Safety Leadership

“Fixing Stupid” Starts with Personal Reflection

Categorized under: Safety Leadership

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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Why Mindfulness will not Improve your Safety Performance

Categorized under: Safe Decision-Making, Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Insight 6, Serious Injuries and Fatalities

When people talk about how safety performance has improved over time, they typically focus on three phases: Technical – improvements in machine and equipment safety; Organizational – a concerted effort to improve the safety of all systems and procedures employed in the workplace; and Behavioral – a specific focus on the behaviors of frontline employees. Each of these phases was initially characterized by a marked improvement in safety performance. These improvements were then followed by the hitting of a plateau, whereby any further gains became marginal. Many safety leaders have the feeling that we have reached another plateau with the...

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Safety, Culture & Business Risk: What’s the Connection?

Categorized under: Safety Culture, Safety Improvement Strategy, Safety Leadership

When Tom Krause and Kristen Bell wrote 7 Insights into Safety Leadership, we were explicitly writing about personal safety within the workplace. We recognized that the insights would apply very well to other types of risks, but we did not focus on those applications directly. We didn’t treat the broad topic of business risk at all. Yet every one of our clients is in the risk management business, and from time to time they ask about our view on the connection between safety and business risk. Not Interchangeable Let’s be clear: One cannot replace “personal safety” with “business safety” in our...

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

Categorized under: Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Safety Leadership, safety management, Thomas Krause

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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Developing a Safety Improvement Strategy as Part of Your Safety Management Plan: Part 2

Categorized under: Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Safety Culture, Safety Leadership, safety management, Serious Injuries and Fatalities

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 should your improvement strategy for safety look like and how do you prepare yourself and your organization for successful execution of the strategy? Approach answering these questions with some caution. It would be easy to inadvertently undermine your objective by getting this off your plate...

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Safe Decision Making for Safety Leaders: Part 2

Categorized under: Safe Decision-Making, Safety Leadership

Tagged as: organizational safety, Safety Culture, Safety Leaders, Safety Leadership, Serious Injuries and Fatalities, serious injury and fatality prevention, serious injury or fatality, SIF prevention, Thomas Krause

Safe 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...

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Safe Decision Making for Safety Leaders: Part 1

Categorized under: Safe Decision-Making, Safety Leadership

Tagged as: organizational safety, serious injury and fatality prevention, SIF prevention

Safe Decision Making for Safety Leaders: Part 1 New Research and Implications for SIF Prevention Introduction The notion that leadership matters to organizational safety is intuitive for most people. Over the years, we have accumulated a thorough understanding of certain aspects of safety leadership, what excellence looks like, and how that leads to safety improvement. Countless books have been written, leadership assessments have been developed, and organizations have entire programs dedicated to developing the safety leadership skills of their employees. Despite this progress, safe decision making is an aspect of leadership that has not received enough attention. Until recently, we...

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What Is a Safety Improvement Strategy and Why Do You Need One as Part of Your Safety Management Plan? (Part 1)

Categorized under: Safety Leadership

Tagged as: BBS, Behavior Based Safety, preventing SIFs, Safety Culture, Safety Leadership, safety management

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 Injuries and Fatalities, and (we think) we’ve done the things thought leaders have recommended. We’re doing a long list of things aimed at safety performance improvement in general, in fact, our people sometimes tell us they suffer from ‘initiative fatigue’. In spite of all this our leaders don’t think we have attained the ‘strong safety culture’ we...

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Safety Management

Categorized under: Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Insight 1, Safety Culture

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: 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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