up to 60 life-altering and fatal events. In 2010, a metal dust explosion, inside a metal blender,...

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Safety Management

Categorized under: Safety Culture, Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Behavior, Insight 1, Safety Management System

Putting a solid safety management process in place, in any organization—much less sustaining it—can be difficult to wrap your arms around. One thing I think we can all agree on, however, is that you must start with a desire and commitment to having one. A case in point: not long ago, a prospective client (that subsequently became a client), reached out to me for help. He expressed concern that his organization had a recordable injury rate significantly higher than the industry average. He wanted to know what we might be able to do to address their safety management process, so...

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Which Comes First – Great Leadership or Great Safety Leadership?

Categorized under: Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Behavior, Insight 3

Like the great debate of which came first – the chicken or the egg – so too is the topic of what comes first – great leadership or great safety leadership. Let’s start by looking at what great leaders do. When you think about the most influential leader you’ve ever followed, what were the characteristics, attributes and behaviors of that person? I’ve asked this question in literally hundreds of workshops and the most common answers are… She really listened to me. He was open to my feedback and ideas, often using them when he made decisions. She was interested in...

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Serious Injury and Fatality Prevention

Categorized under: Improvement Strategy, Serious Injuries & Fatalities

Tagged as: Innovation, Insight 2, SIF prevention

It’s been nearly a decade since our first study on serious injury and fatality prevention explained why so many companies were seeing recordable injuries improve, while fatal injuries were level or increasing. Dr. Tom Krause, with collaborators from 9 global organizations studied the problem in 2010. They concluded that the disturbing trend was the result of differences in the precursors which lead to serious injuries and fatalities compared to other types of injuries. This work demonstrated that the traditional approach to safety improvement is ill-advised. For decades, the strategy was to reduce exposure at the bottom of the safety triangle...

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Safety Leadership

Categorized under: Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Behavior, Insight 3

Improving the quality of safety leadership is the single most important change an organization can make to increase the effectiveness of their safety programs. While it’s not surprising that strong safety leadership results in effective safety efforts, our experience and research show us that in many organizations where safety is a critical concern, even highly effective leaders have a knowledge gap when it comes to safety leadership. This gap can directly impact the overall quality of the safety effort and, ultimately, the safety of people within the organization. So, how do we bridge the knowledge gap and improve the effectiveness...

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Safety Culture

Categorized under: Safety Culture

Tagged as: Insight 4

We all know that building a strong safety culture is important for the overall success of your organization’s safety effort, but how does this connection actually work? Is it a general idea you take on faith? Or, is it something that can be demonstrated? In the book we co-authored, 7 Insights Into Safety Leadership, we present a set of cultural characteristics are essential for improving safety and support organizational performance in general.  A culture assessment focused on these attributes can predict safety engagement of front-line employees, injury frequency, and a set of performance variables that apply outside safety as well....

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