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Making Safety Simple with Steve Howe

Making Safety Simple

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Steve Howe, motivational speaker and Safety Director at Emil Anderson Group, joins The Safety Guru this week to share his powerful story with us. He suffered a serious injury at work in 2006 when an excavator bucket struck him through his abdomen. Steve shares insights surrounding motivations behind shortcuts, the crucial influence that supervisors possess in truly promoting a safe culture, and practical ways for safety leaders to make safety simple. Drawing from his personal journey and rich experiences, Steve makes safety concepts relatable and easy to understand through emphasizing that safety should remain everyone’s responsibility. Tune in to learn, be inspired, and make safety simple with Steve Howe.

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Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is The Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker, and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy’s success story begins now.

Hi, and welcome to The Safety Guru. Today I’m very excited to have with me Steve Howe, who’s the safety director at the ML Anderson Group. We’ll get into a little bit of background in terms of what they do. He’s also a safety motivational speaker. Incredible background, incredible story. Steve, welcome to the show. Really happy to have you with me.

Thanks for having me.

Why don’t we start a little bit about your story? Because you had a serious safety event that happened to you, and now you’re a safety director. So, I’m really curious to hear about your journey or story.

Yeah, sure. So, 2006, I was operator and tree faller for an organization, and we were widening the highway from Vancouver to Whistler for the 2010 Winter Olympics. And that day, went to work, it was just like any other day, and was asked to do some free falling. And the shorter version was I was asked to do a machine assist with an operator and myself. And I asked for a certain operator. I didn’t get that operator that I wanted and basically told the supervisor this isn’t safe. I need one of these other people to help me. The supervisor essentially said, if you don’t like it, there’s the road, use it. And I ended up dropping my gear and was leaving. I got to my truck and for some reason I grabbed my cell phone. I don’t know why I grabbed my phone, but I grabbed my phone and there was a picture on my screen. It was my girlfriend at the time. This is where my mind played powerful tricks on me. I went, Steven, 15 days I have a car payment due, truck payment due, mortgage payment due, all those things of life that we all have.

Sure. I ended up convincing myself that I needed to do this job. I went down the hill, talked to the operator. We had our plan put together. Essentially, all I had to do was just put undercuts in these trees, back cuts, and have an excavator push the trees over parallel to the road while the traffic was still moving. We got about 5, 10 trees on the ground so far. And then we get to the last tree. I haven’t got to fall in my life. And I put my undercut in, put my back cut in. I got in my safe still, and her thought it was my safe zone. And I gave the operator the hand signal to push. He started pushing the tree over. And instead of committing and pushing the tree down to the ground and following the next sequence of events, which would be picking up the tree, deck the world, the stamp, etc. He ends up turning the machine back towards me. And for some reason, the bucket comes flying towards me and hit me in the stomach. As it hit me in the stomach, it ended up dragging me the full length of the machine. And as I’m screaming and saying stop, I noticed my legs are now separating from my body.

Wow.

From there, the paramedics were called. You think about, or I used to at least when I was 22, that thought all these emergency drills and procedures were a joke and tell you need them. Right. Because of those procedures, I’m probably here today. So, they called for a helicopter. The helicopter came, picked me up, got me seven minutes after the helicopter landed back at Vancouver General Hospital. And that’s where the journey really started. I went into an induced coma for several weeks. Then I started to come out and then they put me back in an induced coma because apparently, I wouldn’t survive the pain that I guess I was in. And over months and months and months and months, they started doing rehabilitation surgeries of trying to put my legs together with all the organs and everything that had been ripped out, trying to repair that stuff. Then probably about six, seven months in, I got transferred to GF Strong, which was a rehabilitation hospital where I was left with not being able to feel my legs. But they were there.

That was, again, a win to me in my mind that I could still see them at least. Then we started trying to just figure out life being in a power wheelchair. We muscled through that. The employer that I was working with asked me if I wanted to come back to work. I said, yeah. They said, what do you want to do? I said, I want to be a project manager. They said, well, can you at least get some schooling behind you? Because I actually only had grade nine at the time, I dropped out of school, which don’t promote that very often. So, I did that and ended up having to do safety as a side thing so that I could work during the day, being a safety guy and then at night do schooling to be a project manager. I did that for four years. While I started doing that, I worked on, I think it was $2.9 billion bridge in Vancouver as well, and finished my degree in structure management and told my company, said, hey, I’m ready to go into project management. And they said, Yeah, right. You’re doing too well. And so that’s the beginning of me being into safety.

And ever since then, I’ve been leading across Canada, United States, being a safety director now for email Anderson Group for the last years. And that gets you too today.

And email Anderson, just for those that are listening, broad organization, 10 different business units. Can you share a little bit of background? They do infrastructure projects roads. Tell me a little.

Bit more. Yeah. E mail Anderson Group is made up of 10 different business units from residential, commercial, big infrastructure projects. We got one right now we’re doing in BC that I think it’s around $600 million. One of the most challenging jobs in the province right now. We also do traffic control, landscaping, and paving, and maintenance as well. So, we’re very diverse.

Very diverse. So, your story is a very powerful one which you share. You’re now applying a lot of the principles. When we first talked, one of the themes that you touched on is really around motivations attached with shortcuts, why we work safe. Tell me about some of your exploration, some of the thinking in this space, because I think that’s an incredibly important theme.

Yeah.

So, one of the things, again, when you’re sitting in the hospital for that long, you have lots of time on your hands and you’re trying to figure out what went wrong and just trying to just under grasp this whole thing. And over the years, and it’s been years to figure this out, but I started to think about the decisions that I made every single day at work. And we’ve all heard the words, short cuts. And I took tons of short cuts in my life for sure, up to this point as well. And realizes that there’s motivation is attached to every shortcut that we take as humans. And some of them are easy ones. F or instance, some of us are just lazy that day, or it’s time management. We’re just trying to juggle so many things, or we’re striving from that attaboy from your supervisor manager. There’s a whole bunch. But the ones that it came more apparent, I would say, in the last four or five years, the significant role or influence that our supervisors and managers have on our front lines. I didn’t… Huge. It’s huge. And I didn’t totally grasp that. And as I’ve been doing motivational safety speaking around North America, I’ve been doing this little skit that it actually shocked me how well it’s worked and to show the effect of this.

And what I’ll do is I literally will pick someone out of the crowd, and I’ll say, I’m the superintendent, you’re the guy that works for me. And I’ll literally just say, Okay, we have to get these two sticks of pipe in the ground today because the rain is coming the rest of the week. It’s on the critical path. It needs to get done today. Do you understand what I need from you? And I’ll ask these crowds from 200 to 5,000 people. And I’ll say, Guys, what did I just say to that? To Johnny. And they all say, oh, you told him to take shortcuts. Oh, you told him to do it at all costs. You hear all these things. And the crazy thing is I didn’t say any of those things, but what I learned from all of this is that’s what they all here. They all heard that, and they all heard their own message that they perceive. And that’s when the real aha moment came because I realized up to this day and before, the number of conversations where my supervisor would say, you only have today, or it’s got to get done today, all those other things we’ve all heard. And all I heard through that message was safety doesn’t matter anymore. It’s got to get her done. And the reality is this, too, is again, being a worker before, nobody goes to work every day wanting to disappoint their boss and let them down. And so, if I believe that’s the most important thing to them, then most likely I’ll probably tend to do it. And so, I used to think that that is what’s most important to him because of some of the things he said. Now, hindsight is 2020. If literally he had that same conversation and I would say, hey, Johnny, but I don’t want you to compromise your safety. Can this still be done today? All I’ve done is add a few extra words, but now I went from a message to a black and white.

It’s very crystal clear. I do want it done today, but I don’t want it at all costs. And so, from that test kit, I’ve done that around, like I said, North America. I actually had this one individual supervisor. I didn’t know he was a supervisor at the time. He stormed out of the room. It was in Alaska, actually. He stormed across the room, out of the thing. I still have like half an hour to go. In the back of my mind, I was like, I can’t believe this guy is that something else. That’s that important. I just flew all the way here and you just leave like that. Again, that’s where my mind went. A gain, tried to forget about it and kept working or speaking and the meeting concluded and all of a sudden, he pops back out the door or in the door and he goes, hey, man, I’m so sorry that I had to leave. He goes, that just struck a chord with me. He goes, I just told the guys before I went to this meeting, he said, hey, I have to go into this safety meeting. I need six more sheet piles in the ground today.

And he goes, But I didn’t want them to compromise or save you. I didn’t want them to do anything that could hurt you. And he goes, But I don’t want them to think that based on what I told them. And to me, I was just like, Wow, full circle. It really works.

I think that’s an important point because it’s also a theme. I remember I was talking to one executive who had moved into safety, and he shared how at some point in his career, he had this realization that all he was recognizing people for was getting the job done, working overtime, things of that nature. He just took for granted that they were doing it safely. His reflection was like, All I’m saying is get it done, and you’re never hearing me say, Thank you for a specific behavior around safety. Thank you for something in terms of making a safe choice or stopping work or doing something that puts safety at the forefront.

Yeah, for sure. The other part from this, I learned, still staying on that track with the motivating some of the short cuts, is what you say or don’t say as a supervisor and manager. And I use this story a few times in my career. But right now, I have an eight-year-old and 11-year-old daughter and a beautiful wife. And they’re at the age now where they’re starting to verbally attack each other to the point where it’s almost too much. And it is, it’s too much. And I’m in the room watching this happen. And it made me think, if I don’t say anything, what message am I sending to my daughters? Because we know it’s not right. And so, I have to say something. But made me think about it. What if I didn’t say anything? What message did I send them? And to me, the message would be that it’s okay. And so, what line that I use is what you permit as a supervisor or as a father, you promote. And so, if you apply this back to work, if you’re a supervisor manager that sees people not tied off and they see that, then inadvertently you’re promoting that that’s okay.

Yeah, it’s a safety rule. It says that, but it’s okay to you. And so that was the other part where you could see how it influences the decisions you make. You get to the time management, you want that, a boy from him. He clearly doesn’t care and doesn’t speak up when he sees me not doing the right thing. So, it must be okay. That, again, helps influence the decisions you make as the boots on the ground.

Or even peers that see that you didn’t say anything, see it as you’re allowing it, you’re promoting it, you’re saying.

It’s okay. Correct.

I like the point you’re making there because I think one of the pieces, we often assume is safety. If I want to really drive a difference, it needs to start at the top. And yes, absolutely, senior leaders have a very key role. But the supervisor is the one who’s interacting day in and day out. And in my opinion, they’re the one that has the greatest impact into the decisions that their teams make.

No, I agree. Again, just thinking back to those days when I wake up and go to work, I’m sure I’d see a top manager, CEO, maybe, maybe in once or twice in my career. But the guy that I see every day was my supervisor. And again, probably even people that will be listening today have been in the trenches before and would know that one leader in this world that you looked up to, that you would run through a brick wall for. That person had so much influence in my life, and it wasn’t the top CEO because he can’t be. They had 55,000 employees. He couldn’t be everywhere. But that supervisor was there. And so, to me, he was the most influential person. And like I said, I can’t be the only one that thrives to have those out of voice, those affirmations and things. There’s more than just me that want that. And where are you going to get him from is probably from him, if anybody.

