Managing Safety Performance News

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A Safety Ambassador

This month Paul examines influence and influencers. He separates the current trend of self-proclaimed influencers from the real influencers. Especially those who make a difference in industrial organizations sending people home alive and well at the end of the day. He ends up focusing on one particular person who’s influence, even though he does not blow the whistle, has made a huge difference. You will want to know about this Safety Ambassador.

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Safety Meeting Topics

Performance Feedback

In this month’s Newsflash Paul discusses performance feedback – good and bad – and the important role good and honest coaching plays in sending everyone home safe.

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Leadership

About Safety Meetings

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.

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Safety Meeting Topics

Safety Meeting Self Evaluation

When we launched the Flash seven years ago, our objective was to provide suitable content for the Ask, Don’t Tell© process, and in so doing, offer one practical step to improve the quality of safety meetings.

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Managing Change

Regarding Knowledge

This month Paul examines what matters most to working safely. You might be surprised that the real First Line of Defense is not what leaders often focus on. But it is not enough to know what it is, every leader needs to understand the process, the best process, for obtaining it. This may be Paul’s most important message for good leaders like you.

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Safety Meeting Topics

Procedures

In this month’s edition Paul discusses procedures and offers a simple lesson along with a tragic example of what can happen when they are not known or understood.

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Compliance

Applying Root Cause Failure Analysis to Safety

In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News Bill is back to dive deeper into improving safety performance this time through the lens of Root Cause Failure Analysis. In this new article, he focuses on applying the tools and concepts of RCFA on the challenge of rule compliance, or if you prefer, the challenge of rule non-compliance. Bill admits it took him a long time to learn some important lessons. He shares them with you here, so you don’t have to learn the hard way.

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Safety Meeting Topics

Correcting Problems

Everyone knows the point of troubleshooting is to fix a problem. But there’s a world of difference between trying to fix a problem and successfully correcting the problem.

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Safety Meeting Topics

Do Not Assume

It’s easy to be lulled into making assumptions. People make them all the time. This month Paul discusses assumptions as they relate to safety and provides a tragic example of how they can prove fatal.

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Troubleshooting

Eye On The Prize

Imagine situations where the clock is ticking, fast, and lives hang in the balance. This month Paul examines cases where getting it right matters and identifies some key lessons that can make a huge difference in sending people in your organization home alive and well at the end of the day.

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Popular Topics

Popular Articles

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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A Case Study

This month Paul explains that investigation reports are valuable leadership tools not simply because they identify technical causes, but because they reveal how familiar execution challenges—such as limited training, inexperience, weak supervision coverage, fatigue, time pressure, and inconsistent use of PPE—combine to produce serious outcomes. The primary purpose of an investigation is to help ensure an event does not happen again, but equally important is the Performance Visibility investigations provide: a clearer understanding of what is actually happening where work is being performed.

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Situational Awareness

In this month’s Flash we look at static hazard recognition. Knowing and understanding where stored energy exists, which might not always be obvious, helps us ensure everyone goes home alive and well.

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Looking In The Mirror

In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, guest contributor and Balmert Consulting senior teacher Van Long reflects on a simple but powerful idea: the most effective safety leadership begins with self-reflection.

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