Paul Balmert, Author at Balmert Consulting

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A Safety Ambassador

This month Paul examines influence and influencers. He separates the current trend of self-proclaimed influencers from the real influencers. Especially those who make a difference in industrial organizations sending people home alive and well at the end of the day. He ends up focusing on one particular person who’s influence, even though he does not blow the whistle, has made a huge difference. You will want to know about this Safety Ambassador.

August 1, 2022 No Comments

Safety Meeting Topics

Performance Feedback

In this month’s Newsflash Paul discusses performance feedback – good and bad – and the important role good and honest coaching plays in sending everyone home safe.

July 18, 2022 No Comments

Leadership

About Safety Meetings

This month Paul examines safety meetings. Now before you run off saying you have been to and given hundreds and know how to do it well, he wrote this exactly for you. Safety meetings should make a difference and to know if they are making a difference you need to know how to evaluate them. Paul offers you a tool to be able to do that.

June 30, 2022 No Comments

Safety Meeting Topics

Safety Meeting Self Evaluation

When we launched the Flash seven years ago, our objective was to provide suitable content for the Ask, Don’t Tell© process, and in so doing, offer one practical step to improve the quality of safety meetings.

June 16, 2022 No Comments

Managing Change

Regarding Knowledge

This month Paul examines what matters most to working safely. You might be surprised that the real First Line of Defense is not what leaders often focus on. But it is not enough to know what it is, every leader needs to understand the process, the best process, for obtaining it. This may be Paul’s most important message for good leaders like you.

May 31, 2022 No Comments

Safety Meeting Topics

Procedures

In this month’s edition Paul discusses procedures and offers a simple lesson along with a tragic example of what can happen when they are not known or understood.

May 16, 2022 No Comments

Compliance

Applying Root Cause Failure Analysis to Safety

In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News Bill is back to dive deeper into improving safety performance this time through the lens of Root Cause Failure Analysis. In this new article, he focuses on applying the tools and concepts of RCFA on the challenge of rule compliance, or if you prefer, the challenge of rule non-compliance. Bill admits it took him a long time to learn some important lessons. He shares them with you here, so you don’t have to learn the hard way.

April 29, 2022 No Comments

Safety Meeting Topics

Correcting Problems

Everyone knows the point of troubleshooting is to fix a problem. But there’s a world of difference between trying to fix a problem and successfully correcting the problem.

April 19, 2022 No Comments

Safety Meeting Topics

Do Not Assume

It’s easy to be lulled into making assumptions. People make them all the time. This month Paul discusses assumptions as they relate to safety and provides a tragic example of how they can prove fatal.

March 15, 2022 No Comments

Troubleshooting

Eye On The Prize

Imagine situations where the clock is ticking, fast, and lives hang in the balance. This month Paul examines cases where getting it right matters and identifies some key lessons that can make a huge difference in sending people in your organization home alive and well at the end of the day.

February 28, 2022 No Comments

Popular Articles

Expectations and Assumptions

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.

Environment And 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.

Finding “The Source”

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.

It’s Just Common Sense

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.

Resetting PPE Habits

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.

The Holiday Season

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.

Accountability

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.

Enough Said?

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.

Managing Hazards

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.”

Beyond the Rules

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.

Paul Balmert

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