Absolutely. Or he’s going to tell you to hit the road, which is not the right thing to say. No.

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One of the things that you advocate and that you bring to life as a safety director is around making safety simple. I think that’s often forgotten. People get into these complicated elements. Tell me a little bit about what making safety simple really means to you and how you bring that to life in an organization like ML Anderson.

Sure. First and foremost, I got to say it again, making safety simple. It has to be easy, or people won’t do it. That is probably my biggest pet peeve that I see and hear is, and we’ve all probably heard it, there’s the famous buzzwords. We think a buzzword changes our safety culture or the next flavor of the month initiative. And the reality is our people aren’t stupid. They know that’s just the flavor of the month or the next buzzword. It doesn’t make them safer. And truly, what it does is it just creates white noise and distraction. That’s all it does, in my opinion. So, we’re trying to make it simple. And we’ve gone back to the basics. I got to him on this in three years ago. And again, elementary basics. And to me, well, one, if anyone’s into charts and graphs and those things, statistically, we have just phenomenal dropped off the charts for injury rates and stuff and ER ratings and stuff. Incredible. For anyone that can, those experience ratings, we were all at surcharges in all of our CUs. They’re know all in discounted positions. Anything you want to quantify, we have it.

And again, it was the starting beginning foundation was making safety simple. We also do… Everything is paperless, so it’s at their fingertips. It doesn’t matter if you’re at work or at home, they have it on their cell phone, ready to go, the whole OHS program platform at their fingertips, and they use it. That’s probably part of our most important thing, keeping it simple. The other thing that we were really focusing on is what we’re doing right versus the negatives and recognizing people for doing things well. And if you think about it, as humans, most of us have been trained or it’s embedded in us to just go look for all the things that are wrong. We’re there to fix problems. And it’s not like we typically go to school to say, Let’s go find all these positive things about somebody. And so, it’s actually pretty tough to do. But one of the things that we do, like I said, is we try and find, and this is our formula, is for every one negative, we have seven positives. And so, whether it’s in our meetings, we bring positivity. We have, for instance, a safety calls every week.

Again, there might be one or two negative things in there, but there better be 7 to 14 positive things that are going well and we’re doing shout outs. And again, praising people. And someone probably wants to know how we came up to the formula of 7 to 1.

Yeah, for sure. Because I’ve heard 5 to 1, I’ve heard 6 to 1, I’ve heard 10 to 1, now 7 to 1. And I think it’s less about the ratio.

Truly, it’s more about that there should be more positives than negatives at the end of the day, right?

Correct. And a lot more, not just equal.

Leaps and bounds more. So, we’ve used that. And then I try to, again, bring it back home as well. And I have a little… Again, I love my family stories, but my daughter, she’s 11. And one of the things that is a challenge is cleaning her room. It is a challenge to convince her to do that. And I tried the old standard way of nag and telling her all the things she’s not doing right. And I’m not trying to take things away from her, et cetera. But it’s not getting me very far, which clearly, I know for other people it’s probably the same thing. But one of the things is I tried to apply this same positive to negative ratio at home. And I noticed that she cleaned her room this one day and I said, hey, honey, I just proud and thank you for cleaning the room. What a good job. And we gave her some details of the things I noticed that she well-organized stuff. And lo and behold, it happened the next day. And then it happened again. And again, every day I’m continually recognizing her for it.

But what I learned from that is what gets recognized gets repeated. And so, to me, it’s the same thing as at work. If you go up and you observe someone in a trench and instead of just telling them all the things that are wrong there, find something positive to say, the better chances of that being repeated the day after that and the day after that. So that’s one of, I think, the things that we’re really pushing these days is this recognition piece.

So where did that ratio, the 7 to 1 ratio come from? You touched that in a little bit. I think from a reader standpoint, from a listener standpoint, I think it’s good to have the reference point because you’ve got an interesting data point.

Behind it. There was a couple of guys that put me on this, but there was an article from the Harvard Business Review that they said that they found that 6 to 1 was the right ratio for the best performing teams out there. We’re always pleased but not satisfied. So, 6 was good, we went to 7. I always have to exceed. I think this is an important message. The doing more recognition versus calling out things that are bad, I think is key. One is it gives you permission to actually call somebody when they’re doing something not right because otherwise, you’re just nag, saying negative things because now it feels more balanced. I agree with what you’re saying. It also gets you to do more of the things you want to see. One of the struggles I’ve seen with leadership teams, also with craft employees, is craft employees, actually, just the other day, it was a session I was in, and they were saying, I don’t want some leader salivating some fake recognition that they learned from a workshop or a book. I think there’s some merit to this one. I think I’ve also heard from some leaders saying, why should I praise somebody for getting their job done? So, tell me a little bit about how you drive that right ratio, because I think that’s key. And getting leaders to see what I should recognize is really important.

Yes, great question. Part of this, I would say, and I think I just want to touch on one more little piece on that, to just tile into it is why is this important. And if you think about there’s lots of us listening right now, including myself, probably you Eric, we all have a spouse. And think of the last time that your spouse pointed out something that was wrong. How did that make you feel? Did that motivate you? Did it make you not want to do it again? Because if that worked, then we’d all have perfect marriages. Right? it doesn’t work.

But think of the times when you actually were called out by your spouse for doing something positive and they recognize you for it. And how much did that motivate you to want that feeling in the end? To me, there’s no difference. And so that’s why I think if we’re trying, we need to find ways to motivate our guys, it’s easier to do it by recognizing than just trying to call them out because, again, that system is not working. It doesn’t work, in my opinion. The second part, how we’re trying to promote it and say it is, it needs to be genuine and sincere and directed through that person. Tying the shoelace, yes, might be not a great example. But one thing that we’ve learned is not everything’s wrong. If it was, we would have nothing built. Everyone would be in the hospital. So, there’s a lot of good things going right. It’s just harder to find them because, again, we’re so wired to just find the bad things. And so, finding that genuine, hey, one of our meetings we have is a CSI meeting, continuous and safety improvement meeting, and there’s pulling that guy that’s facilitating that meeting to say, hey, I really liked about this two things you touched on and how you tied it back to a certain subject, etc.

It’s very genuine, it’s sincere. You’re pointing out the specific things. It’s not just good job. That doesn’t go very far. It might for the first time, but it doesn’t. I would actually just tell you this before we got on here. I actually just had this exact same, AHA. I tried to be completely honest, I was just trying to speed up time because I was really busy. Yesterday, it was Farm Shore Day at the farm, and my daughter, she did really well. She cleaned the one side of the property, raking, did the horse manure, the chickens, the goats, everything. She did it all. It was amazing. Didn’t have to tell her thing. And I just wanted to recognize her, and I say, good job. And so, I said, hey sweetheart, you did a great job today. And you know what she said to me? Yeah, Dad, what part did I do good? And that’s when it just struck me again. Again, that was just too generic, not sincere. And so, I had to actually point out the things that she did well. And then you could tell that it made such a big more difference to her that I recognized her for the right things. So, I’m still learning this as we go as well.

Absolutely. But it doesn’t need to be complicated. It doesn’t mean you need to put big dollars around it. It doesn’t mean there’s a prize that comes out of it.

It’s genuine, sincere, as you said, but very tangible. It’s a behavior, something that maybe isn’t expected, that maybe isn’t the norm, but you’re going one step and beyond. But not necessarily you transform the world. Correct. I think that’s the elements. People are looking for that big, I went, and I ran this project and I transform all these things, etc. And then you get the out of the white. But if I’m hearing you correctly, it could be something simple.

Very. You nailed it. Very simple. Because also those things create ripple effects, too. They grow. And all of a sudden, you’re sending that recognition to those workers, those workers then recognize other people. And it just keeps… And again, to me, it’s the culture we’re trying to breed. And like I said, it just grows. And I’m seeing those fruits of that right now, three years in. And honestly, I say that every safety call we have every Monday, almost the whole organization jumps on that call, at least safety leaders and some of the foreman and all the way up to the CEOs on the call every week. And that’s one thing I said is so proud of this group because the amount of positivity that’s going, again, it’s cheap. It’s not expensive.

It’s not expensive. It’s simple. It’s a desire. It’s setting an expectation, like your 6 to 1 ratio. Whatever ratio you pick, it’s that you’re trying to find more positive things, and they’re happening. In every organization, they’re happening. As you said, otherwise, you wouldn’t be building bridges. You would be visiting a hospital every single day, if there were more bad things happening than there are good things happening. Correct. It’s interesting because I was working with a very good leader not so long ago, and one of his stories was really he struggle with that idea at the beginning in terms of coming up with more recognition. Then when he started doing it, he started seeing a shift. And like you said, then soon enough peers were starting to recognize each other and say, well, since we’re talking about recognition for a safe choice, can I share some of my own that I’ve observed? And then it starts spreading because now we’re not just looking at the things that are bad, we’re also looking at what we’re doing well and wanting more of it.

That’s awesome. So, I had one other one for the safety simple. It should not be a new concept to anybody. I’m not creating something new that nobody knows, but it’s this whole concept of why I work safe. I’ll start with myself. We probably all heard that slogan before, but I’ll try to give you what the meaning truly means to me and tied it all together is, after having this event, you realize what’s important in life and what isn’t. And ultimately, it’s my wife who is the cornerstone of my life. The girl who was in that photo in my picture 16 years ago was her, and we’re married now. I make smart, right choices every single day for her because I need to grow old with her, and I’ve committed to her that I’m never going to choose work over her again. She is first in my life. But it’s also my daughters. I work safe so that the arms and legs are still working and continue to work. Because, again, the pictures are so much bigger for me now as I know they’re both going to get married one day, and a part of their wedding is their dad walking them down the aisle and the Daddy Daughter Dance and all those things.

Again, before I got hurt, work was my life, my everything. Now it’s completely shifted and now work is important. I love work, but it’s not everything. It’s not the meaning of my life. Same with my hobbies. We all have hobbies that are listening today. A gain, I still love to hunt and fish and snowmobile and dirt bike and stuff. But those are the things I want to do. But the difference is I’m doing it because I want to know because I have to. That’s the hugest thing in this is that I get challenged lots on this. And they said, well, I don’t really get your goofy why I work safe thing. I’m just a compliant person. And the problem with compliant people I’ve learned is this, they’ll always do the right thing when everybody’s looking. But when nobody’s looking and you know, you won’t get caught, what decision will they make? The difference I find is people that have those whys in their life, the things that mean everything, it’s harder to make that wrong choice because there’s so much more at stake. And so, to sum that up, that when you find your why, the families, the hobbies, those things, you create meaning. And when you create meaning, you create purpose. And then you realize that all those things, the safety procedures, policies, all that stuff really just keeps all the pictures, the things in your life HD in here. But until you understand that safety is annoying, it’s in the way, it’s frustrating, I make more money. But because you’re missing that whole “WHY” component to it. That’s the whole reason why we do what we do. A gain, very simple concept. The other thing I learned, and it was pretty cool, I can’t remember his last name, but I remember Butcher’s last name, but he’s a very well-known speaker, Simon, I think. Simon Sinek? Yeah. One of the things that he, again, I always had this belief, this idea, and he just reaffirmed it for me is he was talking about the whole why, et cetera, in business, et cetera. One of the things he commented on that he did this study that the part of your brain, the lymphatic part of the brain that controls your decision making, your behavior, it can only change your behavior with emotion. And so, to me, that’s the piece that’s your why, the emotion part that you want to be here for your kids.

