What If Your Organization’s Safety in 2017 was NOT VERY GOOD?

January 17, 2018 By Leave a Comment

What Can You Do to Turn it Around…So That Every Person Goes Home Safe at the End of the Day?

safety performanceRecognize Einstein’s Words of Wisdom: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.“

This means that a serious “retrospection” is needed. What happened right in 2017? What went wrong? Why? How do we make sure that injuries/incidents will not happen again? Where are we strong? Where are we missing the mark? Who’s supporting Safety? Who’s undermining Safety? How?

Look Deeper: Where are we at cross-purposes? What mixed signals are being given to the Organization? How is Leadership truly leading safety?

Look deeply at the processes you have in place that demonstrate authentic caring about your people and their safety. Here are some great examples…Are your first line supervisors asking these type of questions of their direct reports on a daily basis (individually, and team-wise) in order to manage risks, & engage people genuinely:

  • What are the top 2 or 3 risks you face today in your work?
  • How will you need to help (coworker) today (and vice-versa)?
  • What are the standards you are using today for this job?
  • What risks are you facing and how will you manage them today?
  • How will you know you’ve…done a safe, quality job?
  • What help do you think you might require today?
  • What extra precautions are you taking?
  • What did you learn today, in the course of your work, that you can share to help others on this team (gain competence and commitment to safety)?
  • How did you do on a scale of 1 to 10 today? What surprised you?
  • How can you share this new information to make tomorrow’s tasks be done more safely?

What is Essential to Know: The safety performance of any work team, work group, organization or company directly correlates to the Leadership of Safety…at all Levels of Leadership.

Call us at 716-622-6467 if you want to turn your organization around.

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

From Good to Great!

December 12, 2017 By Leave a Comment

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don'tIn 2001, Jim C. Collins wrote the best-selling management book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t. It described how companies transition from being good companies to great companies and how most companies fail to make that transition. The author found that focused leadership, clear expectations and alignment, and staying true to their field of major competence was key. There were other factors about greatness that showed up too – like Leaders being humble, and high employee engagement – employees being in tune with the company’s purpose, mission, endeavors, goals – not just the business side of things, but on the people side of the enterprise. Line organizations integrated information; people were involved, included and respected – because getting the right people in the right places was deemed as essential too. Entire organizations were communicating, collaborative, and cooperating.

How are things inside your organization? Inside your work team? What needs to happen as you move forward into the New Year so that your workplace can move into greatness? So that a year from now, you’re not scratching your head wondering why you didn’t make much progress toward greatness?

Richard N. Knowles & Associates can help you with continuous improvement. Whether it be increasing your effectiveness, leadership, safety, quality or all of the above. Give us a call and we’ll share how (716-622-6467). It’s worth adding here, that Workplace Violence, including bad behaviors, incivilities, bullying, harassment, and deeper dysfunctions like vengefulness, violence – even homicide, certainly does NOT fit with good or great companies. These are inside-cultural aspects that show up big time when supervisors, teams, leaders, organizations are not principle-based in their leading, and when communication, collaboration, cooperation are absent. We can help you here too.

Click here to read an article Claire wrote, It’s the Simple Things that Count…What Leadership needs to Know & Do NOW to Thwart Incivilities, Bullying, Harassment, & Workplace Violence.

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

Pressure Cooker: We Need to Partner with Each Other

September 18, 2017 By Leave a Comment

Changes in our workplaces keep coming fast and furiously. A recent report released by Price-Waterhouse-Coopers indicates that by 2030 the pressure on workers to perform will be huge. Organizations will be using all sorts of ways to track performance…even putting chips under their workers skin to look at location, performance, health and wellness! They may be tracking safety performance as well. Managers will need to be having “mature conversations” with the people about all this change and the feeling of threat this creates for their people and their jobs. The pressure to keep improving skills and performance continues to increase.

There is a “workable pressure relief valve” already available to us to release these stress levels! It’s called Partnering for Safety and Business Excellence. The need for open, honest, disciplined, constructive dialog is critical. It is through these sorts of continuous conversations that people and organizations change. The positive energy for continuous improvement builds one conversation at a time over and over. Showing respect and caring for both the people’s mental and physical health, as well as for the success of the business, is critical. The business can’t succeed without the creativity and energy of the people and the people’s jobs can’t survive without excellent business performance.

Who Really Cares Enough to Step In and Hold those Critical Conversations?

