Article Category
Leadership
Browse Balmert Consulting articles about Leadership, with practical safety leadership ideas for frontline teams and managers.
Showing page 1 of 8 / 70 posts
MSP News
Coaching Leaders
May 30, 2026
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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MSP News
Looking In The Mirror
March 31, 2026
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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MSP News
The Holiday Season
December 19, 2025
This month Paul shares that for twenty-five years, our work has been grounded in disciplined observation, analysis, and testing. That process has shaped how we identify the leadership practices that most directly influence safety performance—the same ideas we teach.
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MSP News
Accountability
November 21, 2025
This month, we are pleased to feature an article by Newton Scavone, one of our most experienced members of the Balmert teaching team, based in São Paulo. Newton started as a client learning and using the MSP tools, then became one of the leaders developed to teach the course inside his company. For the last six years, many of you have known him as a Balmert Consulting teacher. He brings deep operational credibility and a clear understanding of what it takes to make these tools work in the real world.
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MSP News
My Supervisor
September 30, 2025
In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News Paul takes on the challenge of trust and credibility in leadership—he discusses why they’re eroding at the top, why supervisors hold the real advantage, and what that means for influencing followers to work safe. He makes the case that trust is not a given but a hard-earned reward—and the most powerful tool any leader has for sending everyone home safe, every day.
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MSP News
Complacency Arising?
June 30, 2025
This month, Paul examines the challenge of complacency for leaders and their followers. He asks the question when was the last time you read an investigation report that began, “The root cause of this terrible tragedy can be found in the simple fact that so many of those involved failed to treat things as seriously as they needed to be”? For some reason, it’s rare for complacency to be described as the cause of a safety event. He goes on to discuss what to do about the problem of complacency.
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MSP News
Leading – And Managing Safety
January 7, 2025
This month Paul hails Ceasar’s selection of New Year’s Day as the beginning of the next trip around the sun, as well as the perfect moment for every manager and supervisor to plan and evaluate. He points out there is nothing more important than planning for actually making things safer for those who do the work of the business. In the process he takes on “the next big thing” and “conventional wisdom” that frequently appear during the planning process. He leaves us with thoughts on the critical importance of leadership and execution if the goal is to see that everyone goes home alive and well the end of the day.
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MSP News
The Communication Challenge
October 31, 2024
This month Paul discusses the communication challenge when it comes to sending people home alive and well at the end of the day. He examines the process used by those who are successful to figure out easier and better ways. Understanding the communication process is key to improving it and he points out it is a challenge that falls on the shoulders of leaders around the world. He makes the point that improving communications can go a long way to keeping problems from ever happening.
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MSP News
What’s The Problem?
September 30, 2024
This month Paul discusses problem solving when things go wrong at work that rise to the level of an investigation. He calls on his experience and expertise doing “Root Cause of Root Cause Investigations” to examine the quality and usefulness of the investigation findings. More importantly he discusses the critical importance of finding the truth about what really happened and why. His findings are very important whether the investigations you are responsible for are for little things or rise to the level of a full-scale root cause analysis.
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