You want to be here for your spouse. You want to go fishing again or whatever makes your life whole. And so, it’s just neat to see and reaffirm my beliefs that they’ve scientifically proven the only way to change human behavior is through emotion. So, I thought that was fascinating.

It is. And I think it speaks as well to leader being comfortable speaking about them why for safety because they’re asking somebody else to do the same. I think there’s some elements there on vulnerability and being able to share it, but then eliciting that reflection on your why. So maybe share some thoughts in terms of some of the approaches that you do use to bring the why and to get your team members to think about the why day in and day out.

What we do is we either create… We get the craft to submit their photos and we either create and or we’ll do stickers on their hard hats for some reason. Craft guys love stickers and hard hats. So, the kids or somebody, I just had to make one the other day was a Cowboy’s fan. So apparently, he’s working safe for the Cowboys. But everyone has their thing. But what he does, it also makes it personal. So, when you see somebody doing something unsafe, it makes it personal because there might be a picture of that guy’s daughter or his wife. How can you not want to say something? That’s their why. So, to me, it just makes it personal at all levels. And then again, back to the vulnerability part, when our supervisors’ managers are doing the same thing, hey, our managers put one boot or one pant leg on at a time. They’re just the same as us. And even all the way up to our CEO. And I know our CEO has two kids and loves being with them. And so, I need to speak up if he’s doing something wrong. It doesn’t matter what level you’re at.

And so, to me, just, again, back to that simple concept. It’s very simple. We all have those same things, and we need to do it right for yourself, but for them and for the people in their life. Because again, that’s something else I learned from all of this. The ripple effect that was created because of a decision I made became waves and affected my friends, my family, just everybody because of one decision that I made.

Steve, very powerful story. Your story in terms of the events that you had, but also in terms of how you’re applying it to drive safety within the organization. Really powerful. Thank you for coming to the show and sharing your story. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, what’s the best way to reach out? There are a few ways. You could go to safetystevehow.com, or you can also go to Keynote Speakers Canada or Keynote Speakers USA.

Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Steve, for coming on the show.

Thank you so much for having me. It was awesome.

Thank you for listening to the Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy, distinguish yourself from the pack, grow your success, capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.

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ABOUT THE GUEST

With over 18 years in the construction industry, Steve Howe understands the daily hazards faced by workers and why safety is often viewed as an impedance.

In the spring of 2006, while working as a young tree faller on the Sea to Sky Highway project in British Columbia, Steve suffered an unimaginable injury.  Despite the feeling that something wasn’t right that morning, Steve pushed forward – as many would – to get the job done. Unfortunately for Steve, this decision – to ignore his gut – resulted in being struck by an excavator bucket through his abdomen and being dragged for several feet.  It was the beginning of a drastically altered life.

He was told he would never walk again, and it almost broke him. However, throughout his many days in the hospital. Steve had a chance to reflect on his journey and muster the courage and strength to challenge his projected outcome. Steve believes fiercely that we control our destiny. We have the choice to speak up when things don’t feel right. We have the choice to stop someone from engaging in unsafe acts. We have the choice to do the safe thing every time. Not only at work but in our day-to-day lives. So, he decided to choose a different path and after years of dedicated work, he is now able to walk again.

Steve shares how at 22 years old, he felt invincible. Sure, he had heard stories of workplace injuries, but it would never happen to HIM. Sadly, this belief, shared by so many workers, is what ultimately led to his accident.  By reflecting on his injury and drawing on his experiences working in the field of safety, Steve has found what he considers to be the keys to success in preventing all workplace injuries. A goal that he believes to be 100% obtainable.

Living through 83 surgeries, 90 Days in a Coma and over 500 days in a hospital allowed Steve the opportunity to reflect on his accident and he developed a passion to share his story with others. His message of survival, emphasizing the importance of working safety not just for yourself but others around you, has been heard all around the world from Vancouver to Australia.

As a safety consultant, Steve travels across the Country sharing his story and inspiring audiences to trust their gut.  And reminding them that he used to live to work but now he works to live.  This keeps what’s important – his family, his health, his life – at the forefront of every safety decision he makes today.

For more information: https://keynotespeakerscanada.ca/speaker/steve-howe/ and https://safetystevehowe.com/

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The Impact of Leaders and Their Decisions in Improving Safety Culture with Dr. David Hofmann

The Impact of Leaders and Their Decisions in Improving Safety Culture

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“Culture comes from the top and is enacted from the bottom.” Dr. David Hofmann has been researching safety climate and leadership for over 20 years and joins the podcast this week to discuss the multi-level aspects of improving safety culture and the daily micro-decisions leaders make that in turn affect safety performance. Tune in to learn strategies for leaders to personalize safety in a tangible way, foster trust, and reduce psychological distance from the frontline.

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Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is The Safety guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker, and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy’s success story begins now.

Hi, and welcome to The Safety guru. Today I’m very excited to have with me Dr. David Hofmann, who’s a professor in organizational behavior at University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He’s a researcher who’s applied extensive research to safety, safety culture. Dave, really excited to have you with me on the podcast today.

Thanks, Eric. Glad to be here.

Let’s first start. We’ve touched on the topic of safety culture in the past on the podcast. Would love to hear some of your perspective around what you call multi-level aspects of culture.  

Let me just give you just your listeners a little bit of background on me. I am an organizational behavior faculty member, PhD in organizational psychology. I’ve been studying safety, climate, leadership things for about 20 years now, plus 20 years plus. And where we think about this multi-level aspect of safety culture is culture comes from the top and is enacted from the bottom. The way I think about culture is you have the espoused culture of the core values and the key assumptions and then the org structure and the artifacts as well as the metrics and all those things that are coming from the top. And then at the bottom and the middle of the organization, this culture gets enacted day in and day out. I’ve written a little bit with a friend and colleague by the name of Dove Zohar about these micro decisions that frontline and middle managers face every day. And often those micro decisions involve competing priorities. And those managers have some degree of discretion in terms of how they prioritize one of those priorities, a little redundant, over the other. And over time, as I watch, as an employee, I watch these micro decisions getting made every day.

And if cost is always just a nudge higher than safety, or schedule is always a nudge higher than safety, so it always went out in the end. Then what happens as I watch these decisions is that I get a gestalt impression about what’s really valued, expected, rewarded, and supported in the organization. And we call that the enacted culture. And so, then you can start thinking about the enacted culture coming from below. And then it intersects with the espoused culture coming from the top. And then that’s where in the middle you see the gaps between the espoused and the enacted culture. I think this is something you see very regularly and sometimes I think almost happens. It feels like it’s happening unintentionally. I was talking to a group not long ago and they were talking about recognition, and they kept recognizing examples. They had a recognition where people that worked the weekend, people that worked extra hours, which again reinforces productivity. And when it came to reinforcing or recognition around safety, it was, thank you for doing that job safely, but really, are you recognizing safety or are you just saying you came back and you weren’t injured, but you have no idea what happened and how the work occurred?

Yeah. It’s the absence of an outcome gets recognized as opposed to the presence of proactive behavior that really drove that outcome to be a safe manner. I see that quite a bit is that there’s this notion of the absence of something means we must have done something well. And it’s like, well, maybe, maybe the absence of something, it might be the absence of something means you just got lucky. Correct. I don’t think people make that distinction very often. But in this instance, you’re hearing constantly this message around getting the job working harder productivity, not somebody saying, get this job ahead of safety, but it still sends that message if I’m hearing you correctly.

Yeah. Well, at the end of the day, if you want a safe organization, they should do absolutely nothing. There is this notion of there is risk in many of the industries that you’ve worked in and the industries that I am familiar with and where I do my research. There is this notion of there is going to be some risk that you must really manage. But I think this notion of thinking about safety as a bit of a dynamic non-event is something that I’ve spent some time thinking about and talking about as well. And this, probably the most recent example I talked about this was I was asked to do a presentation to the California Public Utilities Commission, a public hearing, and they called me and asked me to just kick off the day with a talk on safety culture. And one of the things that this model I’ve been working on and doing some research on with some of my colleagues is if you think about safety and cybersecurity and several other types in the risk domain, they’re that we would term a dynamic non-event, which is you work hard, so there’s a lot of dynamic behavior going on.

But at the end of the day, if you’re successful, then nothing happens. If cyber security is successful, then you did not have a breach. If safety is successful, then you didn’t have an injury. And I know my safety professionals listening would say, Well, that’s not right. There’s a lot of things happening. And I hear you. I can hear the listener saying that I agree. But if you think from a non-safety professional practitioner perspective, they think about these as dynamic non-events. And so, one of the things I highlighted in this presentation of the California Public Utilities Commission is it’s the middle managers that really have to prioritize budgets and funding and all of that thing. And this was the example I used. If I put a dollar over here in this investment, then I know I’m going to get a dollar, depending on what my internal rate of return is, a dollar tin back. And if I spend a dollar on safety or cybersecurity, or in this case, tree trimming or repairing lines, then nothing happens. Well, I’m left as that manager with the idea of, well, what if I would have spent 95 cents on safety?

Would nothing has happened. And then I can put a dollar five over here and make a little bit more of my return. And that’s where my metrics are. That’s where if there’s a bonus structure, that’s where the bonus structure often is. And those performance metrics are measured every single month, week, quarter. And the safety metrics are a little bit long. So, it’s really easy for me to just turn this little dial and say, well, let me invest 95 cents over here in safety. Put a dollar five over there. Nothing happens. It’s like, well, maybe I can do 92 cents this year. Nothing will happen. And what happens then is those managers think that they’re actually learning because they’re updating their model. They’re like, oh, what I learned is that you only have to spend 92 cents on safety or tree trimming or cybersecurity and nothing will happen. And I think that’s really a false notion of learning.

Is there something as well there in terms of… You mentioned when we talked before in terms of the psychological distance between the decision and the outcome. Can you expand maybe a little bit on that front?

Yeah. So, this is some research that came from I served on the National Academy of Science Committee that was charged with investigating the BP Deepwater Horizon accident. And our charge was to go up until the moment the accident happened. None of the recovery efforts. And one of the things that we did is we went to an oil and gas company’s onshore command center for offshore drilling. Sure. I’ll say that onshore command center for offshore drilling, for those folks that are driving in the car or something. So, this is in Houston normally. And you see it’s a quiet office park, office. And you have seven or eight computer screens in front of you, and the person is there just monitoring offshore drilling, drilling operations that are happening for 500 miles offshore. And I just was struck by that environment. The other thing that we did as part of that committee is we flew out to an offshore oil rig. And so, you could get a little bit of a contrast of what does it look like to be on the oil rig thinking about safety issues versus 400 miles away? And that started me thinking about this notion of in social psychology, there’s a whole body of research on Construct level theory.

