3 Things All Senior Leaders Need to Know About Safety

Organizations often suffer a disconnect between safety professionals and other leaders. Operational leaders are paid to assess situations and make decisions aggressively. They work in cycles of what is wrong and what it will take to fix it, and they are good at what they do. However, this drive can prove counterproductive to safety performance…

Why Safety Is Good Business: The Importance of a Healthy Safety Culture

Most people readily agree that safety is good business, but they span an enormous spectrum in what they mean by that and the degree to which they truly understand the connection between safety and their business. Understanding that connection is important. Without the right understanding, anyone who recognizes their fiduciary duty to their organization will…

Safety as an Organizational Improvement Strategy

If a client came to us saying, “We know we have some leadership and culture issues: Communication is poor, skill level of supervisors and managers in inconsistent, our people don’t un­derstand system thinking, and behavioral reliability is sketchy. Performance is suffering and we need an organizational improvement strategy. How should we approach it?” Our answer…

Don’t Let Your Safety Scorecard be the Tail that Wags the Dog

“If this happened at home, would you go to the hospital?” This was the third question that occurred to David when his warehouse manager stepped off a platform onto a loose rock and rolled his ankle. For the sake of his numbers, David was hoping the answer was “No.” David had attended incident response training…

3 Characteristics of Strong Safety Leadership

Suppose you want to accelerate the safety performance of your organization, but you have limited resources to get started. You can only invest in one of the following strategies to improve safety: You could build a stronger safety culture, improve your safety management systems, build an inherently safer facility, reduce at-risk behavior, or strengthen safety…

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Safety Leadership: This CEO Had One Core Mission

Paul O’Neill was the CEO of Alcoa from 1987 to 2000. Under his leadership, Alcoa’s market value increased from $3 billion in 1986 to $27.53 billion in 2000, while net income increased from $200 million to $1.48 billion. O’Neill began his first speech to Alcoa shareholders in 1987 by saying, “I want to talk to…

Innovation in SIF Prevention

Over the past two decades, many leading organizations have achieved consistent improvement in injury prevention.  On average, US private companies reduced their injury rates by 62% between 1994 and 2014.  But those dramatic reductions in injuries haven’t translated into reductions in workplace fatalities, which dropped by just 34% in the same period.  For a mid-sized…

How to Make Unpopular Decisions: The Key to Good Leadership

Keri’s Dilemma: As the newly-hired head of sales at a family-owned company, Keri faced a challenge that had been ignored for far too long. Since its inception 25 years earlier, the owners had brought in only trusted family members and friends to work in the business. These people were smart, energetic, and available, but were…

These Three Criteria Determine the Value of a Safety Culture Survey

Most leading organizations today use a culture survey of one kind or another. Some are directly related to safety and some indirectly. Often they are given annually. How worthwhile are these instruments and how should they be used? Whether your survey is designed to measure organizational culture in general, safety culture in particular, or both,…

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How Senior Leaders Lead Safety Improvement

One of the most difficult things for a leader to understand is how we influence the safety, health, and wellness of an organization. It’s easy to know the outcomes we want – zero injuries and a thriving workforce. It’s much more difficult to know what individual leaders do on a day-to-day basis to achieve those…