This month Paul talks about the importance of training, more importantly of knowledge, in sending people home alive and well at the end of the day. He discusses how good leaders doing Managing by Walk Around can make a difference when they show up at a class. There are some very important points he makes that make this probably the most important News he has written.
This month Paul starts by examining Deming’s Plan/Do/Check/Adjust cycle and supplements the discussion with lessons from Drucker and Fayol. Paul uses the lessons as a starting point for a deep dive into the Check step as it relates to sending people home alive and well at the end of the day.
This month’s News is authored by one of our senior consultants and teachers: Dr. Edward Aronson. Eddie, as we know him around here, is a former manufacturing executive, whose focus as a management consultant is on what I’d describe as leading from within. Or, as Eddie puts it, “Standing up for what you believe in.”
This month Paul discusses two tools of leadership – Leading by Example and organization power. He makes the point that by the time anyone is promoted into a position of leadership they know about the important leadership practice of Leading by Example and while it may seem simple “there’s more to it than first meets the eye” and not always easy to do. Leading by Example is easier to understand than organization power and this month Paul does a deep dive into organization power and how not understanding it can lead to huge problems and catastrophic outcomes. He examines a case where the misunderstanding was deadly.
You probably guessed that recent headlines about a train in Northeast Ohio jumping the track has caught Paul’s attention. In that event and others of the same ilk Paul has found some lessons to share that can make a difference helping us send people home alive and well, particularly when things go bump in the night.
This month Paul discuss the annual performance review process on The Journey to Zero. He reflects on safety goals and the measurement of safety performance and if there is a measurement there is a need for comparison — aka benchmarking. This is where it gets really interesting — compared to what? Then he points out the part of the process that in his experience is not done well. I think you’ll find his conclusions quite interesting and even useful.
This month Newton Scavone, one of our senior teacher/consultants, who was born and raised in Brazil, shares his thoughts on many aspects of understanding and why it matters to sending people home alive and well at the end of the day. He shares his journey seeking understanding and explains the difference, in his terms of art, between “square feet” and “cubic feet” of understanding.
This month Paul steps aside so that Gary Rivenes, one of our senior teacher/consultants, can share his thoughts on the responsibility of leaders to own safety — theirs and that of those who work for them. Gary makes the case that owning safety is critical to getting great safety performance but that owning it, without acting on it, is not enough.
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.
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.
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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