And Construct level theory just basically says how psychologically distant are things from you. So, in that sense, to put some flesh on the bones of what that concept means before your listeners fall asleep is that you could think about, if I’m in Houston watching drill operations 400 miles away, that’s a very distant, psychologically distant thing. Where if I’m on the rig with drill pipe and everything, it’s very psychologically close. It’s very concrete. So, the research shows that things that are close up, we conceptualize in very concrete terms. It’s very the how we do things versus the why we do things. And things that are way off in the distance, we construe at a much more abstract conceptual level ethics and values.

For example, core values, religious belief, ethics are often consternated at high level, very abstract level of these abstract principles. They’re constrained abstractly because we want them to converse time so that we can apply them in different situations. Anyway, I was thinking about that notion of concrete versus abstractness. Fast forward now, any number of years, we finally have a research paper with about five or six studies where we show that if you construe a work context is psychologically distant, you view safety as less of an ethical moral obligation.

And that’s in part driven by the reduced perception of harm. Sure. So, to put it in real practitioner terms, if I’m watching drilling operations happening 400 or 500 miles away, the realness of those people and their potential for harm just dissipates in the background. And then you add to that that I communicate with those folks through chats and coarse communication modes, often not even video feeds. And again, this becomes faceless people, and I’m less likely to view ethics as a moral obligation.

So, what are some strategies organizations can drive to address that element? Because I could see that as well happening. You talked about the onshore command center. Imagine it can also happen at the C suite level. The more you remove from the front line, you can feel further removed. What are some strategies organizations can do to try to mitigate on that?

This episode of The Safety Guru podcast is brought to you by Propulo Consulting, the leading safety and safety culture advisory firm. Whether you are looking to assess your safety culture, develop strategies to level up your safety performance, introduce human performance capabilities, reenergize your BBS program, enhance supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety leadership training and talent solutions, Propulo has you covered. Visit us at propulo.com.

Yeah, I think you’re exactly right that there are any number of different ways in which psychological distance can be operationalized. And so, in the study is actually one of the ways in which we operationalized it just to give you a sense of this. So, one was we had offshore drillers view aerial pictures, photos of their drilling rigs versus photos of the drill floor. There were no people in any of the photos because we didn’t want to confound this notion of potential personal harm. And what we did is just randomly assigned people to the aerial photos. I see a helicopter view versus a drill floor view. And we asked them to what extent are these 25 safety behaviors a moral, ethical responsibility? We found significant differences. But we also operationalized that by having a group of nurses tell us what city they worked in. And then we coded into the subsequent survey. Either they were a manager in a hospital in the city which they said they worked in, or we randomly picked Miami as a as a place that’s far away from most everything, except I guess Fort Lauderdale. But we can control for that in the study. And then we said, Imagine you’re an administrator in a hospital in Miami. Now, think about the amount of potential harm that could happen and the extent to which these safety behaviors are moral and ethical obligations. And we find that if you’re thinking about being an administrator in a hospital that’s a thousand miles away, you think about it in a different way. Research has also shown that organizational level, as you go up management different levels, you think about things in a more abstract way. So, you’re right in the sense that leaders often construe things in a little bit more abstract way. There’s a couple of implications for that. First is that they see tighter connections between things. So, there is this notion of, well, if you do things safe, then you’re also going to be highly productive. And I think that these two things can go together. Safety and quality. For example, go together. Can go together. And I would say, over time, I think there is some truth to that. But day in and day out, and so the leaders see these things, these concepts as very abstract, which means they can see tighter relationships to these things. But then the frontline managers, they’re faced with a real concrete decision this afternoon of we can either pause for three hours to try to get this part, or we can do a makeshift thing and be back up in 15 minutes, and they see those things competing. So, what do managers do? What do they need to do in terms of practical implications? I think first, they need to continually remind themselves of what the work really looks like on the front lines. And I don’t mean remind themselves, like, remember when they did it 15 years ago or 20 years ago. They need to get some exposure to how is it done now in a much more dynamic, competitive cost pressure environment than maybe they faced 10 or 15 years ago when they did it. And part of it is reminding themselves of that. I think day in and day out, a symbolic reminder of the harm that can potentially occur.

Really thinking about your employees and getting to know… You can’t get to know everybody in your organization if you’re running a big organization. But boy, to the extent that you can really know some people on the frontline supervisors who really are facing this harm, so they become real people and you know something about their families and their children so that you think about, oh, if something bad happens, that’s Jim or Sue. That’s not just some random person that I have passed on the plant side at some point.

That element of personalisation, I think, is I remember in the customer experience space, people would often say, if you put people actual pictures in a call center as an example of your customers and you remember, who am I here for? I’ve seen some organization in the safety space do similar areas where they put actual pictures of team members doing the work and encourage more regular visits to frontline work to understand, to listen, to understand how their work impacts a perfect day for them so that gets more proximity.  

There’s some research where they have given health care professionals who are reading radiology, for example, or something similar to that, a distant person that’s just sitting in an office reading X rays or looking at blood samples or something, a blood test. And what they did is they randomly attached a photo of the patient to the file. And when they attached the photo to the patient, the read was more accurate because it became a real person. So, I think all of those things are really good. We actually opened and closed this research paper with the Canadian iron ring, which you may know something about, the iron ring, the Ceremony of the Iron Ring for Engineers, is that when you become a licensed engineer in Canada, you go through this iron ring ceremony and you wear a little ring on your, I guess, your right hand little finger, I think, to remind you of the ethical moral responsibility of a professional engineer, there’s an apocryphal story about those being made from the bridge collapse in Montreal. It turns out that’s not really true. Maybe once upon a time it was true. They ran out of metal. But that notion of this constant reminder of decisions that I make at the drafting table have downstream consequences. I think anything that you can do to make sure that that abstract notion becomes is always salient and particularly around the potential for harm would be beneficial. And if I touch on the example that you shared before in terms of the middle manager making a trade-off, I take $0.05, maybe I take $0.07, an extra $0.02. What are some strategies to mitigate that? Because it sounds like it would just be in the story in the news around the incident in around the derailment, sounds like it was, we took, we took, we took until eventually the budgets run out and something went too far. Obviously, we don’t know yet the full conclusions, but the early signs seem to be that their budgets kept being cut until it was too much. I think that’s a common story, actually, unfortunately. And I think it’s common in part because the dynamic non-events are this abstract phenomenon that are hard to imagine and therefore easy to discount the likelihood that something bad is going to happen versus a very concrete metric that you’re held accountable for every quarter for delivering or even shorter on delivering the product. So, a couple of things come to mind. I wish I had this is my next 10 years of research to try to sort this out. But I think the first thing that I would recommend is to understand the difference between what I would call real learning and superstitious learning. Now, real learning involves the reduction of uncertainty, that you were missing information, some degree of uncertainty, and that uncertainty has been removed in some substantive way. Superstitious learning is probably not that familiar. That definition of real learning, I think people are like, well, yeah, that makes sense. But what is superstitious learning? Superstitious learning goes all the way back to Pavlovy in psychology. And superstitious is defined as an incorrect pairing of a stimulus and response. Okay? Okay. So, when I take those five cents away from the dollar and nothing happens, I conclude that I have learned that I can spend 95 cents, and nothing happens. And it’s like, no, you have not reduced any uncertainty in that equation. And it’s very difficult to do that because those kinds of things, like you cut the training budget for whatever safety protocol, or you cut 10 % of your tree trimmers from a utility company, that decision is not going to manifest into demonstrative risk for sometimes many years. And by that point, all the middle managers are off into different jobs, and nobody remembers. So, you can’t really connect the two. So first, I would want to say, to what extent are you really learning? And do you understand what learning really means as opposed to just getting lucky? And so, a lot of times you’re cutting these budgets and you’re just it’s just there’s a really long feedback cycle and it’s fuzzy. And so, nothing’s happened, even though the risk is continuing to accrue. But you’re concluding that you’re learning that you don’t need to spend as much on safety and nothing will happen. So, the first thing I think is just really for people to grapple with this notion of, if I cut this budget, am I really learning anything given the flow feedback cycles, the stochastic nature of that, the fuzzing of the criteria, etc.

So, there’s a lot of ways in which you’re not really learning. I think the second thing goes to this notion of a really strong safety culture throughout the organization. Another piece of research that was done by my friend Dove Zohar with another one of his colleagues, showed that if you have a really strongly agreed upon and strong safety culture at the top of the organization, then it actually reduces the amount of discretion that mental managers enact with respect to safety. So, safety becomes a nonnegotiable. So that’s where it loops us back to the beginning of our conversation around safety culture, is that you have a really strongly held view at the top of the organization that safety is an extremely important criteria. And that’s strongly held, symbolically reinforced, top of the organization talked about, communicated about, invested in, so people see not only the words, but the actions behind the words, the money behind the words. And that my job is designed to be safe. My manager is talking about safety, then all of a sudden it reduces the amount of perceived discretion that I have. And so, I’m going to be less likely to take that $0.05 and move it from the dynamic non-event into the other criteria.

The two things that come to mind is really getting really clear on what organizational learning means. And then forcing people to justify it, like, oh, if you’re going to cut the budget this year and you don’t think it’s going to be risky, how do you know? You’ve got to give me the criteria, the data that you’re using, the assumptions you’re making. And then secondly, I think just creating that really strong safety culture throughout the organization to reduce the amount of discretion that those frontline and middle managers perceive that they have with respect to safety.

I think it’s an important point because what you mentioned, even at the top management team, I’ve seen very mature organizations where even when somebody say, I could save X amount of money in my budget, finance will say, well, what would be the impact on safety? Help you think through, because sometimes the impact is… It’s not just cutting the safety budgets, not cutting the training budgets, not just taking your PPE out. Sometimes I hear now of examples of, in 2008, we didn’t recruit for two years, and as a result, we lost some learnings as people retired because we didn’t create the next generation. And we’re now 14 years later, and people are starting to realize the effect of a hiring freeze that happened in 2008. And so, it’s really trying to think about what could go wrong from these pieces that are not necessarily a safety budget. This was just a recruiting budget, promotion budgets in an organization.

Yeah, that is a great series of questions that would go a long way to fleshing these out. And then trying to make, in reverse, connect some of those dots so you do learn from them to say, oh, we did cut that training budget. And now, five years later, six years later, when we’ve got to expand operations, we don’t have people trained up to do it. And this needs to be a lesson learned. We need to do an after-action review. We need to file some learnings with the senior managers so that we can act on it and continue to move forward positively.

