Preventing Pencil Whipping of Safety Checklists

Safety is filled with checklists. Pre-task checklists, equipment checklists, start-up and shut-down checklists to name a few. Unfortunately, it is all too common for people to “pencil whip”…

Early Warning Signs that Systems are Impacting Safety

About 20 years ago I conducted a safety culture assessment for a large paper products company. They had been working hard on improving their safety performance and like many organizations, had…

Frontline Supervisors: The Key to Safety Culture

Discussions of safety culture improvement often focus on senior leaders, which is appropriate since senior leaders are the ones who must define the desired safety culture, set the vision and values…

Psychosocial Hazards Part II: What Leaders Can Do Now

In Part I of this 2-part series, I presented a primer on psychosocial hazards (PSHs) for readers who might be unfamiliar with or are simply interested in learning more about this topic. As a quick…

An Example of Safety Leadership Success: Moving Towards a Just Culture

Want an improved safety culture that cultivates communication and problem solving? Make a systems approach the primary tool in your safety leadership strategy. This ninth blog is dedicated to…

Psychosocial Hazards Part I: The Move to Occupational Safety & Health

Introduction to Psychosocial HazardsI recently attended the annual safety conference of the American Society of Safety Professionals (ASSP) in Denver, CO. Often at conferences, I’ll attend a talk…

Balancing the Carrot and Stick: The Role of Negative Approaches in Leadership

Over the past several years, I’ve noticed that people and organizations are shifting away from using primarily negative approaches to influence behavior. Instead, they are embracing more positive…

An Example of (Safety) Leadership Success: Narrowing Focus to Create Results

The best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. This eighth blog discusses one leader’s intentional push to move away from everything is important right now to a narrowed, organization-…

An Example of Leadership Success: Building Psychological Safety

Want a team that performs at the highest levels? Make winning fun and learning a critical part of growth? The seventh blog is dedicated to one leader’s determination in developing a high-…

Culture, Language, and Positive Reinforcement

Increasing cultural diversity is adding a richness to the work world. Immigrants (like many non-immigrants) are often hardworking, loyal employees, however cultural diversity can present safety…

Sustaining a Culture of Engagement with Behavioral Science

If you manage a team or hold a leadership role in an organization, you may already know the benefits of maintaining high engagement. Highly engaged teams are correlated with lower rates of attrition…

An Example of Leadership Success: Creating Bench Strength

Want to go fast, go alone. Want to go far, go as a team. This sixth blog is dedicated to a leader’s determination to develop the bench strength of her team. Pat’s effort led to an organization-wide…

An Example of (Safety) Leadership Success: Creating a Learning Culture

Safety is our number one priority is a nice slogan, but the systems, processes, and management strategies happening inside an organization communicate what’s most important. This fifth blog is…

Teaching Persistence Without Overdoing the Pain

A headline about Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, wishing pain and suffering upon Stanford students caught my attention recently. I took the bait and clicked to find out what he might be getting at.…

The Case for Conducting a Behavioral Lean Maturity Assessment

Organizations that embody continuous improvement are exemplars within and outside of their respective industries. Ironically, we measure nearly every key metric critical to the forward progress of…

An Example of Leadership Success: Investing in New Talent

Why do companies hire smart people and then set them up to fail by not investing in their development? The fourth blog in this series highlights one leader’s investment in a new employee to help…

A Tale of Two Telematics

With the improvements in occupational safety over the past two decades, incidents within the workplace have been greatly reduced. Those organizations for which driving is a requirement have found…

Behavioral Lean: The “Best of Both Worlds” Approach to Cultures of Continuous Improvement

Creating a culture of continuous improvement is an aspiration for many organizations. Continuous improvement cultures bring to mind industries such as commercial space flight. Only 55 years ago…