Leading and Learning Through Safety
Leading and Learning Through Safety
Episode 127- Trickle Down Leadership
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Safety starts at the top, and the absence of good leadership becomes very apparent when you look at the culture.
Links
https://jordanbarab.com/confinedspace/2023/09/20/osha-cites-before-worker-is-killed/
https://www.wcia.com/news/local-news/adm-explosion-draws-third-osha-investigation/
Welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast where we discuss the technical and people side of safety. Safety should be your primary leadership tool for discovering more about your people and culture. Your host is Dr. Mark French, also known as the safety dude. Mark is a credentialed, experienced and passionate professional with experience in automotive, food, chemical, nuclear, ecommerce, and energy sectors. He is going to share information and anecdotes from years of experience in the people side of safety based on industrial and organizational psychological theories. Safety is so much more than a technical skill. It is a motivational need that defines the culture of your organization. employee safety is a meaningful business practice that makes a direct impact on everyone through direct behavioral engagement. That is why your organization should be using safety as a key method to learn about your culture and lead your teams. Thanks for joining this episode as we talk through current issues and people management and how they impact our everyday workplace.
Mark French:And welcome to this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. Hey, I am your host, Dr. Mark French. And I am so happy that you have joined me for this episode as we continue to look at really its leadership. But with all the years I've put into safety, I've always felt like I have missed something big, like what is it that really drives safety. And it comes first of all, to leadership. There's been a lot of research about top down safety management, there has to be commitment, there has to be investment in when that empowerment happens. Psychologically, fundamentally, people change. And so this podcast is dedicated to the leadership part of safety. And it's not just a safety podcast, we focus on safety, but it's so much more I feel like this is really the cutting edge if you want to become that next great leader, if you want to accelerate how you influence people. Start with the idea of how do I make my workplace physically and psychologically safer for everyone? How do we do that? And when we're able to do that we create so much more for our people. So found a whole bunch of really good news stories that I want to touch on. Very, again, I only get a lot of times the news that we get in safety is usually bad news. We see that but there's lessons here that sometimes are learned and in this case, not learned. This one here is from Decatur, Illinois, there was a chemical and food ish plant that had an explosion, and it sent eight people were injured from this explosion. Probably combustible dust. Why do I say that? Because earlier in the year, there was a combustible dust explosion at the same place. So less than 12 months ago. Earlier this year. Another explosion in the same facility. And then just a couple of months ago a fire broke out. So not an explosion but still flames and fire department. Wow. progressively getting worse even after multiple issues. What does this say about an organization that has this happen? So earlier in the year, boom, you have a fire and explosion people. It hurts people. People are injured from it. OSHA comes in news media bad publicity. You move in a little further big fire no one's injured but property damage fire could have been an explosion could have been worse move forward another couple of months another explosion bigger this time. Eight people in the hospital or eight people injured as they in the hospital says injured. This is ultimately this is leadership. There is no doubt that there is a problem there. Interestingly enough, I will post the News link but I went to the webpage because it's a big company and I was looking at, like, who are they hiring for. And of course, one of them's a PSM engineer looking at combustible dust, I'm sure. Evidently they decide they need someone to help out there. I feel like that person's got a big job ahead of them, considering what I'm seeing here. But let's start. Because I don't know all the facts here. I don't know everything I need to know to make an assessment. But let's, let's take a theoretical, this is how I like to play this game is let's walk through it together to see where the faults are one. They're not following any standard here, there are some great NFPA standards, there's OSHA, guidance on combustible dust, fire prevention, explosion, prevention, all this stuff, it's out there. If you're willing to do it, you just have to do it. And you have to empower people to do it, you have to make time for people to do it is time consuming to vacuum up all that dust in a in a correct manner. It's hard to keep that controlled. It's hard to maintain keeping fire in Sparks out of areas. It takes a lot of work and a lot of effort. But in this case, it seems that that effort definitely wasn't worth the cost of people being hurt. So the first thing you always have, why would people still work there? Well, again, we have this interesting thing that continues to happen where OSHA doesn't really want to close something down because it costs people jobs. And the idea of losing a job is worse than the idea of someone getting hurt, because it's always someone else that can get hurt. It's always that other person. And so in our minds, we think well, I'd rather have a job and I'll just work extra safe, I'll just do my best not to get heard while I'm at this place. And hope that we're able to get out of it where I have a job, and I can just protect myself. That's a very self protection, leadership style. And it's scary, it's wrong. It's illegal. In this case, there's going to be citations, there's no doubt and of course, I've I've heard of this, I've I've seen it, where companies will truly go well, you know, the cost of fines, the cost of the fine, we're going to get for this is cheaper than the fix, we had rather just take the fine, we know they're not gonna close us because we provide too many well paying jobs for the community. So we'd rather pay the fine and move on and don't mess what'll happen. That's scary. It's so fundamentally messed up in my head, that that's allowed. And yet, you know, it's business. That's what we say it's just business, we separate business from personal. I'm not sure that's going to continue to work decades in the future, I just don't see that is an excuse for not doing the basic necessity of protecting people. Let's step back now we'll look at the leadership aspect of what I think I see here. One local leadership is something's wrong. If they're going to have three incidents of this magnitude, and still not in compliance, still not learning their lesson. But let's ratchet it up a notch. Let's go and look at the broader scope of the organization and what kind of organization would allow leadership that's this fundamentally lacking in caring about people and caring about safety, to continue to lead in that organization. And I don't know if there's been replacements and leadership, maybe there were some big changes, this person is still cleaning up the mess from someone else could be. For me, though, I would see this as being one of those like, okay, explosion fire, probably after the first explosion, I would hope that there would be the the rush of help. Let's do everything we can to get this right, to get this back on track to make sure we've made the capital investment to make sure we've done everything we need to do to protect our people. Evidently something didn't go right there. Then there's a fire. Oh, okay. Well, another indicator lagging indicator that things are not good. Not even close to good. Fire. And then months later, what happened between that time? What kind of work was done that then led to a bigger, more costly, more injury? Explosion? I mean, fortunately, I mean, I'm reading here that like the governor is involved with the state. There's other municipalities there's public officials are now finally fired up. No pun intended there about what's happening as they should be, because that's scary and that's dangerous in why isn't allowed. And I think about the larger organization that would allow that To continue to happen without putting the resources needed to make some basic corrections that other industries do. Very lagging very behind. Very scary. Let's talk more about another news story I came across, coming up in the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast.
