Safety Leadership Training in the workplace | Blog | Safety Excellence For Business

The Lurking Elephants…Can You See Them Now?

December 19, 2014 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

Did you hear the story about the Safety Elephant who roamed all over the place stomping people down, messing things up, and completely blocking the ability of the people from having the important safety conversations?

creating safe workplace Yes, the elephant that got in the way of having the conversations that matter? You did? Oh, you have one of those too?

Safety First Elephants are big and smelly. Everyone knows they are there because they stink up the place, making it smell rotten. Elephants are also sneaky, often disguised, or even invisible. Sometimes they show up as the bully who tries to push everyone around and control the group. Sometimes it is a boss who just doesn’t seem to care. Sometimes it is “obliviousness” to what is really happening. Sometimes it is simply an undiscussable that has been allowed to fester. Anyone who tries to speak up about an important issue is silenced, put down, demeaned or ridiculed. The elephant just loves this. The elephants are in control! They are having a happy time!

You know that the elephant has a name…yet, you speak of it in whispers. (For the purpose of this Safety Flash, let’s call this elephant, Hiney – the H is for Hidden!) While Hiney is invisible or disguised, Hiney loves for you to talk about him/her in private, with a person you can trust. You might talk about Hiney in the restroom or by the water cooler. You make Hiney really quite visible in these conversations. But when you stay quiet in the situations that really matter – when you could constructively make an issue explicit, but you don’t – then Hiney remains very safe. So back in the workplace, Hiney keeps sneaking around, messing the place all up and stomping all over. Hiney is really very unfriendly – just loving it when someone gets hurt because you couldn’t talk about the real safety problem. Sometimes there are whole herds of Hiney’s!

Hiney is really very afraid of being made visible. If you just look Hiney (aka, the undiscussable) right in the eye and name the big, stinking elephant, everything changes! The big, cowardly, stinky, brutal Hiney seems to just melt away. You can talk about Hiney and work to fix the safety problem. There are courageous, safe ways to name and address the hidden elephants! Hiney can’t stand the light of the truth! Transparency hinders elephant herds. Fewer injuries and incidents will happen when you learn how to lift them up and address them. Call us…We’ll show you how!

Check out Can You See them Now? (Elephants in our Midst) – Discover the hidden elephants that are lurking in your organization or Work team…Then Vanquish Them! Available on Amazon.

America’s Safest Companies Conference

December 11, 2014 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

I found several papers from “America’s Safest Companies Conference” last year quite interesting.

One by Terry L. Mathis discussed his new book (co-Authored by Shawn M. Galloway) called “Steps to Safety Culture Excellence.” This book describes, very nicely, 43 steps that can lead to safety excellence using the more traditional approach coming out of the Newtonian/Cartesian paradigm where we see cause/effect relationships, linear processes and big results needing big efforts. A lot of their ideas are quite good.

workplace safety processes Another paper from an award-winning company showed their outstanding progress in lowering their total recordable injury rate from around 10 to 0.5 through a steady progress of improvements over 10 years. Their work was out of the Newtonian/Cartesian perspective, quite similar to what Mathis and Galloway teach.

The new book by Sydney Dekker, “Drifting into Failure,” discusses the importance of seeing the world from the complex systems perspective. This is the perspective from which I have worked for so many years. In using this approach when I was the Plant Manager at the DuPont Belle, West Virginia Plant, we cut the total recordable injury rate from about 5.8 to below 0.3 in just three years and sustained this for 17 years. When I was leading the transformational work in New Zealand Steel, in the work described by Stephen Zafron and David Logan in their book “The Three Laws of Performance,” we worked from the complexity perspective. The total recordable injury rate at New Zealand Steel dropped by about 50% in just a year and a half.

The lesson here is quite clear. If you want to try to reach safety excellence using the Newtonian/Cartesian approach and taking 10 years to do it, then that is your choice. Doing this over 10 years requires a lot of hard, dedicated work to sustain the effort.

On the other hand, if you want to achieve excellence in safety in just two-three years, then you need to work from the complexity perspective. Not only is the process quicker, you have many fewer injuries along the way. It takes courage, persistence and commitment to make this happen.

It is clear that the approach from the complexity perspective is superior, achieving excellence more quickly with fewer injuries along the way. Leading the journey to safety excellence from the complexity perspective is what we call Self-Organizing Leadership and we use the Complexity Leadership Process to do this.

