Episode 177 - TN Safety Recap

🎙️ Podcast Summary: Tennessee Safety Conference Recap & Lessons in Leadership

In this episode, Dr. Mark French reflects on his experience at the Tennessee Safety Conference, highlighting both inspiring takeaways and sobering moments. A major segment featured Tennessee OSHA’s annual fatality recap, a powerful session showcasing real-world tragedies to underline the importance of prevention, risk management, and leadership accountability.

Key incidents discussed included:

• A worker fatally injured slipping on a freshly cleaned floor.
• Improvised equipment use leading to fatal equipment failure.
• Makeshift scaffolding resulting in a fall.
• Cultural complacency and dangerous problem-solving in the field.

Dr. French emphasizes that strong safety leadership requires:

• Proactive hazard recognition.
• Cultural reinforcement of doing the right thing, even when inconvenient.
• Clear, honest, and empathetic communication.
• Recognizing that even “minor” risks can result in major consequences.

He closes with a humorous yet impactful anecdote of a supply chain attendee accidentally joining the OSHA session—and leaving profoundly impacted and safety-conscious.

🧠 Final message: Leadership rooted in safety and people-first values isn’t just compliance—it’s compassion and responsibility.

Transcript

Mark French: 0:00

This week on the podcast, we're talking about the Tennessee safety conference, doing a recap of the great event, the great learnings, and even taking a little further, looking at safety and leadership and beyond. This week on the podcast, you Mark,

Announcer: 0:32

welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. Your host is Dr Mark French. Mark's passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork and safety. Nothing is more important than protecting your people. Safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation and empowerment. Together, we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode and now here is Dr Mark French. You

