The Lurking Elephants…Can You See Them Now?

December 19, 2014 By 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 workplaceYes, 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.

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

The Oil Patch

December 5, 2014 By 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 leadershipThere 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: , , ,

Partner-Centered Safety

November 6, 2014 By 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 culturePartner-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: , , , ,

Shifting the Safety Culture to Excellence

October 3, 2014 By Leave a Comment

When we work together with our people, we can shift the safety culture.

self organizing leadership cultureThe first part of this work is sharing all information and talking together about it. Another part is building trust and interdependence with the people as we openly discuss what is happening, what we are doing and why. The third part of this work is helping people to see the big picture and how important their part is to the success of the whole business.

These are the core elements of Self-Organizing Leadership. When we co-create our Safety Strategic Plan™ using the Process Enneagram©, we produce a living strategic plan that we use going forward. We keep it posted, talk about it weekly and modify it as things change.

We have found that walking around and talking with, rather than at, our people often feels new and awkward for many managers. It takes some practice and persistence.

Being in dialogue with the people makes us feel exposed and uncertain. Sometimes people ask questions we can’t answer. That is okay – just get the answer and go back to talk some more. This is not a spectator sport. There is a Spanish saying, “It is a lot easier to talk about the bull than be in the ring.” Yet, this walking around and talking and listening together is key to our success. In these conversations we are building the BOWL. This is the container that holds the organization together. It consists of our vision, mission, principles, standards, and expectations. As people learn to function within the BOWL, they find the freedom to create new solutions to problems, taking the lead to solve them and become leaders.

When the culture shifts in this way, the people begin to see other things that they can do to improve the business. Quality problems that were once ignored get solved. Cost problems that lingered get fixed. Customer issues among the plant and their customers, like delivery requirements, get solved. Turn-around times between production campaigns needed to clean and re-pipe the equipment drop from weeks to just days. I have seen all these things happen.

When the safety culture gets right then everything gets right! Moving to safety excellence becomes the leading wave for total cultural change to excellence.

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety for Business, The Process Enneagram© Tagged With: , , ,

Changing Safety Culture

September 18, 2014 By Leave a Comment

I am becoming more and more focused on changing the safety culture of organizations. There are lots of training programs and fine instructors teaching all aspects of safety technology. Yet our organizations still have to deal with a lot of people getting hurt.

Most people don’t come to work expecting to get hurt. Most organizations want people to work safely. I think a large part of our challenge to moving towards safety excellence is the way our organization’s culture influences how people decide to work together, or not.

safety excellence in business leadershipMost of the safety people I’ve come to know approach organizations as if they are mechanical things to manipulate. Organizations are structured in functions. Knowledge is structured in pieces. People are narrowly skilled. Motivation is based on external factors. Information is shared on a need to know basis. Change is a troubling problem. People work in prescribed roles seeing only their part of the work. If change is needed people are moved around like chairs. Training is provided in abundance. Safety programs are set up as step-by-step processes where things are arranged in a prescribed sequence.

There is a big emphasis on teaching people what to do and then expecting them to do only as they are told…as if they checked their brain at the locker.

In my experience, organizations are not mechanical things to be manipulated, but rather they behave more like a living system. Knowledge is seamless. Organizations are seen as a whole system. Work is flexible and without boundaries. People are multi-skilled and continuously learning. Motivation is based on links to the whole system. Information flows openly and freely. Change is happening all the time, and seen as an opportunity for improvement. People work beyond their roles. People see their work in relation to the whole, knowing and doing what needs to be done. People work safely because they want to go home safe at the end of the day. They understand the larger expectation of the business.

Organizations are complex adaptive systems. The tools to work in complex adaptive systems are different from those that work in organizations seen as machines. When the tools of complexity are used, things work much more effectively, people become engaged in working towards the success of the whole system and change can happen quickly.

To learn more about this topic, see my blogs posts on Safety Excellence.

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

A Question to Ponder

December 10, 2013 By Leave a Comment

In my previous Blog I talked about the America’s Safest Companies Conference in Atlanta, GA. There were about 400 people in attendance for the fine papers, displays and the awards to the 10 Safest Companies of 2013.

safety excellence processIt was fascinating to see the contrast between the usual, linear, mechanical approach to safety and The Complexity Leadership Process (CLP) that I discussed at my display table. A large number of people talked with me at my display table about The Complexity Leadership Process which was new to all of them. Many could not believe how quickly and dramatically the safety performance improved using the CLP. At one level the CLP looks like a simple employee involvement program, yet it is much more and also different at a deeper level than the usual employee involvement processes. One fellow, who recently wrote a book about changing the safety culture to excellence just brushed the CLP aside as something he’d already seen. The approach to safety excellence he’s written about involves 43 linear steps that take 3-5 times as long as the CLP and require a very high level of persistence and determination over many years.

In an example of a long, slow, linear process was in a presentation by one of the Award–Winning companies about their journey to safety excellence. The presenter showed a chart showing their progress from a Total Recordable Injury Rate (TRIR) of about 8 to about 0.5 over 12 years, one little step at a time. It is great that fewer people are being injured, but it took way too long, and too many people were hurt along the way. When I count the number of injuries they suffered over this 12-year period, they had about 36 more recordable injuries per 100 employees than we experience at my Belle, WV Plant when we went from a TRIR of about 6 to 0.3 in just 3 ½ years. If the average cost of an OSHA Recordable Injury is about $50,000, then the Belle Plant with 36 fewer injuries and the suffering, saved about $1,800,000 for every 100 people. At Belle, we had about 1,000 people so we saved closer to $19,000,000.

It is interesting to watch people try to reframe a new idea into their old paradigm. The evidence of the improvements doesn’t seem to have an impact.

I think that if people believe something, they will see it, but if they don’t believe it they won’t see it, and not the other way around.

The evidence of many fewer injuries and the large savings that this generates, while proven in real cases, don’t seem to have much impact.

So for you who are reading this Blog, here is my question for you:

How do we get people to see, to understand and to try this new CLP approach when it is proven to be so effective?

 

The photo above is a picture of Dick at his Display table at the America’s Safest Companies Conference, where he had the opportunity to speak with lots of managers about eliminating workplace injuries.

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, 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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