A recent report by the Rand Corporation, Harvard Medical School and the University of California-Los Angeles, finds that 20% of the people in our workplaces feel that the work environment is “grueling, stressful and hostile.” Other reports I have read indicate that as many as 80% of the people in our workplaces are very dissatisfied with their managers and their lack of consideration, listening and caring. It is noted that about half of the workforce would leave their current job, if they could find another, expressly because of their “boss.”

Thus the Forbes quote, “People leave managers, not companies.” Let’s face it. There are many managers and bosses that shouldn’t be managers and bosses. Many…cannot lead, are indecisive, don’t tell the truth, cannot hold the difficult conversations, aren’t clear in their expectations, have favorites, don’t follow-through, lack caring and concern.

There’s Fault…Everywhere:

It is not just the managers who are a problem. A story in the August 15th H.R. News indicates that people between 18 and 34 are putting themselves at risk by not following the companies’ safety procedures, even though over 50% say that they have read the procedures and understand why they exist. This leads, for example, to the tragic story of the death of a 29-year-old Athens, Georgia man on August 9th, who thoughtlessly jumped out of his forklift truck to catch a toppling, heavy, hydraulic car lift he was moving; it fell onto him.

On top of all this change, frustration and anger in our workplaces, many people are suffering from bullying from both managers and co-workers. Shouting and swearing are clearly inappropriate and so are actions like inappropriately withholding information, the unfair allocation of work, deliberate over-monitoring, spreading malicious rumors, and making unreasonable demands.

Stress, indifference and bullying are behaviors that block the ability to have the focused, disciplined, purposeful conversations required for both the people and their organizations to successfully negotiate all the changes we are and will be facing. The costs for the people and their organizations are huge resulting in the loss of as much as 30-40% of their effectiveness.

It doesn’t have to be this way!

Let’s all of us pull together and partner to build a successful and prosperous future. I challenge you to change your workplace for the better. Give me a call at 716-622-6467 and I’ll explain how you can do that quickly and effectively.

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety Leadership Tagged With: , , ,

Some Unsettling Trends

July 10, 2017 By Leave a Comment

safety trendsThe American Society for Safety Engineers (soon to be The American Society for Safety Professionals) in Denver, Colorado, on June 19-22, 2017, was attended by about 5,000 people. This was a record for attendance. There were lots of papers and a huge trade show exhibit. I never saw so much safety equipment and other offerings.

I presented a paper during the last series of talks. It was titled “Breaking Through to Safety Excellence, Self-Organizing Criticality and the Process Enneagram©.” Even though I was among the last of the papers, I had about 150 people attend and received a rating for my talk of 4.7 out of 5. Many people came up at the end to talk further. If any of you would like to see my paper, please send me an email.

Richard Knowles presenting at the American Society for Safety Engineers

In spite of the large attendance and all the safety equipment in the trade show, I feel some alarming trends in safety performance. The number of workplace fatalities in the US has been at around 4,700 each year for the last 6-7 years. New regulations and ISO Standards are not making a strong impact. This is true in other countries, as well like New Zealand, where they have already had 28 fatalities; almost as much as for all of 2016 even though they had a new National Standards issued in April 2-16.

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

Spring Cleaning

April 10, 2017 By Leave a Comment

spring cleaningAs the snow begins to melt and the spring winds arrive, it is time for cleaning up the place. Mud season is upon us as the snow melts. All sorts of curious things emerge from the melting piles of snow; stuff that was covered up and lost. (Just imagine: Years ago the settlers kept their animals sheltered next to their houses or barns attached to their houses so that they could care for them when the winter cold set in. They really had to do the spring-cleaning!)

I would like to consider a special kind of spring-cleaning. What are the old cobwebs, dusty corners and dated ideas we have tucked away in our heads? Are these holding us back – preventing our ability to achieve safety excellence? Erik Hollnagel talks about the need to shift our thinking from the traditional approach (Safety-I) to a more open, inclusive, more effective approach he calls Safety-II. (Erik Hollnagel, 2014. Safety-I and Safety-II).

Let’s open the windows and let the light in with our Partner-Centered Safety Leadership processes that enable all of us to move towards safety excellence.

Here are some simple things we can do to make the shift towards a Safety-II environment:

  • As leaders, managers and supervisors let’s talk together to develop a clear, consistent safety vision and message.
  • We can go into our workplaces, talk with the people, open our minds, listen, and learn together to develop the trust and the best safety rules and procedures so everyone goes home to their families free of physical and mental injuries.
  • We can continually grow and learn together.
  • We can identify those areas where we need to do more training or develop new procedures.
  • We can find new ways to connect safety and security with having personal meaning for everyone.
  • We can bring in specialists to help us when necessary.
  • All sorts of options for improvement open up to us as we shift our thinking and brush away the cobwebs.

