Safety Leadership

What Every Executive Should Look for in a Safety Dashboard

Categorized under: Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Measurement

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 that effect. He wrote about a Vice President from his early career who had regular safety scorecard reviews with his CEO. Unfortunately, the exercise amounted to little more than a ‘spitting contest’ among the VPs, a contest nobody wanted to lose.  A great deal of...

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7 Insights into COVID-19 Prevention

Categorized under: Behavior-Based Safety, Safe Decision Making™ Articles, Safety Culture, Safety Leadership, Serious Injuries & Fatalities

Long before COVID-19 upended life as we know it, there were organizations demonstrating exceptional safety leadership. We are proud to have worked with countless safety professionals and leaders, from small companies and major global organizations alike, who ‘Get It’ when it comes to safety. We even wrote a book about what distinguishes a leader who is very successful in safety from one who struggles, called the 7 Insights into Safety Leadership[1]. Then came COVID -19 which threatened us all and changed everything.  Every leader and every worker, in every company we knew, turned their full attention to maintaining business continuity,...

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Making Good Decisions in a Sea of Statistics

Categorized under: Safe Decision Making™ Articles, Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Insight 7

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,...

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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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Developing a Safety Improvement Strategy: Part 2

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...

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What Is a Safety Improvement Strategy: Part 1

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...

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Portrait of an Effective Safety Leader

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...

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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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The Case for Safety

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...

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Why Mindfulness will not Improve your Safety Performance

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...

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