Absolutely. So, Dave, thank you so much for sharing those examples. I think they’re very powerful examples of safety culture, the role of leaders, and how you really instill those right decisions, both in terms of the concept of the proximity you talked about in terms of the onshore or offshore locations, but also in terms of the role of leaders and the decisions that they’re making day in and day out.

Well, thank you for having me. I’m so happy to be here.

Excellent.

Thank you for listening to the Safety Guru on C-Suite Radio. Leave a legacy, distinguish yourself from the pack, grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafety coach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.

The Safety Guru with Eric Michrowski

More Episodes: https://thesafetyculture.guru/

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Powered By Propulo Consulting: https://propulo.com/

Eric Michrowski: https://ericmichrowski.com

ABOUT THE GUEST

Dave Hofmann’s research focuses on organizational climate, leadership, and organizational change, organizational design and decision-making. He teaches courses in organizational behavior, leadership and the complexities of middle management. Dr. Hofmann served as associate dean for the full-time MBA Program, area chair of organizational behavior and senior associate dean of academic affairs. A specific focus of his research is the impact of leadership and organizational culture on safety and errors in organizations that operate in high-risk environments. He has edited two scholarly books on these topics, including “Errors in Organizations” with Michael Frese.

In recognition of his work’s applied implications, he received the American Psychological Association’s Decade of Behavior Research Award in 2006. He received a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award to study errors and safety issues in organizations at the University of Giessen in Germany, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant to investigate error management and organizational learning on nursing units. He has served on two National Research Council/National Academy of Engineering committees. The first investigated the causes of the BP Deepwater Horizon accident, and the second focused on how to improve safety culture in the offshore industry.

Dr. Hofmann has presented his research or conducted executive development sessions in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, UAE and the U.K. He earned his PhD in industrial and organizational psychology from Pennsylvania State University, his master’s degree in industrial and organizational psychology from the University of Central Florida, and his bachelor’s degree in business administration from Furman University.

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EXECUTIVE SAFETY COACHING

Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their Safety Leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance.

Safety Leadership coaching has been limited, expensive, and exclusive for too long.

As part of Propulo Consulting’s subscription-based executive membership, our coaching partnership is tailored for top business executives that are motivated to improve safety leadership and commitment.
Unlock your full potential with the only Executive Safety Coaching for Ops & HSE leaders available on the market.

Explore your journey with Executive Safety Coaching at https://www.execsafetycoach.com.
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Levelling Up Safety by Embracing Total Wellness at Denver Fire Department with Manuel Almaguer

Levelling up safety by embracing total wellness at Denver fire department

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“At that time, we had focused so much on line of duty deaths, but what we did not know is that suicides were starting to outpace line of duty deaths in the fire service.” Manuel Almaguer remembers back to 2013 when the Denver Fire Department began to roll out training with an intentional focus on discussing stressors, risk factors, and ways to take care of themselves and each other in public safety. Tune in as Manuel discusses steps the Denver Fire Department has implemented through the years to beat the stigma, build trust through vulnerability, and prioritize peer support to embrace total wellness throughout the fire department.

READ THIS EPISODE

Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and wellbeing of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost. For the C-Suite, it’s a real topic of daily focus. This is The Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today I’m very excited to have with me Manuel Almaguer. He’s the assistant Chief with the Denver Fire, 20-year veteran champion of mental health and we’re here to talk about some incredibly powerful actions that he’s taken. He’s driven within Denver Fire to bring the topic of mental health to the forefront. So many really excited to have you with me today.

Hey. Good morning, Eric. It’s my pleasure and looking forward to this conversation for quite some time. Thank you.

Excellent. So many your story has been shared in many different forms that I’ve heard. In terms of the work you’ve done in Denver Fire, maybe let’s start a little bit about what got you inspired to do some very powerful things which we’ll get to very soon around mental health within Denver Fire.

That’s great. It’s a great intro. And my background before I came into Denver Fire Department was in psychiatric settings. So, I was a psychiatric registered nurse and I worked in institutional settings with the developmentally disabled as well as those with some severe mental illness concerns that would require the institutional setting. So, I’d worked in that setting for eleven years and then I went into the career change with Denver Fire and really thought, okay, I pretty much have seen what I’m going to see in life and there’s really nothing that’s going to be shocking to me or something that’s going to as I thought would be traumatic. So, this was in the year 2000 and then I started to see trends and people that I had worked with and people who had retired from the fire service and taking their own lives. But where it really impacted me, and a few others was in 2013 when there was a suicide of one of our respected captains in the Democratic Department and just a man that many of us kind of looked up to as a mentor. And you have to keep this perspective when you come into public safety and specifically the fire service and you always think of somebody who’s stoic, somebody who doesn’t have any issues personally, somebody who’s just kind of that man’s, man, firefighter, firefighter.

He just never really looked deep into the layer of anything that could be preoccupying them in any way. So, this individual took their life in 2013 and it crippled a handful of us. And at the time it was with an employee group called Firefighters Incorporated for Racial Equality and maybe on the executive board worked with this individual in the firehouse. So, what was so interesting about this is that at that time, we had just started to get at the forefront of suicide in the fire service. And at that time, Denver fire collaborated with the National Pawn Firefighters Foundation. We were focusing on the Life Safety Initiative, which is mental health. So, we started to roll out some training. It was very basic training. It was called stress first aid. So, at that time was the very first introduction that I could recall in the fire service, where we started talking about stressors risk factors and ways to take care of yourself and each other. But we were influenced in all of this. We were just trying to get the message out. Well, while we were doing this, right under our nose is when the suicide of the captain occurred.

So, at that time, we knew we had to do something that had a little bit more teeth to it, that was more sustainable, and actually would capture the attention of the importance of this pattern that was starting to go on in the fire service. Because at that time, we had focused so much online of duty deaths, but what we did not know is that suicides were starting to outpace line of duty deaths in the fire service, but we never even so at the time, a task force was formed with FRE. There’s about three to five of us that says, okay, let’s go out and see what we can do. We’ve had enough and we were broken. Eric we really did not know what we were going to get into, but we knew we needed to do something. And so, what we did is the firefighter mentality. We picked up our bootstraps, we marched forward and said you were not going to take no for an answer. But we really didn’t have an idea. We started to look at resources in the state of Colorado, city of Denver, and at that time, we were knocked on many doors.

We’re here, we’re men. We lost somebody very close to us. We have a lot of the same DNA running through our bodies. We’re high-risk factors. We’re at a high stress job. And people are like, yeah, that’s great. That’s a tough culture, tough stigma. Let us know if you have somebody that’d be willing to work with you. It was to us as like, boy, we were just kind of like, whoa, I guess we are kind of in our own little category of high-risk occupations. Well, then what happened at the time is I just happened to be looking on YouTube and I saw there was a local department of the region down to the south of Denver that had put together this video called Dealing with the Aftermath of Suicide. So, I watched it very captivated, like, wow, this is what we’re trying to get into.

Sure.

I looked at the credits, and in the credits was Dr. Sally Spencer Thomas. And I looked at, wait a minute here. She’s down the street from us. So, we made contact with her. About three of us went in there to talk to her, and immediately we knew we were in the right hand. She almost was, like, waiting for us. And at that time, she was recognizing this pattern and trend that was going on amongst working agents, specifically in the public safety industry as well as the construction industry. So, what we did at that time was we collaborated with Sally, and we started at a very, very we had a strategy to go and get some focus groups. And so, what we did is we got members from all ranks, probably about ten to 15 members of the Denver fire department of all ranks. We just went into a room, and we just started talking about what we were all going through and what was so glaring and all that. And I knew everybody in this room, and I thought I had a pretty good idea of who they were as men and as women and as firefighters.

The out is I really had no idea what they were going through. And they were raw. They were tough conversations and very real and eye-opening dialogue. And we had felt that the common thread we had all had been we were all stressed. We take home our work, and we knew we had a system that needed more resources. Keep in mind, at the time when I came on the Denver fire department in the year 2000, we had a city policy that had kind of made its way into our department policies. And it basically was, if you’re experiencing a crisis or if you need mental health resources, call this number.

Sure.

And it was office of employee assistance as a paragraph, probably that big, and every city employee, this was the avenue for resources. So, at the time I thought, well, I don’t want to minimize what anybody in a city employee is going through, but I felt pretty confident that somebody in the library or somebody in parks and rec wasn’t dealing with the same stressors. And that’s me.

I think that’s probably a fair assumption.

And so those are the types of things we knew we had to start having in place in order to have options for our members. Because, you know, the more options you have, the better choices you’re going to make, and there are resources that are better suited for you and your own individual needs. But at that time, our most used resource was our care support team, and that is members of the Democratic department through specialized training. And that is what we had. It was most widely used. We had a department of psychologist. But if you did not feel comfortable with those two resources, then all you had was just the city OOE EAP employee assistance program. So, what we did with that focus group is we looked at a strength and needs assessment. What are the strengths of the fire service? What are the strengths of the Denver fire department? We knew the strengths are we’re a family, we take care of each other. We all have the risk factors that we all can pretty much unspoken language know that, okay, this person, he or she is going through probably the same challenges that I’m going through.

We knew that the strengths are with the firefighter mentality. Give us a task, we’ll take care of it. And the weaknesses we have were lack of resources, lack of trust. Lack of trust meaning that we didn’t feel confident that we could come forward with vulnerability. It was a weakness at the time, and we felt that we didn’t have trust and there would be no labeling the stigma attached. And I want to promote in the fire service well if I come forward and I start talking about the course I’ve taken in my career with dealing with my mental health challenges or concerns, does this impact me where I go on my future? He felt very, very leery about crossing the boundaries of being leaders in the fire service and conveying vulnerability to our peers. And then our peers felt I don’t trust leadership because they’re going to go and use this against me in my career. All these obstacles, we just kind of hashed them all out. And so, we also had done a survey and got to keep in mind a survey in public safety. We probably have 2% to 5% Ops participation. We put this survey and we asked what do I think about mental illness?

What do I think my peer thinks about mental illness? What do I think leadership thinks about mental illness? Can I name five risk factors, somebody who may be experiencing a crisis? Can I list five resources that are available to me and to my peers? We had about a 20% participation rate in the fire service and to many in a company organization, I might not see my calaba. To us it was huge. And we knew at the time that people want to be heard and people are struggling. So, we found out some very alarming data from that. People couldn’t even name resources other than the EAP. And so, with that, we put together a training and said, okay, we’re going to go through this model called the working minds model. We’re going to train the trainer because we knew in the fire service public safety, you bring in an outside speaker to tell you, you know, this is what you’re going through. You automatically get suspicion. You’re going to get the fear of conspiracy. So, we knew in order for it to be effective, it had to be biased for us and we had to put people who’ve actually walked this path.