As we learn and grow together, trust and interdependence build, everyone begins to open up, taking the initiative to improve things. As we work together with the Partner-Centered Safety Leadership process, we can all get better and that is fun!

 

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

A Time of New Opportunities

January 17, 2017 By Leave a Comment

Our new year is full of opportunities, dark clouds and unknowns. The world is full of strife of all sorts. Our political situation here in the U.S. is full of hope, tension, noise, and unknowns. So many people are screaming about their opinions that it is almost impossible to hear. I get so tired of it that I often just quit trying to listen. That is probably a mistake for me to do that; we are all connected and I can’t just go away and hide. None of us can do that.

Here at home in the U.S.A., our culture is undergoing a shift towards the right with a move away from the centralization of power and decision-making towards one with a broader base for the exercise of power and decisions. Many people have very strong views about this shift in our culture and concerns about what will happen. What is going to be good? What is going to be bad? The complexity of all this prevents us from clearly knowing just what decisions is best.

All of this change (at both the macro and micro levels) presents us with opportunities to step in and make a positive difference. More opinions are floating around, more ideas being offered, more questions emerging. In the heat of all this, we each have an opportunity to listen for the truth, think about what is possible and to more openly share our ideas and thinking. Each of us can make a positive difference. While some people try to be louder that others, this in not where the best thinking will come from.

The best opportunities for truth and the best decisions to emerge are when we each engage together in thoughtful dialogue, searching for what is best for us, those around us and our larger communities, cities, businesses, and our country. For our specific work and how we choose to live, we each probably have the best information about what is most appropriate for success. We are engaged with living as it actually happens. When someone tries to impose his or her ideas as to what we should do or how we should live, we get resentful. Our higher leaders have a broader scope of information and know more about what is happening in the broader picture, but they do not know our specific needs or the best solutions for us. We need to talk together at all levels so that we can all develop a better understanding of the broader picture and make appropriate decisions together. This is true in our personal lives as well as our work lives.

When we can come together with respect, listening, being in a search for understanding together in our dialogue, new thinking, ideas and possible solutions emerge. We are all learning to live in this new world and we need each other’s help and support. None of us individually have the “right” answer, but together we can discover solutions that can really help.

Bringing This Into Our Workplaces and Businesses

safety work groupsAs we bring this sort of thinking and being together into our workplaces, we can seek ways to improve our safety performance and business results. I have found over and over that we can vastly improve our safety and business performance when we share information together, listen for understanding, develop trust among us and see how well are all contributing, solutions emerge. When we help to change the behavior of bullies of get them out of the work place, we get even better.

Every organization has work groups within them where the safety performance and business results are excellent. In our dialogues, let us search for these fine examples and learn from them. The people in these groups have a lot to offer us so we can learn together with them.

When the upper management and leaders create the environment where people doing the work have the information they need and can make the appropriate decisions about how they perform the actual tasks, then each group can make the best contributions to the success of safely working and developing the best business results.

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

Helping Each Other – Managing Ourselves

January 10, 2017 By Leave a Comment

We will inaugurate our new President on January 20, 2017. Lots of change is promised. We are all full of questions and wondering about the unknowns. In all of this, we need to depend on each other in our families and workplaces so everyone can thrive.

I think that this is a time, for the good of our families and co-workers, when we need to come together by being respectful, helping, listening, and sharing information, ideas and the workloads so that our families and workplaces are kinder and safer for us. We can control how we are willing to be together even though the world seems in turmoil.

To start 2017 off on a good footing, let’s choose to manage ourselves and decide to help each other through all the unknowns.

I’m reminded of the mid-1980’s when self-managed and self-directed work teams first came into vogue. Each team lived by a set of principles to which they committed to do the work they collectively needed to do (without supervision or having to be told what to do and when), while respecting each other’s individuality and contribution to the overall team. Those behavioral principles are good ones…a little bit of self-management (EQ) (a.k.a. “controlling your emotions in healthy ways”) can go a long way to interpersonal success.

