safetyBUILT-IN

A Three-Step Process for Better Safety-Leadership Walkthroughs (Pt 3: Verify)

SBI — Mon, 13 May 2013 19:04:15 +0000

So far we’ve looked at the first two steps for conducting a meaningful safety-leadership walkthrough. The final step in that three-step process is to “Verify.” In this step we want to verify three things: competencies, confidence, and comfort levels. It’s vital to ensure that the ones who are doing the job have the competencies necessary [...]

A Three-Step Process for Better Safety-Leadership Walkthroughs (Pt 2)

SBI — Mon, 06 May 2013 22:37:39 +0000

Last issue we looked at step #1 of a three-step process for conducting safety-leadership walkthroughs, and that’s to prepare for the walkthrough ahead of time. The second step is equally important, and that’s to engage them in conversation. The three-step safety-leadership walkthrough process is: Step 1: Prepare Step 2: Engage Step 3: Verify Remember, engagement [...]

A Three-Step Process for Better Safety-Leadership Walkthroughs (Pt 1)

SBI — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 15:52:56 +0000

We’ve already addressed the most salient points for improving our safety-leadership walkthroughs. And if we do just those things, we’re going to be in pretty good shape and we’ll be on the right leadership track. So I want to devote the rest of this series to a three-step safety-leadership walkthrough process that adds some structure [...]

Safety-Leadership Walkthroughs: Causes of Missed Opportunities (Part 3)

SBI — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 17:02:46 +0000

“Everything going okay here?” “Things going as planned?” “Not having any problems, are we?” Can you guess what all these questions have in common? Well, if you guessed that all of them are examples of closed-ended questions, you’d be right, but only half right. They are also examples of “leading” questions. A “leading” question is [...]

Safety-Leadership Walkthroughs: Causes of Missed Opportunities (Part 2)

SBI — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:38:02 +0000

The way to engage employees on the floor or in the field is to ask questions. The problem is, the types of questions we ask tend to invite the responses they think we want to hear. This represents still another missed opportunity that makes our safety-leadership walkthroughs not quite as effective as they could otherwise [...]

Safety-Leadership Walkthroughs: Causes of Missed Opportunities (Part 1)

SBI — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 19:38:27 +0000

One of the best things you can do during a leadership walkthrough is to engage employees. The problem is, we tend to do this in a shoot-from-the-hip, haphazard way that results in missed opportunities to gather critical information. One cause of these missed opportunities is focusing on conditions rather than people. As we mentioned last [...]

Safety-Leadership Walkthroughs: What’s Our Focus?

SBI — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 16:38:02 +0000

Many of us already do a pretty good job in our safety-leadership walkthroughs to identify and call attention to personal, occupational safety hazards, such as slips, trips and falls. They’re easy to focus on because usually they’re static, concrete, observable and easily identifiable. A trip hazard becomes pretty obvious to the trained eye. The problem [...]

Putting the “Leadership” Back into Your Leadership Walkthroughs

SBI — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 21:55:01 +0000

In our last issue we alluded to the fact that there are fundamental differences between conducting a site or floor visit in the capacity of a manager v. doing the same thing in the capacity of a leader. One crucial difference is the tone it sets, and how that tone impacts the quality of information [...]

Making the Most of Your Safety-Leadership Walkthroughs

SBI — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 16:12:02 +0000

There are various names for it; sometimes they’re called site visits, sometimes management walk-arounds, sometimes leadership walk-throughs, sometimes supervisor engagements, sometimes something else. But whatever you call them, and whether the context of your supervision is “in the field” or “on the floor” (or even someplace else!), it’s imperative for purposes of leadership and relationship-building [...]

It’s Official: Safety-Leadership Training on Your PC

SBI — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 02:21:50 +0000

Over the past two years or so, many of our readers and subscribers have expressed a desire to attend one of our “From Compliance to Culture” safety-leadership training sessions, but for one reason or another could not make it happen. Others have asked whether it would be possible for a few of their decision-committee members [...]