We’re in positions of leadership and basically say, okay, this is what we’re dealing with. That was the first challenge. The second challenge is we knew we could not go in there and just say, we’re going to talk about mental health and resiliency. Sure, you’re probably going to get callings that day. You’re probably going to get people who have some other thing they want, training they got to take care of. But we knew we couldn’t do that. So right at that time in the fire service, we always are championing physical health. Cancer is high amongst firefighters, heart attacks amongst firefighters and first responders. So, we knew we had to capitalize on that and morph it together, what we call the total wellness. So, let’s talk about what we’re going to take care of our physical health, checkups physicals body composition analysis, propensity for injury, and then let’s start talking about our minds, what’s going on here? As below, as above, so below, that’s kind of our approach. So, we coupled it all together. We called it total wellness and we got great buying. And it was something that we felt that became a model that continued to be used in corporate America.

But it was something, like I said, if I look back on it and it was probably the best thing that we could have done, but there’s was something missing. We had just started to capture data and at that time the data was alarming because like I mentioned before, you think of firefighters, you think of the worst possible thing that could happen is a line of duty death. But when we start talking about working age, men, fire service, the risk factors we all bring in, we’re risktakers by nature. We’re around death all the time. We know if we are in a crisis. We know the mechanisms to take our own life. And we had captured the attention of the data of the people we were presenting to on the organization. But we knew in order to get that knockout punch to really deliver the message. At the time, Dr. Sally says, let’s get about five people in leadership positions. Let’s put together a video. And I want you to talk about moments in your career when you are vulnerable, maybe going through a difficult time, have soft treatment, and you are now triumphant, if you mind.

The ten of us that are going through this, we’re like, we’re very passionate. We know what needs to be done. But all ten of us are like, I don’t know anybody like that, do you? We’re kind of looking around the room. In reality, we were part of our own story. This is part of our own healing. And those of us who were deeply impacted by the suicide of the captain, I look back on it and going through this was part of the best thing we could have done for ourselves because we were able to lay our hearts on the table, be open be vulnerable. So, once we got together, a group of us that basically talked about seeking help, advocating for mental health and resilience building, which is what captured the attention of the members of the department of everything we did. And it was all great. People said, you know what, I never knew that you were going through this, and I admire you so much for your courage and vulnerability and coming forward and that we were able to build on. And I firmly believed, unfortunately, we had a line of duty death about a year and a half later, and this was a firefighter who had fallen through a roof and had lost his life two weeks later.

Well, because we had already started to build those skills of resiliency, crisis intervention, suicide prevention, we were able to teach the entire department on grief and loss. And I firmly would never have been able to broach that topic if we hadn’t already built that trust. And so that is kind of the story in a nutshell on how Denver Fire Department began to morph into championing mental health, coming up with more programs, recognize the value of resource building internally through peer support. Department psychologists were able to come up with a chaplain service for people who are more inclined to have spiritual intervention for mental health. And we were able to collaborate with many, many agencies and suicide prevention organizations and champions. But that’s how it all began.

I think the story is incredibly powerful. A couple of things that really hit home for me was the importance of peer support. And I think the message you shared around without trying to minimize the challenges that other groups may go through. EAP and many organizations that actually remember having the conversation earlier this week is the EP group that you’ve got prepared to address themes. Do they understand what you’re going through saying in the fire department or whether it’s law enforcement without its construction, whatever industry that you’re in because it seems maybe different construction, sometimes you could be away for six weeks or you might be flying to see your family for a day, which could create new stressors and differences. So, I think the peer support piece is something I’m hugely in favor of. I think it’s incredibly important. I love how you adapted things; you made it for the fire department, you adjusted terminology, the total wellness. I think these things are powerful because if it feels like it’s something that’s corporate that’s being pushed, people won’t use. And I think that’s incredibly powerful. And your message around vulnerability, I’ve seen it time and time again when people are comfortable, and leaders are comfortable being vulnerable.

It’s so powerful in terms of getting people to understand.

This episode of the Safety Guru podcast is brought to you by Propulo Consulting, the leading safety and safety culture advisory firm. Whether you are looking to assess your safety culture, develop strategies to level up your safety performance, introduce human performance capabilities, reenergize your BBS program, enhance supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety leadership training and talent solutions. Propulo has you covered. Visit [email protected].

That’s a great point, Eric. And this is a story I want to share with you recently. About two weeks ago, I was at a call downtown on an actual suicide of an individual who had taken their life by jumping off of a structure. And so, if that would have happened 1520 years ago, those who were part of that incident had witnessed what had happened, we would lose them because we would never address what they’re feeling now or what they may be feeling next day down the road. So, after everything was mitigated and during that time when I’m getting the company back in service, the first call I made was our purpose support director. And I said, this is what happened. These are the individuals that were on the scene. Please give them a call by the end of the day or tomorrow morning. So, to see that transition and now it’s part of our call process. First incident, I would never have even thought of that 1520 years ago. It was just something that you went home, you took it home with. If you were able to talk with members of your family or of your own internal support network, fantastic.

But if you didn’t have those, then this is carried with you, and it be accumulated through your career.

Right. And I think one of the reasons why I think your story’s powerful and obviously we’re talking mostly about safety. You’re in the public safety space, you do incredibly dangerous workday in and day out. What’s the impact of mental health and not addressing on physical safety of a team member? That because I think the two things are intertwined. We know from a physical safety standpoint, distractions, all sorts of things that can be exacerbated by mental health can have an impact in terms of my choices, my decisions, and how I stay physically safe as well.

Yeah, that’s a great question. So, as I mentioned earlier, we started to recognize the trend and pattern in line of duty death being surpassed by suicides, not just in the fire service, but in public safety. And this has continued to be the trend for almost ten years. I think the only time we had line of duty deaths that were outpacing suicide was during COVID, but we don’t see a drop off in these trends. So, the cumulative effect, if these stressors and risk factors aren’t addressed, obviously the worst-case scenario is the suicide of a member. But you can also attach it to the things that maybe we don’t consider taking it home to your loved ones. Anger, substance use. And that data we had done back in 2014, we started to see the prevalence of substance use. We started to see the prevalence of domestic issues that were going on in the home. We started to see a trend in the number of divorces in the fire service. We started to see the number of disciplines in the fire service. We started to see a number in injuries. So, all the things you can easily attribute to not taking care of yourself.

And when you look at the number of calls that the peer support receives on an annual basis, of course they’re all confidential. But we do look at the types of calls and they all are on family, substance use, anger management, feeling loss of value and a sense of purpose because of injuries. And you have to keep in mind we’re all kind of have our bread to be on the frontline, to be out there riding on the rig, to be a part of a crew. And when you have issues where you’re taking time off of work, whether for recovery, whether it’s mentally or physically, you lose that sense of value being a part of something bigger than yourself, part of a team. So those are all the things that you can attribute to not taking care of yourself. And then we were also seeing trends, and this is something that may be surprising to a few, is our retirees were taking their lives in the past two years. I probably have a handful of retirees who once they were off the department, had taken their lives. It’s a sense of possibly not having a support network of the brothers and sisters of the fire department to bounce things off and maybe not having the support network that they once had.

And I’ve seen this in other industries as well, where there’s a very strong bond connection to the mission, even in the aviation space, pilots as well, risk factors after they retire. All of that also changes the context that you’re operating within. So, is this something you’ve also extended to people that have left the fire department in terms of the peer support or not yet?

No. Well, we’ve brought it to the attention of administration. We brought it to the attention of the union. Of the union. And yes, I believe it’s part of the message that this is what we’ve seen, these are the resources available to you. But we don’t really have to touch points like we would have members who are currently in the department. But I will tell you what we did that I really felt that was a game changer for us is that I really didn’t start talking about mental health until my 15th year on the department. When I came on in the year 2000, if there was anything going on with me internally, I’d dare not say anything. And even if I was to say, hey, I’m having a bad day, I’ll be quiet kid, just move on, get on the rig. So, part of the academy process, when the new recruits come in, they are automatically just within that first 17 weeks of their training are instructed on the importance of self care, are instructed on being able to have the courage to intervene if a member or a colleague. And I use this story, and I’ve used it with the recruits.

So, in the fire service, we’re safety oriented. Everything’s about safety, of course. And when you’re on a call, all of us are responsible and have an obligation to safety. It doesn’t matter if you’re the chief. It doesn’t matter if you are the brand-new firefighter in the city. You come up on a house fire and you see a roof sagging, I ask the most junior person, the least seniority on the department, what would you do? You roll up on this. What would you do? Oh, Chief, you know what? I immediately talked to the incident commander, but there’s a safety issue right there. The roof is saying, we need to pull people off the roof without hesitation, with confidence. I said, okay, you go back to the firehouse, and you happen to walk past your officer’s room, and you see your officer with his head in his hands and he saw me. What are you going to do? They look around, I don’t know. I said, the mindset is we’re safety officers on the fire ground and in the firehouse, if somebody is in danger or there’s a concern or somebody is not themselves, just like reading smoke, we can tell when there’s turbulence.

We should be able to read each other when there’s inner turbulence, have the courage to intervene and have that dialogue. So that’s the mindset that we’re trying to have. Our entry level recruits have those skills and at least the awareness of themselves and their peers that they can start having that conversation and start moving things in that direction early in their career.

Thank you, Manny. That’s very powerful. So, Manny, thank you for sharing all these great ideas and your experience through this. If somebody wants to get in touch with you to explore your journey within Denver Fire, to explore how to leverage some of the insights you’ve had there in the organization, how can they get in touch with you?

Eric, they can contact me through my personal email. And that is [email protected].

Perfect. And I also want to thank you for coming, sharing your story, for the work that you’ve done within Denver Fire and how you brought all the teams together behind this. I think it’s a very encouraging story and a story I wish a lot of others started thinking about. How do I embark on a similar journey and ultimately as well, thank you for your service within Denver Fire and keeping people safe day in and day out. Really appreciate everything you’ve done. Thank you.

Yeah, thanks, sir.

It’s been a pleasure.

Thank you for listening to the safety guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the pack. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety. Leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo consulting.

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Assistant Chief, Manuel Almaguer, has been a Denver Firefighter for 22 years. Chief Almaguer has served in many roles in the Denver Fire Department. This includes Division Chief of Fire Prevention, Assistant Chief in both Training and Operations. Hazardous Materials Captain, and Lieutenant in Administration. He is a national champion of mental health and resiliency. He has spoken at The White House and Pentagon on Suicide Prevention and Men’s Health.

For more information: [email protected]

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Holiday Special Episode – The Top 8 themes and ideas from 2022

The top 8 themes and ideas from 2022

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As we near the end of 2022, we would like to take a moment to thank all of our special guests for sharing their expertise with us. We are grateful to have had many outstanding guests from academia to executives, safety experts, and motivational speakers from around the globe join the show this year. Tune in to this week’s episode as our host Eric Michrowski reflects on the top 8 themes and ideas from 2022.

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Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and wellbeing of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost. For the C-suite, it’s a real topic of daily focus. This is The Safety Guru with your host Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized Ops and safety guru, public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now. 

Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru. I’m your host, Eric Michrowski. As we approach the end of 2022, I’d like to take a moment to express my gratitude for all the leaders and executives that tune into the show as you seek to leave a legacy by making the workplace safer. Great news. To start with. We are honored that The Safety Guru has been appointed as one of the Top 40 Best Construction podcasts of 2022. Our podcast wouldn’t be where it is today without your support. You’re the ones that make our podcasting go around the holiday season has a way of reminding us of what matters most in life as we gather and spend quality time with our loved ones. For the team at Propulo Consulting, the holiday season also symbolizes the why behind our work and the drive behind our passion to partner with outstanding organizations and leaders that intentionally pursue safety without compromise to ensure that each team member returns home safe to their loved ones every day. We appreciate each and every one of you for the gift of safety that you have been given to your team members this year. 2022 has proven to be a year of remarkable ideas on the Safety Guru from safety experts, academia and motivational speakers all over the world.

In this episode, I will reflect on the top eight themes and ideas from guests that join the podcast to share their expertise with us in 2022. Here are the top eight themes and ideas from all of our episodes in 2022. Theme number one the impact on families and loved ones I talked about as we enter the holiday season on the impact of why, we focus on what, we focus on safety. We had Bernie and Sheila Inman, Brad and Kayla, Louise Adamson, and Alyssa Grocutt. They all talk to us about the true impact on families and loved ones at the end of the day. As I started with that’s really why safety matters. It’s a reminder of the why. As leaders, we need to drive an impact. It’s one the impact on the individuals that get injured, but also the impact on families. So, I appreciate all of them for coming in and sharing their stories on how safety and a decision can have a lasting impact on a family member. We also had esteem number two key speakers talk about their experience, their personal experience with safety. James Wood from Australia, Dan Plexman, Alan Newey, Ken Woodward all shared very powerful stories on the importance of focusing on safety and what could go wrong. All four are strong motivational speakers that speak to audiences to convey the importance of safety in the choices and decisions being made. One of the things that marked this topic with Dan Plexman was the impact of microcultures, where you can have a great culture overall, but maybe in one location, one region, there could be a different subset of that culture and how that can impact decision making. All very powerful stories. Theme number three, I think, is really critical. It’s a theme of how do you engage at the executive level? How do you drive board engagement? We had Dave Ulrich, an incredibly powerful, respected figure, talk to us about the experience in HR and how HR got to the decision making table at the C-suite. Really, what was the impact that they drove to make sure people could really voice their opinion and the value of HR at the executive table? I think there’s so many great parallels from that episode in terms of what can we do as safety professionals to elevate our conversations around safety, how to elevate the role of safety at the C-suite. Julie spoke to many themes on board engagement, governance. How can a board lean in to make sure that the right themes are being driven? Brian spoke to us about his experience as a CEO and really, after winning a prize on how he leads around safety leadership, shared some great, powerful ideas for executives on how they can show up to influence safety leadership. And then we had Dr. Georgie pop up. He spoke to us, really around some of the key elements of how do you make a business case for safety? Theme number four is really around safety leadership, a topic we’ve talked so often on the safety group is so critical and really is one of the key drivers of decision making at the front line. Dr. Kevin Kellaway. Great conversation. Themes. Very simple ideas, really based on the premise of let’s put in some daily simple habits or weekly habits that were driving greater frequency of messaging around safety. How do we prioritize safety? So, it’s very simple thoughts and ideas for any leader to start thinking about how do I level up my influence on safety today? Dr. Josh Williams talked to us about the impact of safety leadership on culture. Really powerful themes in terms of personal self-reflections around it.

We had John Drebinger talked about communication and the impact of communication and how a leader shows up and communicates the importance of safety. Really powerful stories and examples from a magician turned into a great safety speaker. Six, we had Ron Gantt and Sheldon Primus talk to us about employee involvement. Great stories. Ron recent episode, great conversation where he shared so many great ideas around how you level up employee involvement, how you get frontline participation, and safety to get better outcomes. Such an important topic that probably doesn’t get as much attention as it should. Sheldon shared some examples as well from his time when he was running a water plant water treatment facility and how he engaged with frontline workers to make them feel that they were part of the program and increases safety ownership. Such an important, powerful topic. Martin Royal talked to us about coaching. We talked about safety leadership before and the impact of it. Martin talked about how you leverage a coach that has expertise in safety leadership, whether you’re in safety or in an executive position, to really level up how you show up, how do you drive some daily practices, habits, think about some of your blind spots to drive real, meaningful, impact, tangible stories there.

Theme number seven, we talked about suicide prevention, mental health, two topics that don’t get covered enough when it comes to safety leadership, but really important. We talked about the linkage back to safety in teams of decision making. We had Dr. Sally Spencer talked about suicide prevention, very tangible ideas that safety leaders can take forward to bring the topic of suicide prevention and mental health to the workplace to reduce injuries. And we also had Michael Weston with a very powerful story about a personal experience and the impact of stress and how it can impact mental health in the long term. We got more episodes on this topic coming up in the new Year. I recently recorded a great episode with Denver Fire and really, in terms of how they brought in suicide prevention and mental health in a very concrete, tangible way in the workplace.

And finally, theme number eight is a bit of a concoction of different important themes around safety in different areas that you should focus your safety programs on. We talked about ladder safety. We had Dylan come talk to us about his personal experience and a great invention he came up with to stabilize ladders.

It really made me rethink personally even why am I going up a ladder to go on the roof? And some of the things that you can do, both personally, but also in terms of impacting a ladder safety. We had Anthony Corinne talked to us about active shooter training. Unfortunately, something we hear too often in terms of active shooters, the training component becomes important. How do you have situational awareness? Great tips to be aware of what you should do yourself, but also how can you train your workforce on this important theme? We have Patty Ackerman come talk to us about stretching programs. So important, and a lot of jobs are physically demanding and get a lot of soft tissue injuries. Patty talks to us about some stretching programs, how leaders can reinforce them to make sure that people are doing it on a regular basis. Really, really important part of most safety programs. And finally, we had Cam Mackey and Dan Glucksman come talk to us about heat Stress, a topic that is becoming more and more prevalent. A topic that as global warming continues to increase, we’ve seen this year regions that normally don’t get extreme heat get extreme heat. Like the UK, like the Pacific Northwest, and some very tangible approaches that people can take around both PPE, but also training, awareness, peer checks on this heat stress theme. All themes that should be addressed, all key learnings that came to us in 2022.

Thank you for all of you to join our show. We would like to announce that we will be skipping the episode for the last week of December for the holiday season and meet all of you again in the new year. We have a lot of experts all lined up for 2023. I don’t want you to miss another episode of Safety Guru. Stay safe. And more importantly, happy holidays.

Thank you for listening to the Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the pack. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo consulting.

The Safety Guru with Eric Michrowski

More Episodes: https://thesafetyculture.guru/

C-Suite Radio: https://c-suitenetwork.com/radio/shows/the-safety-guru/

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Eric Michrowski: https://ericmichrowski.com

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EXECUTIVE SAFETY COACHING

Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their Safety Leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance.

Safety Leadership coaching has been limited, expensive, and exclusive for too long.

As part of Propulo Consulting’s subscription-based executive membership, our coaching partnership is tailored for top business executives that are motivated to improve safety leadership and commitment.
Unlock your full potential with the only Executive Safety Coaching for Ops & HSE leaders available on the market.
Explore your journey with Executive Safety Coaching at https://www.execsafetycoach.com.
Executive Safety Coaching_Propulo

The Lasting Legacy of Poor Safety Leadership & Culture with Louise Adamson

The lasting legacy of poor safety leadership & culture

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“At the end of the day, whatever you’re working on is never as important as your family back at home.” This Thanksgiving season, we are grateful to have Louise Adamson join the podcast as she recalls the events that led to the loss of her brother in a fatal workplace incident in 2005. Louise accentuates the critical need for safety leaders to possess greater care for their team members than the work product and expresses the life-altering ripple effect that serious injuries and fatalities have on loved ones.

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Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies, ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost. For the C-Suite, it is a real topic of daily focus. This is The Safety Guru with your host Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker, and author. Are you ready to leave a safe legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.  

Hi, and welcome to the safety guru. Today, I am very excited to have with me Louise Adamson. She is a workplace safety speaker and a former lawyer. Louise, welcome to the show.  

Thanks so much for having me on. It is a pleasure.  

Maybe share a little bit about your journey and really the story about your brother that got you really focused on driving change, positive change around the safety space.  

Okay, thanks. Well, my brother Michael, was an electrician, 26 years old. He left a home that he shared with his fiancé on the morning of the 4 August 2005, and he did not make it home to Lisa that night. So, what had happened was he originally had come into a job in Edinburgh. He then got a call midway through the day from a job his employer was working on in a city called Dundee. It was an all-hands-on-deck job to get a sports store and a gym complex completed for a handover to a client by the next again a day or else some penalty clauses were going to kick in. So, for a job worth 720 grand for Michael’s employer there is a fifteen grand late penalty clause if it is not handed over by 10:00 the next again morning. Did you know if is Michael willing to go? Well, this is a man who is saving for a wedding. He has been offered over this over time probably right through the night. So of course, he’s willing to go. So, he heads up to Dundee with two of his colleagues. They’ve done pieces of work in the afternoon, and they’ve had their evening tea break.  

He then heads back to work at 06:30 in the evening and at that point, he was only to continue working for the next 40 minutes. So, what he was doing, was collaborating with his colleague Jim and they were installing a security system. So, they were needing to connect a cable that was already in place within a ceiling void to one lead pulled in and Michael is on a set of steps. He’s got his head and shoulders above a full ceiling, he cuts a cable, and he throws it down to the gym. And that cable had a label on it on insulating tape just wrapped around it. And written on the label it said not in use, I do as then Michael is stripping the insulating material from that cable, he suffers a fatal electric shock. So, he fell off the ladder, he fell at Jim’s feet and efforts were made to survive them. But those efforts were unsuccessful in the end. 

I’m so sorry.  

So, it’s a 26-year-old man with his whole life ahead of him to live and he didn’t make it home that night because it’s often said that Michael died because of contact with electricity. No, my brother didn’t die because of contact with electricity. He died because that series of feelings came together and resulted in his death. So, on that site, there was ineffective management and supervision. There was the paperwork that was not put into practice, you’ve got incorrect equipment being used. So, Michael only had a multimeter available to him when he should have been using a voltage tester. There were time pressures being brought to bear. Clearly, with the penalty clauses about to kick in the next day, you’ve also got shortcuts potentially being taken. So, did my brother use what I’m told is referred to by electricians as the bang test? So, did he just try to cut that cable with his snips, wait on the bang to tell him it was life or not? We don’t know if that’s what he did because only he’d be able to tell us, but that’s one of the possibilities that we left with. So, you’ve got shortcuts in the mix, you’ve got a safety on the job.  

It was just seen as a tick box exercise. You had a risk assessment that wasn’t a living document. It was dated more than a year prior to their contract start date.  

Oh, my goodness. 