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Self-Organization Tagged With:

Releasing the Forces for Excellence

December 12, 2016 By Leave a Comment

safety excellenceAs this year comes to an end, we will be looking at our overall performance to see how we did and to plan for 2017. We will usually look at our injury statistics like the total recordable injury rate and try to determine how we performed. Often quite independently, others will look at other performance indicators to see how they came out. We act as if these are independent of each other, but in our organizations everything is connected so all aspects of performance influence each other. Everything happens through the people. All the parts are interconnected. Excellence in safety performance is strongly related to our total performance because it all works through the will of the people.

We traditionally try to apply safety and other metrics to our organizations in a machine-like fashion. We see that something needs to improve so we push harder as if we are pushing a wagon up hill. Too many regulators and managers sit in their offices trying to imagine what needs to be done and write a new procedure or rule so that things will be better. Then they issue edicts pushing everyone harder. However, the work as imagined is never the same as the work as done. Why do managers think that sitting, bound to their office chairs, that they know everything? How can they? Then at the end of 2017 we will do this all over again trying to understand why things did not get better. Around and around we go!

We break this vicious cycle by opening up ourselves to a different way of thinking, seeing and being.

safety managementWork-as-imagined and work-as-done are ideas developed by Erik Hollnagel in his book, Safety-I and Safety-II (2014. Ashgate Publishing Ltd., UK). Safety I is our traditional top-down management approach to safety management where rules and procedures are issued by those far from the actual work. This is like the approach discussed in the proceeding paragraph. I think that a lot of people are trying to do good safety work from the Safety I perspective, but the results are not improving fast enough.

For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently reported that the rate for nonfatal injuries and illnesses per 100 people dropped to 3.0 in 2015 from 3.2 in 2014 and 3.3 in 2013. That is a 10% drop over three years. That is way too slow! In 2015 2,900,000 injuries were reported. That is WAY TOO MANY people getting hurt. In an earlier paper the BLS reported that the number of fatalities has hovered around 4,700 people a year for the last 5 years. This is WAY TOO MANY!

This is not just a US problem. For example, Worksafe, New Zealand recently reported that the health and safety laws have had little effect on reducing fatalities further.

While driving safety from the top has had benefits historically, the effort is having less and less impact. But when we change our approach to working with the people to co-create our future, things change for the better quite quickly. This is true! It’s proven!

In the work of Richard N. Knowles and Associates, we approach the organization as if it is a living organism. Time after time coming out of our Safety Excellence Workshops, the performance improves quickly. When we engage with the people this way and help them to co-create their safety future, building on the positive strengths of the people, safety and all other aspects of their work get better quickly. For example, when I was the Plant Manager at the DuPont Belle Plant in West Virginia we worked this way, and our injury rates dropped by over 95% and earnings rose 300% in just three years. This is similar to Hollnagel’s Safety II approach.

Whenever we, at Richard N. Knowles Associates, work in organizations the safety and total performance improves quickly. Everything happens through the force of the will of the people. We release this force helping the people to co-create their shared future. Then we show them how to sustain their work for the years ahead. All dimensions of the business improve; costs are lower, productivity is higher, morale is better and far more people are working safely.

Call us at 716-622-6467 so you can release the positive, creative forces in your organizations quickly!

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety Leadership Process Tagged With: , ,

Even When the “Force” is With You, Things Can Go Wrong!

November 11, 2016 By Leave a Comment

The background story:
workplace safety for employeesA recent article in the October 13, 2016 Daily Mail reported a £1.6 Million fine (equivalent of $2 Million) against Disney after actor, Harrison Ford, was crushed by the Millennium Falcon’s hydraulic door on the set of the latest Star Wars Episode VII, “The Force Awakens”, movie which was being filmed in June, 2014.

Ford had gone through the door, hit a button, walked out the door, and unexpectedly turned to walk back through the door when it came down on him. He assumed that the set was not live since it was a rehearsal. In this scene, Ford was helping his injured Wookiee friend through the door into the spacecraft. The door, which was operated by a person who was remotely located and could not see Ford, quickly closed it as he unexpectedly turned back into the spacecraft. Ford screamed and an emergency stop button was pressed, stopping the door just eight inches from being completely shut. They described it like a blunt-edged guillotine with a force comparable to being hit by a small car. Ford was pinned to the ground, suffering a broken tibia and fibula, a dislocated ankle and cut hand. The door had to be opened by the operator.

