Bill Wilson

Execution

Safety & Process Improvement: Synergy In Motion

In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News you’re in for a treat: one of our teachers and consultants is writing about something else he knows very well: what’s known in the business as “Lean Six Sigma.” In addition to teaching about managing safety performance, our Bill Wilson has been teaching about business process improvement for years. Despite the appearances, it turns out both subjects have a lot in common.

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Leadership

Anecdotes

In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News Paul reflects on some of the great leaders he has met during his working career and his time teaching leaders like you. He shares some of the stories he heard or was a part of when they occurred. Paul’s cleverness was not only being a great observer but also having a great memory for details and being good at analyzing them for what he can learn.

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Hazard/Risk

How Big a Problem Is Complacency?

At the organizational level, there are plenty of examples that suggest it’s a big problem. NASA’s Challenger and Columbia disasters and industrial accidents like …

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Leadership

Invisible Work

In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News Paul explores different ways to think about leadership when it comes to safety. He reflects on thinking from some of the best books on management and leadership and finishes with a most interesting view of leadership when it comes to sending people home alive and well at the end of the day.

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Execution

Undercover Boss

This month Paul’s journey into The Name of the Game Is Execution takes a new twist. With this edition, the focus is now turning to answering the question, “OK Paul, I got your point that execution is important. I get that. So, what do I do to change things? Answer me that!” Well, read this month’s Managing Safety Performance News and you’ll get the first idea.

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Leadership

Credibility Lost

This month Paul examines the credibility of leaders. How precious and useful it is, especially when it comes to sending people home safe at the end of the day. Wish I had his thoughts and advice back when I was trying to free that snake.

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Execution

Organization Power

In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News™, Paul examines Organization Power. He looks at who has the power to make a difference sending people home alive and well at the end of the day. And why power in organizations is so commonly misunderstood. I think you’ll find the lessons he draws from all of this very interesting.

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Top 10 Mistakes

Biggest Mistake Number 1

Managing safety performance– sending everyone home safe at the end of the day – is fundamentally a game of execution. No matter how good the game plan – policies, procedures and programs – when it comes to bottom line safety performance, the game is won or lost on the field.

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Top 10 Mistakes

Biggest Mistake Number 2

Read the mission, vision and values statement of just about any industrial company these days, and you’re bound to find safety prominently mentioned. Words to the effect that “The safety of our stakeholders is of critical importance to the success of our business” can be found right next to the other goals and values so important

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Popular Topics

Popular Articles

Your Safety Meetings

In this month’s Flash, we’re giving your safety meetings a checkup. Instead of another idea for what to talk about, we’re taking a closer look at how your meetings are going—and what makes a good safety meeting good.

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Reliability and Safety

In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, Newton draws on four decades in pulp and paper manufacturing to explore the relationship between reliability and safety. When equipment fails, production falls behind, and the pressure for results builds, does improving reliability necessarily improve safety?

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Real-Time Decisions

In this month’s Flash, we explore real-time decision making, what to do when urgency and pressure push us toward making faster decisions, and how to recognize when it’s time to slow the process down to make a better decision.

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Running Red Lights

In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, Paul takes running a red light and turns it into a much larger lesson about safety, leadership, human behavior, and execution. He starts with a company vehicle that ran a red light near his house and connects that incident to the tragic runway collision at LaGuardia, where technology, procedures, radio communication, and red runway entrance lights were all in place. The system had controls, but the outcome still depended on execution at the point of contact.

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Appreciating Feedback

In this month’s Flash what might get in the way of intervention, why feedback matters, and how a simple “thank you” can encourage the conversations that help prevent injuries.

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Coaching Leaders

In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, Gary Rivenes explores what effective coaching looks like when safety leadership moves from the classroom to the field. Gary writes from experience: before joining Balmert Consulting, he spent more than thirty years in mining leadership roles, from supervising a seventy-person crew to serving as Chief Operating Officer. In those roles, coaching leaders was not a theory or a program. It was part of getting the work done safely and sending people home alive and well at the end of the day.

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All “Those” Rules…

In this month’s Flash we discuss “dumb rules”, and re-visit an easy way to put on great Tool Box Safety Meetings. Unfortunately those sorts of rules are often unwanted and seen as unnecessary, here’s one idea to help you reduce the chance a new one might be needed in the first place.

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A Case Study

This month Paul explains that investigation reports are valuable leadership tools not simply because they identify technical causes, but because they reveal how familiar execution challenges—such as limited training, inexperience, weak supervision coverage, fatigue, time pressure, and inconsistent use of PPE—combine to produce serious outcomes. The primary purpose of an investigation is to help ensure an event does not happen again, but equally important is the Performance Visibility investigations provide: a clearer understanding of what is actually happening where work is being performed.

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Situational Awareness

In this month’s Flash we look at static hazard recognition. Knowing and understanding where stored energy exists, which might not always be obvious, helps us ensure everyone goes home alive and well.

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Looking In The Mirror

In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, guest contributor and Balmert Consulting senior teacher Van Long reflects on a simple but powerful idea: the most effective safety leadership begins with self-reflection.

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