Several web sites have useful information relating to this way of leading and working:

Safety Excellence for Business

Center for Self-Organizing Leadership

RNKnowles Associates

Let’s not lose sight of our objective: We want everyone to leave the workplace at the end of their workday or shift without getting hurt—no injuries! Safety is an everyday, every minute dynamic, starting now!

Call me at 716-622-6467 to learn more about this robust, proven approach to achieve safety excellence.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership Tagged With: America's Safest Companies Conference, business safety, creating a safety culture, employee safety, injury-free workplaces

The Oil Patch

December 5, 2014 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

Recently, there was one man killed and several others seriously hurt when a tank they were cleaning exploded. The article describing this accident talked about how high the injury and death rates are in Wyoming, in the oil industry, due to lacking a “culture of safety.”

safety leadership There is no doubt that work in the oil and gas industry is tough and dangerous, but that is no excuse for disregarding the health and safety of the workers. Almost all the deaths occurred when safety procedures were not followed. There is plenty of safety information available relating to tank cleaning. Have we not learned the lessons of improper confined space/vessel entry?

But, the demands for production are high. People are pushed to do things faster and quicker so corners are cut and procedures are modified to make the work quicker and easier. Communications are difficult because the people are dispersed across many working units. Do we just say that this is the way it is and bad stuff happens or do we take the responsibility to create a culture of safety? I think that supervisors and managers need to step up to the problem and solve them like they have shown that they can solve other tough problems.

My mantra, as a Plant Manager, was:

“I don’t have a right to make my living at a place where it was okay for you to get hurt. Now we need to make money so let’s figure out how to do that safely.”

If these supervisors and managers really work with the people, they will be able to make a big step towards very much improved safety. Following safe confined space/vessel entry procedures is a given – if we want our people to be able to be safe. Where do you stand?

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety for Business, Safety Leadership Process Tagged With: oil spill and workplace safety, safe work environment, safety leadership, tools for safe workplace

It is NOT Just Theory…It is Practical!

November 28, 2014 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

The Safety Leadership Process is firmly based in complexity science, where organizations are seen as behaving more like living systems than machines.

Safety Leadership Process But, the machine view of organizations is the dominant paradigm right now. We direct the people to work in tight procedures. We manipulate them to do things right. We punish them when there is an injury or incidents. We look for root-cause. We think that if we can take things apart and understand the parts that we can understand the whole. Almost all the effort is engaged in doing things TO the people as if they were just interchangeable parts of a machine. Most people push back against authority in this paradigm. This is a win/lose environment.

When we see organizations as if they are living systems, we focus on the whole system where all the parts are interconnected and interacting all the time. Change is embraced. Information needs to be freely flowing so that all the parts are working in harmony. Trust needs to be built so that people can depend on each other and work more effectively together. Each person helps the others do their work more effectively. People from all levels PARTNER together for the good of the whole – rising above their own selfish needs and goals. This is a win for safety, a win for the business, a win for the people.

Dr. Sydney Dekker, an Australian safety expert and leader, spoke at the ASSE Safety 2014 Conference. He is a leading thinker in trying to bring the complexity science paradigm into the field of safety. In his talk, he emphasized that while great improvements in reducing injuries and incidents has been achieved over the last 50 years, the injury rate improvements are getting smaller. By shifting our thinking to the complexity paradigm, we can achieve excellence.

This is what I was advocating in my talk I described above. The Safety Leadership Process puts the complexity paradigm into the organization. This is what I used as a plant manager and now as a Safety Consultant with excellent results. The Safety Leadership Process is a robust, proven, easily understood, low investment process that leads to sustainable levels of safety excellence.

A core part of the Safety Leadership Process requires everyone to get clear on their assumptions, values and priorities. I have often found that various members of management are not clear and aligned, which results in mixed messages and inconsistent results.

A powerful complexity tool called The Process Enneagram© is used to bring the people together to struggle with the hard questions like “Is safety #1?” or “How do we get everyone engaged in helping to improve our safety performance and sustain it?” Here is a link to sign up and receive free access to a recent webinar I held to describe this tool and its use.