Mark French: 1:35

Music. Welcome to this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. As always, thank you so much for joining me. Always honored to be part of the playlist and the download group for your podcasts. This week, we're talking about the Tennessee safety conference. So first week of April, last week was the Tennessee safety conference, and in my opinion, I think it's one of the best. I think they continually bring in some amazing speakers, some amazing vendors. Run a very nice, well run conference overall, and just a bunch of good people. It really is a good time. Of course, you can't beat being in Nashville, Tennessee, at the gaylord opryland Convention Center. It's just, it's a nice event. There was a lot of interesting things that went on this year, and a few observations and a few items, I just want to walk through them, because there's a lot of great points that we as safety professionals, just it's good reminders, and it's a good opportunity for us to go back and really think about some of the things we do, the things that we have a influence on. And one of the items that I really I enjoy it and I don't enjoy it at the same time. It's one of those interesting things. Is at the end of the conference every year they have the big kind of one of the last breakout sessions, and they put it in the main room, because it's so big, is the Tennessee OSHA officials recap all of the fatalities from the year before. And it's a sobering experience. It's an educational experience. It's eye opening, it's all of those things wrapped into one, but it's one of the one that's the biggest draw, because it's impactful to what we're doing. And I remember as we started, they were talking about the things that could be prevented, the things that couldn't, the things they sided the things they didn't, because some of it was somewhat, I mean, there was just things out of people's control. And one of them was a car accident that they were working on the side of the road. They had everything, every precaution in place. The person just completely came off the road like, almost like it was aiming for people and and had a fatality, but it was how the public interacts. It wasn't interesting. One was another one that they were talking about that, uh, someone on a piece of property was clearing trees and on a property that was adjacent that they weren't even dealing with. It wasn't even something they were doing. It was a good distance away. A tree, because of the wetness in the soil, had unrooted and fell over and landed on someone, um, items like that that we think about, that just send concern and shivers down someone's spine because of it, it, it's eye opening. But we started, and I love the beginning of it, where you're gonna, they said you're gonna see some things here that are just people need to get it together. And he goes, you know, the good news is you're here and it shows you care. And that's the first step of preventing what. We're going to show you here. I'm paraphrasing. He said it's so much better. I'll be honest. He said it's so much better. But that was the general idea of it is because you're here in your learning, and you're wanting to see this, and it's hard to see it, but you want to see it, and you want to learn. You want to take it back to your team. You're already so far ahead of most of the companies we're dealing with in the slides I'm about to show you. And that was a really positive message. It was a nice message to hear. It was also it's a reminder of what we do with safety professionals and what we our task with every day is trying to make it better, trying to improve items. But I want to go through that just a little bit looking at actually a pretty good year in Tennessee. They had, they were down in fatalities, which is always a good thing, but one is too many. We always say that, but statistically, you you you do the best you can, and you keep getting better. You drive that improvement. They were 26 this past year, struck by caught in slip, trip and fall, really rounding out the top of those items. The one that really, I think, got me was one that was an office area that someone had come in and they cleaned and stripped the floor. And so it was. It was a wet floor area. Had the sign up. It was slippery. It was still a walkway, but they had, they've been doing their work to make the floor clean. And someone had walked into the area, slipped, struck their head, and after 16 days, passed away, and I think there, there's one of the prime examples of that, once something starts to go into motion, it's all luck. And I joke about this in a weird way, and it's not a joke. It's just my brain being able to deal with randomness and chance in life. I am a D and D fan, so it's like rolling the D 20. If once you've enacted the slip and you're falling to the ground, or you've tripped or falling off a lap, whatever it is the odds are playing at that point of what kind of injury you're going to land on your rear end and bounce back up, you're going to twist an ankle, are you going to hit your head and die? It's a role. It's chance. And so we always try to remove as much chance as we can. And yet there is still risk. And one what we think could be a small risk, could still be a big incident, and that's really hard as for me to really wrap my mind around, is, have we done enough? And early in my career, that was a very tough one. It was like I'd never have done enough. And that's true. I mean, we could always get better, but I was obsessive about it, and there comes a point where you can't give up that mental stability, where you're working to try to make things better. As much as you can drive that improvement, drive that engagement, get the information flowing, you can do a lot, and we do the best we can. A lot of it comes from good leadership within the organization to be able to get the best information we can about the hazards that are there so we can work on it. All right, that's a long let's keep going. Another one was one that to me, just I've seen it, and I can't stand it, and it bothers me. They were using a small Bobcat machine to like trench a little bit, and it got stuck. So what they do? They put two guys in the back end of it to give it enough weight to try to get traction and go and of course, that doesn't go well, and it bucks and flips, and someone loses their life. No, we don't stand on equipment. We don't we don't just come up with in the field, come up with a fix, rather than just doing the right thing, calling someone, getting a toe, getting it pulled out. And yeah, I have certainly seen some creative people who thought they were doing the right thing for the company. Hey, we found a solution. We're going to get it done. We think this will work. And they just do it? And then it turns out to go, Oh, you don't do that again. We got lucky in most cases, that it didn't end up with something bad, but it's not something we want to do. And sometimes we catch these things through pure luck or an example or someone says something. But this is one of those examples of in the moment, a quick problem solving that doesn't take into consideration the potential of risk that you know, this makes perfect sense. We need more weight on the back end. We got two people jump on the back end. Give it a little balance, see if we can get some traction. Let's keep going. And it turns into a tragedy. And so I. Helping everyone understand that these decisions matter, and it's the choices we make, these decisions that we make every day, that we help others try to make. And this is where safety and leadership absolutely go hand in hand. Let's talk more. I've got more I want to talk about from the conference. Let's come back to that on the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast, you

Stinger: 10:24

are listening to the leading and learning through safety podcast with Dr Mark French,