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Mark French:And welcome back. We're to the second half of our leading and learning through safety podcast. So glad you're joining me. If you've been listening to the podcasts for any amount of time, you know that I'm a big fan, there's a blog out there called the confined space by Jordan Bahram. He is a former OSHA leader for the USA, and he publishes a really nice blog. One is the weekly toll or talks about it as many as he can find of workers who have lost their lives. But then he also will occasionally find things that I'll expand on and one of those, and I'm going to post a link to it if you're please join me on LinkedIn, Facebook, you can find the T SDA consulting, Facebook page, my T SDA consulting, LinkedIn, read my personal LinkedIn, feel free to connect with me, I would love that. But I will post those links into the comments section of where you can find my podcast. So you can look there find that I think it's really worth a read. But this blog is about fall protection. And the it's so spot on with what he catches. And the the commentary he puts behind it about what kind of leadership what kind of organization lets this kind of thing happen. So this latest one that I found, it was reading, I didn't find it, he came to me. The email is about fall protection. And it's mainly about roofers that OSHA was, went to this organization, and they found significant issues with fall protection and roofing. And this is so common roofing and fall protection. I don't know what it is. But if you find a roofer that actually knows their way around fall protection, you would have found a gym, because it is so far in between to find a good group that truly understands how to use fall protection on a roof. They don't make the excuses of well, the angle is just right, we can use a spotter we do this all the time or etc. It's so many excuses of why we don't have fall protection. While on the roof, it costs more money, it takes more time we do this all the time, the angles, not right, the steep, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, they can make some really amazing excuses for not doing something that's the right thing to do. And even I remember a number of years ago, there was a state, I was at a state conference. And they were talking about that there had been a fatality from a roofer and OSHA came the next day. And they didn't really have to do a whole ton of investigation because basically, they it's the company hasn't all the workers, the ones that hadn't died, backup on the same roof, same location, no fall protection. So the OSHA compliance officer was able to step out of the vehicle snap a few pictures in the investigation was done because there you go, no change at all. From what they had. They had just killed someone falling off a roof the day before. And they put everyone else back up on the roof again the next day with no changes. No difference. Didn't care. Billy I still remember. That's one of the most vivid things I remember them talking has been years ago. So here we have where they've been cited. The court company has a pretty large fine. And the blog actually goes to their web page and looks and they they're showing how their quality roofing process works. And the pictures on the web page are people working on rubes with no fall protection and with roofs like at the edge. Like I'm looking at one of the pictures here on the blog. The guy's right on the edge like he's he looks like he's doing a great job with zero fall protection on They don't get it. They don't get it at all, that they would even publicize on their web page. Like, here's the quality work we do. And here's the complete lack of fall protection that we have. I can accept to a certain point. I'm not really, I just always try to see it two ways. Did they not know that they needed that? And I don't see that. I think if you've been in the roofing business, or been around the roofing business long enough, you see that there's others that use it. And I've heard that certainly, and I completely understand that. Sometimes. If safety, if you put the safety measures in place, you're not as competitive in the bidding process as someone who will use the right fall protection. So you might lose the bid, you might actually not get business because of a safety issue, because you would be willing to invest in the safety process. And so it's going to cost you more therefore, you have to ask more from your customer or your client, and the clients gonna go with the cheaper option. And that may be the unsafe option that may they are enabling an organization to work unsafely. Fortunately, I've been proud to be part of a number of organizations that didn't accept that that part of the bidding process was safety. And we understood that we would pay more to get a vendor to get someone who would do the job right. And do it safely. We understood that it cost money. And again, that's not me, I certainly joined an organization, I like to think I maybe made influence maybe helped pick the right vendors that were safer. But at the end of the day, they stood for that they understood the financial implications of a human life, whether it be because of name brand recognition, whether it because of who knows why, hopefully, there's great reasons why they made that choice to assure that even the contractors that came on site, we're going to work safely, that they were under the same rules and guidance that everyone else has. And we're going to work hard to be safe. Now. I'm on the other side of that with my day drum. I see that and I'm very proud to be able to walk into an organization and say, you want a good safe work force, you don't want your your picture of your company on the front page of the newspaper because of something your contractor did. We can do it safely. Yeah, we're we cost more because we're a higher value. Because we do great work. We do it fast. We do it the right way. And we do it safely. And I think that's the most important thing that we see from being a contractor. And as we work and have good leadership that requires our contractors to have that exact same dedication to safety that we would within our organization. The organizations that wouldn't choose a safe contractor are probably the same organizations that don't care about safety. They go hand in hand, and they propagate each other. It's that's the cycle, that continuous cycle that just keeps breeding this unsafe attitude. Hey, thanks for joining me. I really appreciate you being part of the podcast listening in this week. I also just want to throw out one little thing that if you're following me on social media, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, put out a bunch of songs about safety recently, check out their YouTube page. It's awesome. It's hilarious. They're great. I just wanted to point that out. I thought that was amazing. One final thing to talk about there, and until next time we chat stay safe.
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