Leadership

Leadership

Not On My Shift!

In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, Paul looks back to the lessons learned on his last trip of the year that included developing a new teacher for Balmert Consulting in Germany. But that is not the story, not this month.

This month Paul finds safety leadership in the most unusual place and follows the thread back fifty years to his first boss and the plant manager.

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Hazard/Risk

Failure To Learn?

In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, Paul examines the problem of failing to learn and there is a lesson we should not fail to learn. He focuses on the real problem of the perception of risk, aka, probability.

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Leadership

A Real Safety Leader

In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, as you rightly assumed, Paul has turned over the reins to one our consultants, Wayne Pignolet. Wayne shares his story about deers and safety leadership.

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Compliance

Common Practice

In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, Paul starts with an investigation into a fatality, sure there’s a lot to learn about getting meaningful investigation findings, but don’t stop there this is really about navigating a very large ship, in a very narrow channel, with lots of cross current and other traffic — changing direction. In the end it is about getting great safety performance. They say there is no silver bullet for getting great safety results, that may be true, but there are a few key fundamental things that are the difference that make the difference. Paul reveals them this month. I’ll be interested to hear what you think after you finish “Common Practice”.

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Leadership

Three Questions

In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News Paul examines three darn good questions to see what we can learn. You might think this month’s article is about darn good questions, it is, but back up the truck: it is full of other darn good ideas including getting people to follow all the rules all the time, making change happen, execution, and safety leadership. You will be intrigued as he pulls the thread and brings them all together. There’s a lot to learn.

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Execution

Perspective – And Leadership

In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News Paul examines the perspective of leaders, how perspective can effect a leaders action, and how leaders can get a new perspective. He suggests the right perspective about safety is helpful, even critical, to sending everyone home alive and well at the end of the day.

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Execution

The Danger Zone

In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News Paul starts the New Year by examining the challenges of leadership and looking at how complacency plays into the goal of sending everyone home, at the end of each and every shift, alive and well.

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Execution

Effect – And Cause

In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News Paul digs into some of those recent events to see what we can use back on the job to make sure everyone goes home alive and well at the end of each and every day.

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Leadership

Your Safety Culture

In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News Paul examines safety culture: What it is, why it matters, why it can be a problem, and what you need to know to change it. If you’re like me, you’ll get a lot of value out of what he has to say. You may even get a new appreciation of the paper that lines your hallways.

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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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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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