Safety Leadership Archives | Krause Bell Group

Making Good Decisions in a Sea of Statistics

Mar 29, 2020

Categorized under: Safe Decision Making™ Articles, Safety Leadership

Introduction In a previous life, I was a statistician. I used to be able to tell you how many ways you could win any given poker-hand, hand-calculate complicated multivariate statistical equations using matrix algebra, and explain the difference between an autoregressive integrated moving average and an autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average. But in all those years of studying statistics, I stayed far, far away from epidemiological statistics. Why? Because they were too hard. Epidemiologists have to work with limited data, from biased samples, taken from flawed reporting systems, that shift and change over time: Impossible! Now, suddenly, every scientist, writer,...

How to Transform Business Results by Getting Safety Right First

David Libby

Jul 11, 2019

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...

Developing a Safety Improvement Strategy: Part 2

Tom Krause

Jun 15, 2019

Categorized under: Improvement Strategy, Safety Leadership

Tagged as: safety management

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...

What Is a Safety Improvement Strategy: Part 1

Tom Krause

Jun 1, 2019

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

Tagged as: Behavior, SIF prevention, Strategy

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 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...

Portrait of an Effective Safety Leader

Tom Krause

May 2, 2019

Categorized under: Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Behavior, Leadership Attributes

You know it when you see it. But it isn’t always easy to articulate clearly, especially to those who don’t understand it to start with. What does effective safety leadership really look like? Here is a start: I know that safety is good for our business; for quality, productivity, culture, and profit. My most important priority within safety is the prevention of serious injuries and fatalities. To achieve safety excellence I must assure that I and the leaders around me are excellent safety leaders, extending to the shop floor through every level. I recognize my role in creating the culture we...

“Fixing Stupid” Starts with Personal Reflection

David Libby

Apr 9, 2019

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...

The Case for Safety

Kristen Bell

Mar 15, 2019

Categorized under: Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Insight 1

Those of us who have devoted our careers to safety do it because we want to make a positive difference in peoples’ lives. Full stop. That’s the reason. But we also have a duty to our employers and clients to help them make smart business decisions. The good news is that we can do both – it is not an either or situation. The challenge is demonstrating the value that investment in safety delivers in a world so focused on the bottom line. This article is about the business case for safety and how time and investment in safety delivers...

Why Mindfulness will not Improve your Safety Performance

Filip Coumans

Jan 12, 2019

Categorized under: Behavior-Based Safety, Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Behavior, Insight 6

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...

Decision Making for Safety Leaders: Part 2

Tom Krause

Kristen Bell

David Libby

Jul 28, 2018

Categorized under: Improvement Strategy, Safe Decision Making™ Articles, 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,...

Safe Decision Making for Safety Leaders: Part 1

Kristen Bell

Tom Krause

Jul 25, 2018

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

Tagged as: Innovation, safe decisions, SIF prevention, Thomas Krause

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...