This month Paul looks at some recent very public cases where change was mandated and some cases where compliance has been resisted. Paul draws out some key learnings that every leader responsible for making change happen needs to understand.
This month Paul explains why inverting the organizational pyramid is critical to understanding who the most important member of management is when it comes to getting things done and sending people home alive and well at the end of the day.
This month Paul disects three similar events to examine the issue of trust. You might be surprised how he ties it all together. He provides us some very important thoughts that we all need to understand.
This month Paul begins with a story from the other side of the coin, noncompliance and unsafe practices. He examines the rewards and risks of taking shortcuts. Certainly, there are rewards and consequences, both good and bad, for every behavior. Paul sheds light on them in order to help you send people home alive and well at the end of the day.
This month Paul analyzes followers and the underrecognized and underappreciated power in followership. Not those followers that followed their leaders into to conflict rather those working in an industrial operation, like yours. Along with examining the leadership mandate Paul explores leaders as followers. In the end it is the critical role followers play in execution, business performance and sending people home alive and well at the end of each and every day that gets Paul’s attention. If, after reading what Paul wrote, you feel compelled to go wildly dance on a hill… well, maybe I’ll see you there…
This month Paul analyzes A Crucial Conversation, one particular real-world conversation, to understand the dynamics in play, especially those crucial to sending people home alive and well. He does a deep dive into the organization power present in such conversations. If more leaders understood that power, we might never have heard of the events of April 20th 2010.
This month Paul brings clarity to some of the different word choices in play to explain events where something bad happened and events where nothing bad happened but could have happened. But that is not the big story. Paul takes us below the surface of the debate of terms to examine some critical things that need to be understood to prevent recurrence of an unplanned and unwanted event beginning with you need to know something happened.
This month Paul declares that those who make nothing happen should be celebrated for their effort and their leadership. What better way to end the first month of the New Year than with a positive story recognizing safety leadership? Paul talks about the importance of not just knowing what is most important but understanding it to set your leadership compass on True North. He discusses the challenges of making nothing happen and that those who do and do it over time ought to be recognized, and how they did it understood. He holds up the example of one such leader and how he did it as an example for others to follow. There is much to learn from Lonnie’s story.
This month Paul’s lede story is about a recent accident while working on a similar water tower. Paul dives in on the “job” hazard analysis process. There are several lessons from this accident and the JHA process that need to be understood to make sure no events occur doing the work you and your crew do.
This month Paul talks about being held accountable. He explores common misconceptions about accountability and what it means to you doing your job. He examines a recent headline story about a CEO downunder. He provides a better understanding of accountability and leaves us with some Darn Good Advice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
