How Leadership Decision Making Influences Worker Well-Being

Organizational leaders are increasingly concerned with the well-being of people in their organization, and they should be. Interpersonal conflict, frustration, detachment, absenteeism, and chronic stress are all signs that burnout or turnover are approaching. At a deeper level is the person’s sense of connectedness, inclusion, and efficacy. Deeper still, people want to be part of…

Building a Deeper Relationship between Operations and Safety

The purpose of this article is to challenge the traditional relationship between senior operations leaders and leaders in the safety function, using the risk matrix as an exemplar and catalyst for change. We contend the traditional relationship has the operations leader delegating pivotal safety decisions to their safety counterparts. The lack of involvement contributes to…

What Every Executive Should Look for in a Safety Dashboard

Why Your Safety Dashboard Deserves Executive Attention On the day of his retirement, the head of EHS at a large, global manufacturing company sent a note filled with advice for his friends and colleagues. This note summed up his decades-long experience.  The first item on this list was “Stop the Spitting Contest,” or something to…

|

Making Good Decisions in a Sea of Statistics

We think we know things we really don’t know, and as a result our decisions are comprised. Effective decision makers are willing to apply some rigor. The deeper our commitment to objective, honest, non-politicized information, the better our decisions will be, and the sooner we will find ourselves back on terra firma.

|

Developing a Safety Improvement Strategy: Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, we talked about the importance of having a carefully planned strategy for how your organization will approach safety improvement. We pointed out that many great organizations who are serious about safety improvement, surprisingly, don’t have a coherent, over-arching Safety Improvement Strategy. Here we go on to Part 2: What…

| |

What Is a Safety Improvement Strategy: Part 1

What Is a Safety Improvement Strategy and Why Do you Need One? It always surprises me when I see leading organizations who value safety lacking a comprehensive strategy to attain their objectives. The situation is usually something like this: “We are doing a lot to improve safety performance. Our leaders are serious about preventing Serious…