Disney’s subsidiary, Foodles Production (UK) Ltd., admitted to two counts of safety violations. In the main violation, while the company had done a risk assessment recognizing the risk of death, they had failed to talk to Ford so he was unaware of the precautions he needed to take. In earlier films, the door was operated slowly by a rope and pulley by a stagehand. The mechanized operation moved the door very quickly, surprising the 71-year-old Ford. After Ford’s recovery of about eight weeks, the film was completed.

The Meaning of the Story: Looking at the Blunt End and the Sharp End of Safety

Blunt End and the Sharp End of SafetyThis story illustrates so many of the changing conditions and people involved in our work places. Most of our companies do a good job in risk assessments and developing safe working procedures. However, this planning often takes place away from the actual location where the work will be done. This is sometimes called the “blunt end” of the safety process where the people doing the planning do not understand what happens in the work at “sharp-end” where conditions and demands may be quite different, and where most of the injuries happen.

Relating this Story to Safety Theory and Practice

the past and future of safety managementIn Erik Hollnagel’s book, “Safety-I and Safety-II” (2014. Ashgate Publishing Ltd., Surrey, UK), he discusses ideas like the significance of the gap between “the work-as-imagined” done by managers and engineers planning and designing the work and the “work-as-done” by the people actually doing the work. This is illustrated nicely by the Ford Star Wars incident where the people doing the “work-as-imagined” failed to understand the actual conditions and mindset of Ford doing the “work-as-done.”

Hollnagel describes the way in which we have traditionally done our safety work as reactive and where so much of it relates to “work-as-imagined” as Safety-I. The gap between where the “work-as-imagined” and “work-as-done” is where there are very difficult communication challenges. We tend to react to what has gone wrong. Bridging this gap moves our safety work into Safety-II where we move into the world of more performance variability, more adaptability and resilience. This is a world where everyone needs a better understanding of how and why things work, particularly our organizations. It is a world where we need to have a sense of both the whole and the parts. It is a world where we focus more on understanding what is going right than just on what went wrong. It is a world where we are more proactive in our safety work.

The Bottom Line: Re-engaging the Force…People and Business Together

At Richard N. Knowles & Associates, we help organizations move into a world similar to Hollnagel’s Safety-II world. Our work environments and tasks are complex. Our organizations are complex, adapting, self-organizing networks of people. Building on these ideas, we help organizations to learn how to open up the communications, to engage everyone, to help and support each other, to listen and learn from each other, and connect real caring with the work that needs to be done. We help organizations to reconcile the relationship between the needs of the business and the needs of the people, which results in the release of enormous energy and creativity.

Give us a call so we can explore this more fully with you and help you see the sorts of improvements you and your people can make. We are here at 716-622-6467 to meet your needs.

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

Shifting the Way We Look at Organizations

July 11, 2016 By Leave a Comment

On June 29, 2016, I presented a paper at the American Society of Safety Engineers 2016 Professional Development Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. It was titled “Partner-Centered Safety: A New Leadership Approach for Safety Excellence.”

Richard-ASSE-Conference2016

My message to those who attended my session was that the Bureau of Labor safety statics show the rate of improvement in reducing injuries in the workplace has slowed down since about 2009 and the rate of improvement for deaths has stopped; about 4,600-4,700 people are being killed at work each year.

The safety professionals and managers are putting a lot of effort into improving the safety performance in our workplaces, but we seem to be stuck. I think that the problem is that we are approaching organizations as if they are just complicated systems rather than as complex systems.

current-view-of-organizations

The complicated view of organizations has served us well, and a lot of progress has been achieved. Now we need to move forward in our thinking.

When we view our organizations as complex systems, a better description of the way organizations actually behave emerges.

more-realistic-view

While many people crave reliability, predictability, stability, and control for their organizations, this is rarely achieved. Our organizations are full of movement, feedback, changes, and surprises. Nothing sits still; everything is in motion.

When I learned to view my organization as a complex system, everything improved. Our injury rate dropped by ~97%, earnings rose ~300%, emissions dropped ~88%, and productivity rose ~45%.

My experience in leading the organization as if it was a complicated system was difficult and strenuous. I felt that I had to push everything to get the work accomplished safely, and we never achieved success. When I shifted to a complexity view of the organization, everything became easier to lead, my work was more effective and the improvements were dramatic. In working with the organization as a complex system, the people opened up, the conversations were more purposeful, and energy and creativity were released. All dimensions of the business improved and the people were pleased and proud of their achievements.

There is a lot in making this shift in perspective. I think that everyone can learn to work this way. I would be happy to talk with any of you about this and help you on your own journeys.

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety Leadership Process Tagged With: , ,
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