America’s Safest Companies gather in Atlanta, Georgia

October 28, 2013 By 1 Comment

The America’s Safest Companies Conference is being held in Atlanta, Georgia this week.

The America’s Safest Companies Conference is sponsored by EHS Today and will have about 350 company presidents, Vice Presidents, EHS directors and managers and others interested in helping the people in our facilities go home in one piece. There will be keynote speakers on safety and sustainability as well as four conference tracks relating to:

  • Safety and Risk Management
  • Environmental/Sustainability
  • Compliance
  • Safety Technology

The Conference begins on Monday, October 28th with a reception and then the paper sessions will run on Tuesday and Wednesday up to 2:30 PM.

This is an interesting mix of people and tracks with many papers presented by high-level people with an emphasis on integrating safety into the culture of the companies and leadership. One of the key sponsors is Fisher & Phillips, a large law firm specializing in environmental, health and safety issues among the rest of their practice relating to labor law. The lead EH &S person from Fisher & Phillips is Edwin G. Foulke, Jr. who was a former OSHA Director.

america's safest companies conferenceI’ll be participating as a sponsor for the Conference Program Brochure. I’ll have an ad in the Brochure as well as a display table. My tag line is “When safety gets right, everything else gets right”. Since I am not an official speaker, I am going to use my display table as an opportunity to talk with people about the Complexity Leadership Process that I wrote about in a previous.

While there will be papers about leadership and moving to safety excellence, I will be the only one talking about the three major areas of safety (occupational safety, occupational health and process safety) and showing how to use the Complexity Leadership Process to achieve sustainable levels of excellence and improved business performance. I’ll share my work from the DuPont Belle, WV plant, the New Zealand Steel, Auckland, NZ, and the CSR Invicta Sugar Mill in Ayr, Australia and powerful case studies.

I’ll be working my display during the Monday evening Reception as well as at all the breaks so I am hoping to connect with a lot of the Conference attendees in one-on-one conversations and open up their thinking to complexity and the importance of learning to think and live this way. This will be a very difference experience for me compared to presenting papers that I have often done and expect to do in the future. I am very interested in meeting so many people who are focused on Safety.

In April of 2014, I will also be presenting the Keynote at the Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia SHE Conference – another gathering of great minds in this industry.

As you can surmise, I am very dedicated to getting the ideas about complexity and its importance in helping people and organizations in their journeys to excellence. More and more people are beginning to see the world as Complex and are more open to learning to live and work in this paradigm.  As readers of these Blogs, I hope you are one of these on the leading edge of our thinking.

If you are at the conference, please stop by and say hello!

Richard N. Knowles, Ph.D., The Safety Sage

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership Process Tagged With: , ,

When the Safety is Right, Everything Else gets Right!

July 1, 2013 By 1 Comment

I recently read a book by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan, The Three Laws of Performance. They have studied leadership in many organizations and developed Three Laws of Performance and three Leadership Corollaries for these (P.212).

The First Law
How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.
Leadership Corollary 1
Leaders have a say, and give others a say, in how situations occur.

The Second Law
How a situation occurs arises in language
Leadership Corollary 2
Leaders master the conversational environment.

The Third Law
Future-based language transforms how situations occur to people.
Leadership Corollary 3
Leaders listen for the future of their organization.

These three Laws and Corollaries are almost identical to what we do in Self-Organizing Leadership as we use the Process Enneagram© with the people. In using this tool in conversations with the people we co-create the future with everyone having a say in it. We spend a lot of time in the organizations talking with and listening to the people seeking new and better ways to do things.

For some people in leadership positions, talking with people, seems to be quite hard. Yet it is as simple as for example;

“Hi Mary, How are things going today? I hope everything is going well on the home front. You look like you really know how to do this task. I’ve never done it before, could you show me how you do it? What are the safety challenges and rules? Is there a better way to do this? Is there an easier way? Let’s talk about that. If I help you, can you take the lead to develop the idea and see if it really works as well as you think?”

This conversation shows how the Three Laws of Performance play out. Mary usually gets pretty pumped up as she is listened to, respected and asked for a better, safer way. This may be the first time she’s been treated this way by management.

