We make assumptions all the time. When it comes to safety, we routinely rely on those assumptions to keep ourselves safe. In the vast majority of cases, no harm comes from doing that.
Not all safety rules are followed the way they’re supposed to be. Board an airplane, and there is one that is followed 100% of the time. Every single time a flight takes off.
Here’s today’s question about hazards: things that can hurt you.
Think back in time to all the times you got hurt – including the minor cuts and scrapes, bumps and bruises, and the close calls where you almost got hurt…
Some companies have a rule about working under a suspended load: in a word, DON’T.
Every company safety rule on the planet exists for a simple reason: something bad happened, and the rule will make sure it doesn’t happen again.
When it comes to our personal safety – at work and at home – we make a huge number of assumptions about things and people every day. Little ones and big ones.
Culture is best defined as “the way things really are around here.” That means every operation everywhere in the world has a safety culture.
In our classes, we like to ask Darn Good Questions. Here are a few that you might want to answer – or, even better, ask others.
In your opinion, which is more dangerous?
Entering a confined space
Entering a pedestrian crosswalk on a busy street
Remember when you were a kid and some grown-up would see you with your shoelaces untied?
The question of what comes first – production or safety – is one that is asked the world over. It’s easy to get caught up in the moment…
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.
