Balmert News on Safety, Leadership & Workplace Trends

Safety Meeting Topics

Regarding Enforcement

When it comes to enforcing the rules, most leaders don’t enjoy making people follow the rules.

So, what if we just hit the easy button, making following the safety rules an option instead of a requirement?

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Execution

The Face of the Company

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.

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Safety Meeting Topics

Comparing Hazards

This month Paul looks at how we perceive the relative risk of hazards, as well as the process we use to determine which ones require the most attention.

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Leadership

Your Legacy

This month Paul asks “What would you like your legacy to be?” You might be tempted to think this is just life advice and has little to do with what you do at work. You would be wrong. Paul holds up the legacy of one of the great leaders he met during his career who left a lasting impression on Paul. The lessons are important if you want to make a difference sending people home alive and well at the end of each and every day.

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Safety Meeting Topics

Saying Something

It’s a rule anyone who’s ever learned to change a tire knows well: before jacking up a vehicle, put it in park and set the parking brake. For good measure, chock the wheels…

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Execution

Regarding Trust

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.

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Safety Meeting Topics

Trust

A few weeks ago a residential condo collapsed, catastrophically and tragically – but absolutely not unexpectedly. If you have followed the story, you know there were plenty of warnings…

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Compliance

A Behavior Problem

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.

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Execution

On Followership

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…

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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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