Balmert News on Safety, Leadership & Workplace Trends

Compliance

Changing Habits

This month Paul explores habits. Not just the changes we each have made in response to COVID 19 but more importantly the nature and value of habits related to sending people home alive and well at the end of the day. He investigates habits as they apply to managing risk and gaining compliance and leaves us with some Darn Good Advice.

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Safety Meeting Topics

Habits

It’s now been more than 90 days since the world around us was transformed by a hazard so small as to be invisible to the human eye. The next time you fill out a…

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Execution

Stressed Out!

This month Paul dives into the stress we all are feeling. In this edition he talks about the assumptions, hypotheses, and facts we use to make decisions and the biases that influence and inform them. If you are a regular reader then you know Paul is going to pull it all together, share his perspective and offer some thoughts on how to leverage the lessons. Some Darn Good Advice.

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Webinar

Safety Leadership In The Time of Covid

With all confusing, confounding and even contradictory things going on in the midst of the COVID crisis, the most important goal every leader has remains unchanged: seeing to it that everyone goes home, alive and well at the end of every single day.

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Compliance

Deepwater Horizon: Lesson Learned?

This month Paul, with the help of Erick Reyna one of our teacher consultants, goes back 10 years to examine the lessons to still be learned from the Macondo Deepwater Horizon events of April 20th 2010. He shares five important lessons that are still important today. Some Darn Good Advice.

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Hazard/Risk

A Second Set of Eyes

One of the great benefits of having co-workers is that they represent a “second set of eyes.” They can see what we are doing; they can see things we don’t see ourselves…

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Hazard/Risk

Stop Everything!

This month Paul explores another lesson to be learned about stopping the job and the decisions-maker’s choice. There are lessons about taking action or choosing not to that can be useful sending people home alive and well at the end of each and every day.

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Hazard/Risk

Precaution!

On the subject of the Coronavirus: yes, or no, are you taking precautions? Have you seen others taking the kind of precautions they would not normally take?

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Hazard/Risk

A Deadly Serious Hazard

This month Paul discusses that the risks that scare us and the risks that kill us are different. He examines the lessons to be learned from the Coronavirus and how those lessons can help leaders like you send people home alive and well at the end of each and every day.

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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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