Dated prior to the contract has not even been awarded because it was one of these generic ones and no site-specific tailoring has been done to that risk assessment. So even at the point at which they energize the distribution boards, so they’re now live working, that risk assessment isn’t revisited. So, it is described by the Health and Safety Executive inspectors as being completely inadequate, so nothing living about that. And it also contributed to Michael’s death. And then I think the sort of final piece, the final hole in all of this is there was a workforce there that wasn’t confident enough to speak up if something was wrong. They were in that mindset of, we could speak up, but nobody’s going to do anything about it anyway. We’re coming to the end of the job. What’s the point if I do speak up? I’m seen as the troublemaker the person dobbin pals, so let’s just get on with it. So, all of these things come together and result in Michael’s death. There was a trial of his employer more than three years down the line after his death, and the outcome of that was that the HSC said that Michael’s death could have been prevented had his employer ensured that safe working practices were being conducted in accordance with the company’s own written procedures.  

And that is just you don’t know how hard that is for a family to have to hear and then went on to say that managers and supervisors must be taking active steps to ensure that electricians work safely. Well, for us, it’s not just about electricians there you swap out the word electricians, you’re swapping in the word workers, operatives. That applies to anything that’s going on any site. In Michael’s case, there were charges laid against three senior individuals. So, there was a managing director an operations director, and a technical services manager who were all charged with criminal health and safety offenses along with the employer company. But mistakes were made by the prosecutor and in the end, those three individuals got to leave the court, and walk free from the dock before the case got before the jury. So, the lawyer then for the company is kind of doing his grand summing up speech as you expect lawyers to do. But he’s referring to his client as being the invisible man now sitting on the dock. That being the employer company.  

Sure.  

So, it was the invisible man that was found guilty of the failures that led to my brother’s death and it was the invisible man that was fined £300,000. But that for us as a family, it doesn’t approach justice and absolutely nothing in the way of comfort. So that’s why I’m now trying to use Michael’s story and to use it to strike a chord with other people, to stop it from happening to other people. That is what now provides my family with the comfort of knowing that positives come from the awful thing that is Michael’s entirely preventable death.  

Yeah, it seems incredibly preventable, and everybody goes to work and expects to come back, nobody thinks about injuries and what could happen. And in this case, there are so many elements here that just show woeful inadequacy in terms of how the organization was being run. From a safety standpoint, they’re looking at hazards but not really understanding what they were. The risk assessment to me is something that should be absolutely living, but also something that people review as they change throughout the day. As the conditions change, they need to reassess the houses in front of them. It sounded like there was labelling saying that it wasn’t even a live wire. So, by all accounts, he’s trusting somebody else had done their job. So, it’s a layering of multiple errors and multiple inadequacies on top of each other.  

Absolutely going to say in terms of the wire, the plans had changed much earlier in the job, but nobody had up, nobody. So, while the plans changed, the written plans didn’t change. So, nobody documented a change in wiring plans. So that then compounds that failure in relation to the cable. 

I see. The other problem is you’ve got multiple crews coming in without it seemingly an onboarding to the job and so there are changes like that that get layered on. So, one topic I hear a lot is the importance of speaking up. And there are two elements that you touched on because speaking up requires two parts in my opinion. One is the employer creating an environment where I’m comfortable speaking up. Leaders recognize, lean in when somebody speaks up, stop work, and says, this is positive, I want to see more of it. And then the other is the peer-to-peer element because that’s also very important. Leaders have an important role in terms of fostering that as well. So, it’s not an abdication. But there are two elements because there are cases where the organization has done really well in terms of encouraging it, but peers think that I think somebody shared a story where they said, are you a man or a mouse when the person spoke up and stopped work. And so, peer pressure also becomes an element of it that the organization needs to drive forward. Any thoughts in terms of that part? Because speaking up is difficult.  

I’ve done it once I stop work. And when you know the consequences of it being very expensive, you think about it 10,000 times, is it really the right call? But it was recognized after by the executives that they lose the right choice to make. What are some of the things that you’ve seen to really drive that forward? 

I think reflect on him first on the fact that my brother wasn’t a shy, retiring individual. He was a ball she individual who, if something was wrong, he’d have no qualms about speaking up about it. He’d already challenged his employer previously about some work that they’d been doing where asbestos was present. So, he wasn’t off that mindset. So, I don’t understand why he didn’t speak up in this situation. So, I have to kind of second guess it. And I think a large element of it is that whole drive to get the job done, guys, we’re up against it and let’s come together as a team and let’s battle the odds and let’s beat the odds and we’re going to get this done by ten tomorrow morning. Nobody thinks we can do it, but we’re going to get it done. There’s that whole thing going on. I think so. I think the sheriff, the judge in the case, in our sentencing statement, said that there was a male macho, cavalier approach being adopted in that industry at the time. So, in terms of battling that, you do need the MD, the Ops director, whomever it might be, they’re the ones in that situation. 

They were the ones who needed to take the step back and say, we’re not going to put our people in this position where they are being made to make these choices. They were the ones who should have stood back and had a grown-up conversation with the principal contractor, the principal contractor with the client. Because I can see that it would be easy in that situation for the men on the ground to be swept up in that. Let’s achieve the impossible goal. And when you’re working in an organization where safety isn’t any sort of core value, it seems then it’s dangerous being an important point. 

Because of that desire to achieve a goal, often even in organizations that are fairly good at stopping work and creating that relief valve sometimes a desire of achieving a goal can get people to start straying into forgetting about how to achieve it safely. And I think an example recently was the whole inquiry into the Boeing 737 Max, and it was all a goal to let’s get this plane done because otherwise, Airbus had a superior plane. And at the point in time where the decision was made to progress, American Airlines was going to move most of its fleet on the Airbus side, whereas they had an entirely bowling fleet. So that created this goal of let’s make sure we get this plane done. And then lots of things fell apart in between. Not that that’s the only item, but people then forget about it, we have to do it safely, we have to make sure we know how to build a plane, we need to make sure we’re capturing it the right way, we’re getting the right diagrams, et cetera. And that goal can rally against the right purpose, the right choices. It doesn’t mean don’t have a goal.  

I think it’s just a question of how you mitigate that goal. How do you reinforce that the goal is to get this done safely and to pause if we see something right?  

This episode of the Safety Guru podcast is brought to you by Propulo Consulting, the leading safety and safety culture advisory firm. Whether you are looking to assess your safety culture, develop strategies to level up your safety performance, introduce human performance capabilities, reenergize your BBS program, enhance supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety leadership training and talent solutions, Propulo has you covered. Visit us at propulo.com.  

Yeah, and I often reiterate that because the Health and Safety Executive Inspector who investigated Michael’s death, I met him just a couple of years ago, and he was saying to me, supervisor level back at that time, and he was quite sure to a degree still today is that their number one priority is getting a job done on time. And I’m always saying that’s not what it should be. It should be to get that job done safely. Safely isn’t that added extra? It’s the on-time part that sure added extra so safely. 

And that requires a lot of messaging that really reinforces that story consistently within the organization. Particularly in the case of the production pressure, you’re mentioning, because here there are penalty clauses. Unfortunately, that production pressure seeps in a lot, even in organizations that have good management systems, just, we got to get this done. Have you seen anything or is there any advice that you share with organizations in terms of how to mitigate that production pressure, so it doesn’t impact the choices that somebody makes? 

I guess that’s really about explaining to people why they’re there. At the end of the day, the sports store my brother was working on, was going to open regardless of how long it took. They’re up against time pressures, so they’re throwing bodies at that job to try to get this all-hands-on-deck job completed. And in the process of that, they threw an actual body at that job, my brothers. And the goal at the end of the day, whatever you’re working on is never as important as your family back at home. And that’s what people need. They shouldn’t need to be reminded of that. But as we’ve already talked about, there is that whole getting swept up in a certain mentality sometimes. So it is that core value, that leadership. Actually, the biggest thing that they care about is the people that are working for them. Not whatever the product or building or whatever it might be at the end of that, it’s the people that they care about the most. 

Yeah. And I think that’s really the message that you share really an organization has to do so much more, has to recognize to create an environment, a culture where people get home every day to their loved ones. And the impact of an event like this, somebody passing away, somebody getting seriously injured, is a life-changing impact for multiple people around that person.  

Yeah, absolutely. And we still hear about new people who’ve been impacted in other ways by what happened to my car. And we’re now 17 years on from his death. But we know about the immediate family, friends, his colleagues who were there at the time. Sorry, we know about the impact it had on them because we see it. We see it day in, day out, we see it. We hold an annual memorial golf tournament for him. So, we hear from his colleagues that kind of the impact that it still has on them and how much they miss him. But then I’ll be speaking at an event, and somebody will come and say to me, oh, I know the first aider who stopped by the C-suite where Michael was working. He just happened to be walking past when this happened, and he helped provide CPR to your brother and he’s still impacted. And until more than a decade after Michael’s death, we knew nothing about this man and about the help that he provided. So, the ripple effect is so wide. I’ve just recently had a colleague of Michaels get in touch and she’s now working in safety as a result of what happened to Michael.  

So, there are so many ripples, so many negative ripples, but also, I hope, so many positive ripples are now being created out of Michael’s death. And I was speaking at a new-born graduation on Monday and I’m saying that I hope at some point these ripples all come together and then it’s that sort of ground swell of positivity so that we know that other lives have been saved as a result of what happened to him and being able to talk about what happened to him and getting lessons learned from what happened to him. 

Which is so important. Really. For other organizations. Other leaders. Recognize the importance of really leading for safety and for others in terms of the day-to-day choices or making how they show up as a supervisor. How do they show up as a leader? So, Louise, thank you very much for sharing your story. It’s still a very difficult, raw story to share because there will never really be closure. But I think the importance of sharing the story, the message, I think helps make sure somebody else comes home safe to the loved ones. So, I appreciate the work that you’re doing. If somebody wants to have you speak to their organization, how can they get in touch with you? 

So, they find me on LinkedIn, or you’ll get me on the website michaelsstory.Net or email [email protected], that would be fantastic. Thanks, Eric.  

Cheers. Thank you very much, Louise. 

Thank you for listening to the Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the pack. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo consulting.  

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ABOUT THE GUEST

Louise Adamson spent 13 years working as an employment lawyer for a top Scottish firm.  However, a personal tragedy led to her attentions becoming focused on the field of health and safety. Her brother Michael was only 26 years old and engaged to be married when he lost his life in an electrical incident which could and should have been prevented. Lessons must be learned and Louise now tells Michael’s story on-screen and in workplaces across many sectors and on major projects.  She has spoken internationally, travelling to Australia and widely throughout Europe.  And has delivered her brother’s story on-screen to workplaces globally. In the last year alone it has made a positive impact in health and safety leadership, culture and practices from the west coast of the USA, through Central and South America, across Europe and Asia, and on to Australia. She is a NEBOSH Ambassador and has previously been named the UK’s Most Influential Person in Health and Safety by SHP Magazine. Louise is also a trustee of health and safety charity Scottish Hazards, where she is focussed on securing long-term funding for an occupational health and safety advice, training and support service for workers. Her primary aim in all she does is to stop anyone else from losing their life or their loved one in a preventable workplace incident.  

For more information: [email protected]

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