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.
In this edition Paul offers some insight into PPE, its role in protecting you, and how it does so.
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…
You’re in a rush. There’s a delivery about to show up and your crew has equipment to be repositioned to prepare for the arrival.
In the middle of all of that, you have a safety concern…
This month Paul analyzes A Crucial Conversation, one particular real-world conversation, to understand the dynamics in play, especially those crucial to sending people home alive and well. He does a deep dive into the organization power present in such conversations. If more leaders understood that power, we might never have heard of the events of April 20th 2010.
This month’s edition comes in the form of an opinion poll question: When recognizing things that can hurt you, what matters more: knowledge or fear?
This month Paul brings clarity to some of the different word choices in play to explain events where something bad happened and events where nothing bad happened but could have happened. But that is not the big story. Paul takes us below the surface of the debate of terms to examine some critical things that need to be understood to prevent recurrence of an unplanned and unwanted event beginning with you need to know something happened.
When you’re sitting in the office or break room, It’s easy to have the sense that you’re safe. The hazards you need to be on the lookout for are found “out on the jobsite” not “back in the office.”…
This month Paul explores how we ought to determine which “old things” are important and that we ought to prepare for. He discusses the most common misunderstanding that leads us to get it wrong more often than not. There is a lot to learn from a good hard freeze that can help you back on the job.
Getting behind the wheel of a vehicle and drive to work. In a typical year in the US, ten times as many of us suffer fatal injuries out on the streets and highways than we do on the job. Most of us spend more time working than we do driving, and face a lot more hazards on the job…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In this month’s Flash we look at the difference between an expectation and an assumption. That distinction might seem subtle at first glance, however the difference found in the definitions proves a very critical point for anyone who leads and manages safety.
In this issue of Managing Safety Performance News, Paul looks at why separating “environment” from “safety” misses the point. Using real work examples—from hauling tools over a snowbank to executive debates about compliance—he makes the case that many hazards don’t come from the job itself, but from the conditions in which the work is done. By stripping injuries down to simple “headlines” and sorting them by the source of the hazard, patterns start to emerge that are easy to miss in root cause analysis reports. The takeaway is straightforward: environment and safety are inseparable, and leaders who want better safety performance need to see the work—and its hazards—clearly, from the moment it begins.
In this month’s Flash, we explore where hazards come from—and why that matters. Understanding their sources is a critical step in identifying what could cause harm.
This month Paul examines how leaders often misuse the phrase “it’s just common sense”—either to dismiss learning or to assume shared understanding without definition. He argues that many leadership statements presented as fact are really opinions, and that poor communication stems from assuming others interpret words, experience, and expectations the same way.
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