I speak, conduct workshops and coach people in organizations on how to significantly improve their safety performance. This flyer provides a lot of information regarding my offering. Please call me (716-622-6467), if you wish, to explore what is possible.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership, Self-Organizing Leadership Tagged With: creating a safety culture, injury-free workplaces, Safety Leadership Process, The Process Enneagram

The Drag of Disengaged People

November 21, 2014 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

In a recent email post, someone mentioned that the cost to businesses of disengaged employees is about $350 billion per year.

In another post, it was estimated that about 20% of the employees are actively disengaged; they aren’t just standing around but rather doing things like horseplay, game-playing-sabotage, and even bullying to drag the performance of the organization down. This is not only a huge loss to the business, but also a huge personal loss to these people who are so negative.

These people cause big problems by blocking the channels of communications that are so critical.

how to improve workplace safety People are often reluctant to speak up in these negative environments. Ideas for improvement never surface. New employees are negatively influenced and led astray. Supervisors have a very rough time getting the people to do their work properly. Grievance rates are high and much time is wasted needlessly because these are not addressed at an early stage.

In many organizations, new employees are given a safety orientation and then go to work. The organization depends on the more senior people providing some guidance to these new people. Where there is active disengagement, this follow-up guidance is often not done so the new people try their best, but are often hurt. During the summer months this is especially serious because summer and other temporary employees are hired. These people need a lot of help, but where there is active disengagement, little help is offered and drift from business focus occurs.

When the flow of communications is blocked, the organization can easily drift into disaster. Critical information gets lost. The managers who need the feedback about how the operations are running do not get the information they need. Flying blind is not good!

In your own organizations, if you see disengaged people, begin to talk with them, share important information and ask for their help. This may be hard at first, but over time, most of these people will become more engaged. One reason that people become disengaged is because they feel ignored and under-valued.

By talking together, listening for ideas, exploring for improvements from everyone, a lot of disengaged people will begin to get involved. This is not just a one-time activity. Talking, listening, exploring together are ongoing parts of the work that pay big dividends. As leaders in your organization, you can open things up for the better.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership, Self-Organizing Leadership Tagged With: business safety, creating a safety culture, employee safety, injury-free workplaces

The Three Biggest Safety Mistakes

November 14, 2014 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

The Three Biggest Safety Mistakes that Most Managers Make that Can Lead to Disaster and the Way Out.

The first Big Mistake is putting production first. Some managers are quite blunt and drive production without regard to the safety impact on the people. This sort of indifference is not common and these managers are fading away.

the three biggest workplace safety mistakes For most managers putting production first can be quite subtle with messages like:

We have to get the product out and meet our schedules, but do it safely.
We need to do it quicker and cheaper, but do it safely.
We can’t miss a shipment.
We’ll schedule maintenance when it is convenient.
We’ve spent lots of money and time on training and equipment, now just get on with it and do it safely.
The people cause injuries and incidents.
There is lip service to safety, but it gets lost in the press for production.

The second Big Mistake is the normalization of drift. This can also be subtle since we want continuous improvement. We want changes that are carefully considered by co-workers, engineers and managers. These need to be documented as part of the Management of Change OSHA requirements.

But we do not want people making changes here and there with little consideration and no documentation. This can happen when a worker sees a better way to do his/her work and makes a little change. Then she/he sees another improvement and makes that change. Over time, many little changes accumulate to the point where deviance is accepted and the process suddenly goes out of control.

The third Big Mistake is having structural and cultural blocks to communications. Many organizations are structured in silos of specialization like engineering, maintenance, production, HR, accounting, shipping, etc., where people in one silo are not supposed to talk with people directly in another silo. They are supposed to communicate up through their line of management to the top of the silo and then that manager will pass the message down through his/her silo. Each time there is a step in the communication chain, information gets lost or changes or both.

Sometimes cultural practices block communications. Bullying, fear of criticism, messengers getting “shot”, etc. can also block the communications.

People do not ask for your opinion.
Management does not want bad news.
The “boss” doesn’t listen.
Mind your own business.

When communications are blocked, critical information is restricted and those who need to know it are unaware of what is happening and serious mistakes are made.

Here is the way out of this mess. All three of these Big Mistakes can be overcome.

In opening up the communications in the organization where people can share and talk directly with those who need the information better decisions are made.
When there is trust and interdependence, people listen to each other, critical information and decisions are openly discussed, and evaluated and much better decisions are made.
When people see how they fit into the organization and the importance of their individual contributions, energy and creativity flows into their work.

