This month Paul takes a moment to hit the reset button when it comes to running effective safety meetings, and revisits the simple approach of asking the right questions to help you make the most of yours.
This month Paul does a deep dive into understanding hazards — what can hurt us – and hazard recognition. Actually, that is not exactly correct, he does a deep dive into understanding the failure to recognize hazards and getting to the truth about what really happened. As long as I have known him, Paul has had a fascination of trying to understand what really happened when things go wrong. He puts the “axe of truth” to the reported findings. He has done Root Cause of Root Cause investigations analyzing the findings of reports in his organization and those in the public domains. Whatever your role in your organization, understanding what he shares this month can make a difference sending people home alive and well at the end of the day.
There’s a world of difference between knowing something and understanding it. In this edition of the Flash, Paul gives some insight as to how we come to understand, as well as what might be done with that important knowledge.
This summer Paul has locked himself in his hut, affectionately known as “The Cave”, working on the Second Edition of Alive And Well At The End Of The Day. Last week Paul finished the task and has reemerged from The Cave. This month he shares some of what he was thinking about while writing. He reflects on making change happen, accountability and culture while discussing recent headlines. He’s included some insight into the writing process as well.
In this month’s edition of the Flash, Paul lends some advice on where to look for hazards and some perspective about the environment around us.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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