Hazard/Risk
In Transit
The process of hazard identification never stops. As to where it should begin…
February 18, 2020
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Execution
What Now?
This month Paul examines the customary beginning of a new year thinking about goals and results. He reminded me of Jim, only Paul’s search is for ’cause’ around the leading and lagging indicators used to measure safety performance. Anyone who knows Paul knows he tends to have a different and insightful perspective. He truly is a Rebel With a Cause — to help leaders like you send people home alive and well at the end of each and every day.
January 29, 2020
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Hazard/Risk
A Close Call!
Near-miss. Near-hit. Close call. Call it whatever you want: something happened; it wasn’t good; fortunately, nobody got hurt.
January 15, 2020
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Leadership
Your Gift
This month Paul, during this season of giving, examines lessons learned from the past that might suggest the best gifts you can give if your goal is sending your followers home alive and well at the end of the day. It really got me thinking and I think it will for you as well.
December 30, 2019
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Hazard/Risk
Working Alone
In this edition Paul poses some important questions anyone who ever works alone needs to ask – and answer – for themselves.
December 13, 2019
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Execution
A Simple Job
This month Paul examines lessons learned from a fatality doing a “Simple” clean-up job at a restaurant. The discussion is central to understanding how we perceive hazards and take risks. He provides some very interesting insight into the things that can get someone hurt, hurt seriously, or worse.
November 29, 2019
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Hazard/Risk
Ever Vigilant
Recognizing what can hurt you is a constant and never-ending process. No matter who you are, where you are, or what you happen to be doing, you need to be on the lookout for what can hurt you.
November 15, 2019
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Compliance
Earbud Nation
This month Paul examines lessons learned from a highway construction fatality where earbuds were involved. The discussion is central to understanding hazards and risk both personally and for those you work with. This may be the most important newsletter that Paul has written and he has written a lot of good ones.
October 31, 2019
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Hazard/Risk
Fatal Assumptions
Making assumptions may make work and life easier, but it does not make life and work safer. In fact, it often works in exactly the opposite way.
October 16, 2019
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Execution
Work Done Here
This month Paul examines lessons learned from improvised tools and work methods where the odds of a hazard are a lot higher and there is a potential for creative problem solvers to be taking too much risk.
September 30, 2019
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.