As this simple interaction occurs, over and over throughout the organization, the culture shifts to becoming more positive, resourceful and creative. When the people see that management is really listening and trying, when they see the manager as real people things open up. Ideas about things beyond the safety arena emerge and big savings develop for the company.

When I was the Plant Manager at the DuPont Belle, WV Plant, working this way with about 1,200 people we made huge changes that endured for many years. For example, injury rates dropped >96%, emissions dropped 88%, productivity rose 45% and earnings rose 300%. Together we achieved world-class safety performanece with total recordable injury rates running at 0.3 or less. They maintained this excellent performance for 12 years after I left for another DuPont assignment.

Zaffron and Logan have a case study in their book about New Zealand Steel near Auckland, New Zealand. The mill was struggling and the management decided that they really needed to change the culture to survive and grow into their future. In just 2 years New Zealand Steel transformed themselves. Injury rates dropped 50%, productivity rose 20%, costs dropped 15-20% and return on capital rose 50%.

As I was reading the story I realized that I knew the people they’d named and that Tim Dalmau, my associate in this work, and I had led the transformational effort using the Self-Organizing Leadership approach. The Process Enneagram© was the key tool we used to help the people have the important conversations and discover their future.

These two stories of the transformations of the DuPont chemical plant in Belle, WV and the New Zealand Steel plant in Auckland, New Zealand clearly show that the work with the people to shift the safety culture is the leading edge of change for the entire organization.

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety for Business, Self-Organizing Leadership Tagged With: , , , ,

The Case for making Safety a Priority in Business

June 4, 2013 By 2 Comments

In my interactions with companies I often hear the people saying things like:

“If only my management really supported safety we would really get a lot better. If they say safety is number 1, then why don’t they behave that way?”

The people at the top probably know that they can have big losses, lawsuits and bad publicity if there is a serious injury, toxic chemical release or explosion. They may even wake up at night thinking about these things.

Yet safety is not their core business. They have revenue and earnings goals looming over them. Quality and production problems may be pressing them. In this environment safety is a pain in the neck, intruding at the wrong times. It is seen as more costs.

I think that we may have the safety messages backward. Rather than feeling under-valued and not supported by management around safety, let’s turn the picture around so that excellence in safety performance is the path to total business excellence performance and enhanced profits.

Everyone can play an important part in this. We achieve safety excellence by shifting the culture. We share all information, build trust and interdependence and help everyone see how they are important to the success of the entire business. We engage each other, listen for all the ideas, help people to solve the problems and challenges that come up. We ask for help because none of us can do this alone.

As the culture shifts, injury and incident rates drop thus saving a lot of money directly, people feel more valued and interested in the total business. As the credibility around safety is built, people begin to see other things that can be improved to help the business and they do them.

As we shifted the safety culture at the DuPont Belle, WV plant where I was the plant manager in the 1980s and 1990s the injury rates dropped by about 97% and earnings went up about 300%. People felt a lot better about things and focused at really making improvements. Not only did we save money with fewer injuries and incidents, people went after things like lowering the demurrage rates (the rent we pay owners of tank trucks after their deliveries were made and the trucks were left on the plant) by 75% in just a few months. We also learned how to change our process control systems from pneumatic systems to electronic systems without running parallel—thus cutting the time and costs for the conversions by about 50%. We did this 16 times without failure.

As the culture shifted towards excellence everything else shifted towards excellence. When we turn the story around from safety being a pain in the neck to becoming the leading edge for shifting the total organization to high performance and excellence, then safety becomes a focal point for the organizational change efforts.

About 80% of the large-scale organizational change efforts fail to produce the desired results and are not sustained. Rather than beginning with a large-scale change effort, we can begin with a smaller effort, focused at safety and then spread the effort as we learn how to do it and gain everyone’s support. Success is much more likely and it is sustainable. At Belle the culture shifted! One measure of that was the injury rates dropped to world-class levels and were sustained for 16 years. Everything else we measured also showed significant improvement.

Let’s shift the safety message from being a pain in the neck to becoming the leading wave for total organizational excellence!

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety for Business Tagged With: , , ,
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