This month Newton Scavone, one of our senior teacher/consultants, who was born and raised in Brazil, shares his thoughts on many aspects of understanding and why it matters to sending people home alive and well at the end of the day. He shares his journey seeking understanding and explains the difference, in his terms of art, between “square feet” and “cubic feet” of understanding.
This month Paul steps aside so that Gary Rivenes, one of our senior teacher/consultants, can share his thoughts on the responsibility of leaders to own safety — theirs and that of those who work for them. Gary makes the case that owning safety is critical to getting great safety performance but that owning it, without acting on it, is not enough.
This summer Paul has locked himself in his hut, affectionately known as “The Cave”, working on the Second Edition of Alive And Well At The End Of The Day. Last week Paul finished the task and has reemerged from The Cave. This month he shares some of what he was thinking about while writing. He reflects on making change happen, accountability and culture while discussing recent headlines. He’s included some insight into the writing process as well.
This month Paul examines safety meetings. Now before you run off saying you have been to and given hundreds and know how to do it well, he wrote this exactly for you. Safety meetings should make a difference and to know if they are making a difference you need to know how to evaluate them. Paul offers you a tool to be able to do that.
It is hard to believe tomorrow is February and this month Paul is talking about resolutions and commitments. Fortunately, he is not examining mine, but rather is talking about a commitment he has made, and he is going to ask your help for him to… well, I am not going to steal his thunder as I think this news, and it is big, should come from him along with his request for your help. Help Paul, help you and your leaders make a difference.
In this edition Paul shares a few thoughts about experience, wisdom, and a Wyoming State Trooper’s advice on avoiding tragedy.
This month Paul examines what happens when the right things aren’t done to make sure the hazards do no harm. He examines the case of Jacob Dean and how the decisions, not just of Jacob, led to a tragedy. There are many lessons to be learned from this case regardless of where you work or what you do that can make the difference between going home alive and well at the end of the day or not going home at all. The Case for Safety depends on doing the right thing.
This month Paul examines what happened on the set at the Bonanza Creek Ranch in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He finds several very important lessons for us to apply where we work when things go differently than the planned or expected course.
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.
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.
