Paul Balmert

Safety Meeting Topics

Perceiving Hazards

This month Paul looks into how our minds recognize and perceive different types of hazards. You might not be surprised to hear that we aren’t always the best at recognizing what is most likely to hurt us.

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Execution

A Lesson from the Richest Man in Town

This month Paul unravels the mystery of the handshake. Not only does he solve it, but he ties it together with Jimmy Stewart’s It’s A Wonderful Life AND the goal of sending people home alive and well at the end of the day.

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Safety Meeting Topics

Keeping The Lights On

In this month’s Flash Paul nudges us to remember what is most important, and shares some perspective on how to think better when a task seems critical.

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Execution

The Risk Takers

This month, Jay Bizarro is our guest contributor and shares more of his great thinking about how to do exactly that and improve safety performance. He introduces us to “skydivers”, “The Safety Switch”, “The Probability Problem”, and “The Unsafe Behavior Database.”

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Execution

The Individual and the Team

This month Paul has been out on assignment visiting many of our clients. Last week he visited a client’s Safety Day and asked, “What is the secret of your great safety performance?” It lead to a fascinating discussion and some very important learning. In this edition of the News he dives into learning from success and failure on the road to great safety performance.

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Safety Meeting Topics

Stop The Job?

In this month’s Flash Paul shares some very simple thinking about stopping to assess risk. He also shares a tragic story that offers some perspective as to why it is so important to do, especially when problems and pressure are running high.

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Leadership

Behavior – And Safety

This month Paul makes the case that there is no escaping the truth that behaviors must be managed if the goal is everyone goes home alive and well at the end of the day. He considers different approaches that have been tried and discusses whose behavior should be targeted and who ought to manage them. Paul concludes when it comes to appreciating the times when “it’s on them” and when “It’s on me” it would be fair to say that’s the subject of wisdom. Paul leaves us with some of his experience and wisdom.

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Safety Meeting Topics

Looking for Hazards?

In this months Flash, Paul shares some observations about recognizing hazards by simply sharing a photo he took. Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.

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Execution

Tough Safety Challenges

This month Paul discusses what happened in his old company every time it looked like safety performance was declining and introduces the term “political water.” He then dives into the toughest challenges as reported by one industry and compares and contrasts that to what we have heard over the last twenty-two years across a wide range of industries around the world. It leads to a discussion of the root of all challenges and management’s first duties. He shares some very important lessons.

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Popular Topics

Popular Articles

Teaching Followers

In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, Paul teaches us why teaching followers is still one of the most important responsibilities of leadership.

From assigning work to developing people, Paul shows how teaching gives leaders a powerful opportunity to improve performance, reinforce expectations, shape culture, and stay connected to the people doing the work. He also shares what Jack Welch understood about teaching that many busy leaders have forgotten.

Paul’s lesson may change the way you think about one of the most basic things leaders do.

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Your Warning Indicators

In this month’s Flash, we take a look at what we call Early Warning Indicators. Seeing safety performance for what it actually is means looking beyond past performance, and further into what’s happening today. Using Early Warning Indicators is an easy and effective way to do just that.

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Practicing Leadership

In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, Paul finds a leadership lesson in a decidedly unlikely place: a guy in a bright yellow suit who owns a wildly successful baseball team named after a breakfast fruit. What Jesse Cole and the Savannah Bananas have to do with the everyday practice of leadership—and what Paul sees in their story—is worth the read.

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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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