Not all safety rules are followed the way they’re supposed to be. Board an airplane, and there is one that is followed 100% of the time. Every single time a flight takes off.
In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, Paul turns his attention to diagnosing the problem of hazard recognition. You could attribute Kettering’s quote, above, to my father or Paul. Both masters of — solve the right problem! Sometimes you have to think differently, they did/do. When it comes to hazard recognition Paul’s message is critical to sending people home alive and well at the end of the day.
Here’s today’s question about hazards: things that can hurt you.
Think back in time to all the times you got hurt – including the minor cuts and scrapes, bumps and bruises, and the close calls where you almost got hurt…
In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, as you rightly assumed, Paul has turned over the reins to one our consultants, Wayne Pignolet. Wayne shares his story about deers and safety leadership.
Some companies have a rule about working under a suspended load: in a word, DON’T.
Every company safety rule on the planet exists for a simple reason: something bad happened, and the rule will make sure it doesn’t happen again.
In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, as you probably assumed, Paul discusses the assumptions we all make… and don’t assume you know what he is going to say. You might be surprised.
When it comes to our personal safety – at work and at home – we make a huge number of assumptions about things and people every day. Little ones and big ones.
In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, Paul starts with an investigation into a fatality, sure there’s a lot to learn about getting meaningful investigation findings, but don’t stop there this is really about navigating a very large ship, in a very narrow channel, with lots of cross current and other traffic — changing direction. In the end it is about getting great safety performance. They say there is no silver bullet for getting great safety results, that may be true, but there are a few key fundamental things that are the difference that make the difference. Paul reveals them this month. I’ll be interested to hear what you think after you finish “Common Practice”.
Culture is best defined as “the way things really are around here.” That means every operation everywhere in the world has a safety culture.
In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, from a restaurant in Siberia, Paul examines the differences and similarities of the challenges supervisors and managers face leading people to work safe the world over, including one very important challenge.
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.
In this months Flash we are re-visiting the fundamental concept of getting folks to follow all of the rules, all of the time. As to how you might move the needle a great place to start is with PPE.
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.
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.
In this month’s Flash, we take a look at a very important first step to ensure conversations go as well as they ought to when expectations around safety haven’t been met.
This month, Paul takes on one of the toughest challenges every leader faces — managing hazards. Not just the big, obvious ones that make the “A List,” but the ordinary, everyday things that cause most of the injuries. He reminds us that managing hazards isn’t about eliminating every risk; it’s about handling them — and the people around them — “with a degree of skill and care.”
In this months Flash we look at the importance of Safety Rules, and a very critical concept about the rules that ensures they help keep us safe.
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