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Mark French: 11:10

Welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast. So we're talking about the Tennessee safety conference. We're going to continue that. One of the other items that was kind of interesting, again, it's problem solving in the field, is they were doing some construction on the side of a house, and they needed a scaffold style item. So what they did was they got two ladders, leaned them up against the house, and they lashed another ladder horizontally between the two other ladders, and hey, there's a makeshift scaffold, and it was around six feet, maybe a little less than six feet high. So they thought, You know what, we're under the regulation of needing fall protection, so therefore we're fine. We can build this. Well, of course, it didn't work, and someone lost their life from it again, thinking, how do we get around the situation? And this one brings me to think more about the culture that creates the let's just get around it. Let's just do them. And I remember having conversations with other people and subcontractors in my career where their justification for doing something wrong was, well, we're under the 10 people. We're a small company. We're not really under OSHA, because we're under 10 people, therefore we don't have to comply. Okay, it doesn't stop you of your moral obligations to not hurt someone, or the bigger idea that you signed agreements to say you will protect people, unacceptable. And here's one of those examples. What kind of leadership is there that says instead of going and having the right tools that we know you need to do the job, stay under six feet, figure it out, just do this. And I wonder how many times they've done it before and successfully done it before, and now, because they've never had any issue before, suddenly it's a big one, because it came out of there. The final thing that, well, not the final, but the final thing of the presentation that hit home very hard, and this is how they closed that presentation was the official that was leading it said, you know, I was on the phone with a widow of someone who had their husband had died at a work site, and they were just talking, and he wrote down a few of the phrases that the widow said during their conversation, and he put those on the screen, and the four statements were, how did this happen? Why couldn't this happen to someone else? I can't stop hurting. I can't stop crying. Leadership, safety. This is what we do. This is why we care about people based leadership that starts with a good Safety Foundation. We don't want to be on the other end of this. We don't want to listen and have to console someone because something went wrong that may have been within our control. Again, from the presentation, there were things that you roll the dice and you think that, Oh yeah, I'm I'm good. There's no way I'm gonna, in the case of, do you hit the NAT one? Sometimes it happens in life, and that's hard for as a safety professional, for me to not to say that we don't keep going and we just resign ourselves to that's just the way life is. No, of course not, but we do our very best to try to keep. Going and through again, good, open leadership and what it's funny when you go back to basics of this year, I spoke about building a culture, building safety into your values. A lot of it is establishing a value for people of some form, and reacting to it and not being oblivious to it. In so many organizations, it's easy to just go, oh, well, we do that. Are you really? Are you listening? Are you really looking for cultural cues? Are you building upon it? That's what we really got into. The talk of is, how do you hold an organization and hold the people within an organization accountable to those and it's really strong and open and honest and authentic communication. And that sounds so easy, but communication is one of the hardest, most complex things we do every single day in our organization and in life. I come home to my family and I know my communication is probably not good sometimes with the way I'm trying to say and explain things. Just ask my teenagers if they understand what I'm saying half the time. Now, one interesting kind of funny story that came from, and I want to end with this story was after the meeting concluded, that session concluded, I look over and there's a gentleman sitting next to me, and his eyes are really wide. He looks scared a little bit. And I look over, he goes, sir, I think I've come to the wrong conference. Well, also at the gaylord opryland were a bunch of other conferences, and one was like a supply chain conference about tools and getting supply chain things and getting stuff shipped and being able to have rapid replenishment. He had come to the Tennessee OSHA fatality seminar rather than his one he wanted to attend that was on supply chain. So of course, he was in for a shock when they start showing these slides of pictures, of of scenes, of recreations, but also maybe even security camera. Nothing gruesome, but just people and things and how people died, and just over and over for a whole hour, you're just clicking through fatality after fatality. And you could see in his face, he was like, oh my god, what have I gotten into? He looked over and he's, I'm going to call my safety person, because I don't know if we're doing any of this. He goes, I'm scared to death. And while the Tennessee OSHA officials were sitting near me, came over said, Oh, well, we can help. You can get a consultation. He goes, ma'am, I'm not from Tennessee. I'm from California, but oh my god, what is going on here, he it hit him, and suddenly he was really interested in safety. He was really interested in getting to under, I don't know what his position was when his company, but he was suddenly super interested in getting to know what his safety policy said, because he decided right then and there that he was not gonna let that happen in his organization. And these real stories become powerful when you explain them and walking through them and thinking about, are we? Do we have the risk that could lead to that same event happening? That's the eye opening part. Thanks for joining me on this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast, as always. Thank you. Thank you for joining me always enjoy the conversation. Of course, reach out to me on LinkedIn or anywhere and continue the conversation. Love that kind of thing again. Hope you have a wonderful, wonderful rest of wherever and whenever you're listening to me. Hope things go wonderful, and until next time we chat, stay safe.

Announcer: 19:01

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