Thought Leadership

Subscribe

Senior leadership is an easy target for most any complaint. Politicians, hourly workers, organized labor, front-line supervision and middle management all seem to blame “rich, uncaring upper management.”

The safety rumour mill is buzzing about the probability that governments are about to target a hazard that many of us really haven’t given much thought to: dust.  I can’t tell you how many times I have been on audits where the merest mention of poor housekeeping send eyes rolling and smirks crackling like lightning strikes across the faces of both leadership and the rank-and-file alike.

The New Work Item Proposal (NWIP) for development of an ISO Occupational Health and Safety Management System standard has been approved.  A new ISO Project Committee, PC 283, has been established to develop the standard.  BSI has been appointed as secretariat.

What he meant was you should never (and I do mean NEVER) begin a safety talk or presentation with a negative comment about that speech or presentation, no matter how true or accurate.

I recently received the following inquiry: “We're getting ready to perform safety coaching sessions with some of our frequently injured employees. Do you know of anyone who might have a script to outline the dialogue?”

I write provocative material. I deliberately try to elicit a visceral response and take people to a place where they can explore their deepest held beliefs and question basic ideologies of safety. The latest in neuroscience suggests that our decisions or made and our ability to change reside deep in our subconscious beneath our defenses.

There was a statement in a commentary in the Wall Street Journal a couple of months ago: "A fundamental principle in medicine is that if you get the diagnosis wrong, you'll probably apply the wrong therapy. A corollary is that if the therapy isn't working, increasing the dose may make things worse."

Nearly every safety professional worth his or her salt has been told that he or she needs to look at both leading and lagging indicators; it’s good advice, in fact, it’s advice I’ve given many times in articles and speeches over the years.  But in my last post (two weeks ago—I spent the last week at a customer site and with the travel travails I just couldn’t bring myself to hammer out a post, deepest apologies to my fans and detractors alike) I questioned the value of tracking (not reporting or investigating, mind you, just tracking) near misses.

The term "Safety Culture" has become like the term "Engagement" in popular management writings. There is no common agreement on the term. We are left with (mis)interpretations of terms like “Safety Culture”, which lead to haphazard attempts at changing organizations toward improvement.

Over the years I have watched many safety professionals struggle to get their message across. In addition to this basic struggle another has also been common: an inability to be promoted beyond a position that just evaluates and enforces government safety regulations (regs).