These are the elements of the Complexity Leadership Process. Do you have something to add? Please share your experiences below.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership Tagged With: business safety, creating a safety culture, obstacles to safety, The Complexity Leadership Process

Partner-Centered Safety

November 6, 2014 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

Sustainable levels of safety excellence are achieved only when everyone is pulling together to make their work as safe and productive as possible.

creating a safety culture Partner-Centered Safety is a robust, proven way to bring people together to achieve sustainable levels of safety excellence being based on deeply held beliefs and values.

People want to be treated as people.
Most people have good minds and think.
People want to know what is going on.
People want to be successful and want to work safely.
People love their kids and want to go home safely, everyday.
People come together as partners to co-create their shared future in a structured, focused, intense, disciplined dialogue using the Process Enneagram©.
People are self-organizing all the time openly and freely sharing information, building relationships of trust and interdependence through their agreements about how they are willing to work together and creating meaning.
All the people at all the levels in the organization are in this together contributing from their unique roles and perspectives.
People want to be heard, listened to, valued and respected.

A second element of Partner-Centered Safety relates to the environment in which everyone works that is complex in the sense that ideas, conditions, people, outside influences, etc. are interacting and changing all the time. Every decision is made in these complex situations yet no one has all the information, sees everything and has their mind totally focused on the specific task at hand. To over come these everyone needs help and support so that the best decisions are made in the moment of taking action.

A third element of Partner-Centered Safety is “The Bowl”. In co-creating their shared future and operating out of these shared beliefs and values a container is created consisting of their mission, vision, principles of behavior, standards of performance and expectations. This container is called “The Bowl”. The Bowl provides order for the organization, holding it together and within the Bowl the people have the freedom to make the best decisions possible. A major responsibility of the leaders and managers is to help everyone understand and maintain the Bowl through continuous conversations and interactions. If someone becomes a problem in not working this way or in violating the Bowl, management must address and deal with it. All the people have a responsibility to work within the Bowl holding each other accountable to live up to their shared agreements.

See our website for successful examples of the effectiveness of Partner-Centered Safety.

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety Partnership Tagged With: business safety, injury-free workplaces, partnering for safe workplace, safe work environment, Self-Organizing Leadership

Teaching Point: Talking together, with each other

October 30, 2014 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

In order to build a culture of safety excellence, information needs to be widely shared in a way that it is credible, clear and understood. Talking together is so important.

Treating people with respect, showing them that we care about them and their safety, listening to them as they share their hopes, concerns and ideas, is vital to building a culture of safety excellence.

creating a safety culture As managers go into their workplaces, walking around watching, listening and sharing with true authenticity and interest, trust and interdependence build. People learn to open up, to share, to point out possible areas for improvement, and to realize that they are a critical part of the whole safety effort. A huge, positive shift in the safety culture occurs. The people close to the actual, physical work are often in the best position to see potential hazards that are not visible to the managers. The managers often need to push to meet production schedules so it is easy for them to miss these potential hazards. Therefore, having the active help of those closest to the work is an important piece of the total safety effort. This is one way we avoid disasters like the Deepwater Horizon explosion and fire.

Yet, many managers find that talking like this with the people in the organization is difficult. In the early days of my career, I also was reluctant to go into the workplace and talk with the people. This is a participative process and sometimes you can get tripped up. I found that I needed to get very clear about the safety messages and their importance so that I was able to be coherent and credible as I engaged with every one. Once I had the ideas about safety clear and cogent, I could easily talk with people. I learned that I did not have to have the answers to every question that was asked. When I didn’t know the answer, I’d say I did not know and would get back to them as quickly as I could. This actually made the encounters more effective since the people could see that I was listening and learning as well. People want to get to know their managers and see that they are truly interested in them and their safety.

So, I strongly suggest that the managers get clear and coherent on their safety messages, get out of their offices and into their workplaces, talking together, listening and learning so problems can be avoided and potential improvements identified. Then get going with the people to solve the problems and make the improvements. This takes time and effort, but over the long run, time is saved and leading gets easier as we avoid the dreadful mistakes and injuries.

This way of communicating with the people is highly effective and a key part of The Complexity Leadership Process. While much of my focus is related to workplace safety, this Complexity Leadership Process can apply to all aspects of organizational life since organizations are complex evolving systems.

Safety is very complex with all the interactions of people, technology and varying conditions; this tool enables the people to have the necessary conversations for them to come together in partnership and achieve excellence.

The fundamental basis for the Complexity Leadership Process we use in moving from compliance in safety performance to excellence is a powerful tool called the Process Enneagram©.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership, Self-Organizing Leadership Tagged With: creating a safety culture, injury-free workplaces, safetly leadership process, The Process Enneagram

Keeping Things Simple

October 23, 2014 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

With our focus on improving the safety in workplaces, our intention is to make things less complicated and difficult. Many organizations that we work with are all tangled up and things keep getting twisted around.

People get protective of their turf, resist changes, form tight little groups and exclude others, bully, get into endless arguments with management and others, and waste a huge amount of time in unproductive activities. This drives the management into difficult positions trying to push to get things done safely and on time. Everyone is in the tangled web.

self organizing safety leadership Things do not have to be this way! Most of the people know that this is counter-productive but that is the way it is. However, when we engage the people from across the organization in the Complexity Leadership Process, guiding them in a purposeful conversation of discovery that changes everything, they find it does not have to be that way!

In working with them, we begin with an important question like “How can we reduce the number of people getting hurt?” and talk together. In the course of this, stories are told, incidents remembered, injuries relived, and things open up. The people discover that they know a lot about all this, but the knowledge was hidden and scattered among everyone.

As we talk together, we see how, in working together, we can get a lot better in reducing injuries.

No one comes to work expecting to get hurt, so they begin to see ways for people to stay healthy. As their ideas develop, they are posted on the wall chart we use and a Strategic Safety Plan develops. The excitement builds as people engage in the conversation and debates. They co-create their safety future together, discover the connections that they have with others, and create ad-hoc teams to go after their big discoveries for improvement. When they have co-created their plan, priorities are clarified, and resistance to change virtually disappears so changes are made and improvement is seen very quickly. Their Strategic Safety Plan is posted for everyone to see and use going forward.

In working this way, management’s job gets a lot easier and becomes one of facilitating the people rather than having to drive them. Becoming a cheerleader is more fun than being a driver. Furthermore, the accident and injury rates go way down so everyone wins. I know this happens because this is what happened to me when I was the plant manager in the DuPont Belle, West Virginia Plant.

In working together this way, the chances for making those 3 Big Safety Mistakes go way down!

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Self-Organizing Leadership Tagged With: creating a safety culture, reduce workplace injuries, safe workplace, safety education in the workplace, safety leadership

Characteristics of The Safest Organizations

October 17, 2014 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

The safest organizations are the ones that behave as if they are Living Systems.

creating a safety culture in the workplace Most of us working in safety have been brought up to see organizations as if they are machine-like. This thinking goes all the way back to Descartes (1596-1650) and Newton (1642-1727). We use reductionist approaches to try to understand them. We seek cause/effect relationships. We use linear processes for training and the like, prescribing answers and doing things TO the people. We work on this part or that part trying to fix the whole thing.

It is a bit like a doctor who works on the stomach while another doctor works on the heart as if they are not connected in some way to the whole body, and have an impact on each other.

In this reductionist arena, we put a lot of effort and time into trying to reduce injury and illness rates to levels of excellence (<0.5) and sustain these levels. This is very hard, difficult and expensive.

Yet, over the last 50 or so years, scientists have been able (by using high-speed computers) to see the world and its patterns in wonderful new ways. We can see the whole of the organization – the connections of the various parts and the non-linear ways that they interact. We discover feedback loops and self-organization.

We are able to see the whole organization as if it is a living system.
All the people are vital parts to the success of the whole. We are able to share information freely, to learn together. Trust and interdependence build and the future can be co-created.

This is not just airy-fairy stuff! When I have used this approach to working with organizations to improve their safety and business performance, extraordinary results are achieved.

This is Operation Transformation for you and your organization, for Leaders and your people.

You each can begin to take steps in this direction by going into your organization, listening and talking with the people.

Find out what they think about the work they are doing and if they have some ideas about doing it in a better way. Help them to think through these ideas and, if they are good ideas, help them to bring them into reality. This simple process will begin to open things up to a better, safer, more productive future.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership Tagged With: creating a safety culture, injury-free workplaces, safe work environment, Self-Organizing Leadership