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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 Michael Melnik. He’s the owner and President of The Energized Approach that he’s been owning and running since 1991. Michael, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you with me.

Well, thank you, Eric. Happy to be here.

Let’s get started with a little bit of how you got into safety.

I got into safety through the back door. I’m an occupational therapist and an exercise physiologist. My career actually began working in a clinic as an occupational therapist. I was working with people that had strokes and spinal cord injuries and different kinds of disabilities. But the clinic that I was in opened up what was then called a Work Hardening program, and it was a program for rehabilitating injured workers. These workers were coming in with back issues and shoulder issues, and we would try to replicate their work environments before we sent them back to work so that we could train them in ways to prevent re-injury. Sure. Well, we started visiting the work sites in order to better duplicate or replicate what they were doing We were walking around and looking around and going, Oh, my. No wonder you’re sending zero people. No wonder they’re getting hurt. Look at this environment. I stepped into that environment and out of the clinic, and I was just so much happier there. There It was just louder and dirtier and just a lot more adversity, for me anyway, that was attractive to me versus the clinic. Then they said, well, look, you’re teaching all of our people in your clinic how to do things differently.

When you’re sending them back to the clinic, they’re lifting better than everybody else. They’re doing all these stretches. Why don’t you teach our people before they get hurt? As a naive young therapist, I said, Sure, I’ll come do that. Lo and behold, I realized very quickly that none of the healthy people were interested in what we had to say. That’s where I had to affect my humor and making it very practical and just more geared towards an audience that on any daily basis isn’t waking up and going, I sure hope somebody comes in today and teaches us how to lift. Been doing it for 40 years. That was really the beginning of my safety career.

I think one of your observations when you started was that people were cycling through programs, going from one program to the next and hoping for something that was going to be a miracle cure.

Again, when I began, I was pretty naive because I was truly considered to be the lifting guy. They would call me up and say, Michael, our people are hurting their backs. Would you come teach them how to lift? And I was like, Oh, absolutely. And I would come in and I would do a fun high energy class, and they’d say, oh, thank you. That was great. And then I’d get a call a week later, and the company would go, well, nobody’s lifting the way you showed. I’m like, I’m not a hypnotist, and I’m not a magician. I just showed them something else has to happen because these are long-standing behaviors. They’re not going to change because I do a half-hour class. So that’s really when it was saying to them, look, rather than me coming back and just teaching it again and having it not work again, how about we look at why it didn’t work and why it didn’t stick? And lo and behold, what we found was that means it actually involved involves supervisors and leadership and ownership to create an environment that takes the information that I was presenting and actually turns it into action.

I would say to them, they’d say, would you come in and teach our people how to lift? I’d say, I will under one condition. That means that everybody comes to this party because everybody’s got a role to play in these changes.

Tell me a little bit more about what was your secret sauce? What was the part that moved it from a training classroom environment to something where people would actually start repeating and doing?

Yeah. That’s a great question because it was really a fun journey for me. This is the point typically in the story, if I’m ever able to relay this story to people, if they’re ever curious enough to want to know, is that I’m a selfish consultant and I’m a selfish presenter. What that means is I don’t want to do it if nobody wants to play. I don’t want to do it if nobody wants to be there. I was looking at it and saying, okay, well, wait a second. Management really only wants to know how much it wants to cost, and they don’t really want to be engaged. The supervisors are telling me they’ve got other stuff that they need to focus on, and this isn’t that important. The employees are going, hey, if management and supervisors are not interested, I’m not interested. I’m just going to do whatever gets me my paycheck. I started going in and talking to my clients, and they’d bring me in to say, hey, can you help us with our safety program? I’d say, well, what have you tried? And they’re going, well, we tried this one, and we tried this and this one.

And I said, well, I don’t want to be the next program. It doesn’t work. Let’s see what we can do. So, the thing that I did, and this is really where everything changed for me, is I said, I pulled out a flip chart, and I said to this group of managers, I said, do me a favor. The thing that you are most well-known for, and it might have been a company that did, let’s say on time delivery. Sure. That was really their claim to Fame. I said, I don’t want to talk about safety. Let’s talk about what you do on a daily basis for on time delivery. What are the things that support that? They started listing their commitment systems and their communication and their consistency and their accountability. They had all of these systems. I said, okay, now, let’s talk about your back injury prevention. I pulled out another flip chart, and I said, tell me all the things you’re doing for that. All it had on it was a poster and a video. I said, okay, let’s just review these two flip charts, and you tell me which program is going to be more effective, and which one isn’t?

I did that with several of my clients, and there was this amazing consistency between what their successful programs had across the board and what their unsuccessful, mostly around safety, programs were lacking. I said, I’m not here to teach you how to do anything significantly differently. I’m only asking you to take what it is that you have demonstrated works. It It made your on-time delivery work. It makes your quality assurance work. It makes all the important programs really work well. If you’ll take some of those and bring them over into the safety world, I think that you’ll find that you have more success. Lo and behold, we came up with a system, and I actually did this in conjunction with my clients 20 years ago. We came up with what’s called an energy assessment. What we would do first is we would do an energy assessment on their successful program. Programs, and we would score them and sit there and go, what are we doing on commitment? Oh, my gosh, we’ve got this policy and this procedure and this reinforcement and this. I’m like, okay, let’s call that a five. What are you doing for communication?

Oh, my God. We’ve got it in several different languages for our multilingual people, and we’ve got all this. I’m like, Let’s call that a five. And we created a benchmark with their most successful programs. Then we said, now let’s go look at safety. What are you doing in the way of commitment? And they’re like, Well, that’s more of a two. Okay, programs in a two are not going to work. We got to get it up there to a higher level. What would be the things you could do on a daily basis that would demonstrate some level of commitment? And over time, we’ll then go out and rescore this and see if you’re making progress. And so, things like recognition and inclusion and flexibility and creativity, these things are things that most of my clients already… These weren’t like new terms. Sure. If I would ask about the terms, they’d go, let me show you what we’re doing for our on-time delivery. We’re super creative. I’m like, Well, you’re super creative in that. You’re showing the same video in your back injury prevention that you showed in 1984. I said, That’s not very creative. And so, we’re going to give that a one.

All right. And can we bump that up a notch? So, the energized approach, the way we talked about it, was sitting there going, and my clients got this right away, that if I go out and I say to supervisors, we’re bringing on a new program, what typically is their response?

I love it. I wanted…

Here we go again. It’ll go away soon. It’ll whatever. And what they’re describing is the energy that it’s going to take for them to try to get engaged in this. And I’m like, if your programs are coming out of the gate, sucking energy out of people, you’ve already lost the game. I don’t care how good the program is. The energy is not there. So, my career, the last really 20 years, has been working with organizations to say, Let’s create fertile ground for your programs. I’m not the guy that’s going to help you pick the best program. I’m the guy that’s going to help you package it and deliver it and support it and reinforce it and create an environment where you are destined for success no matter what. And if there are holes in the program or it’s not doing as well as it should, you’re going to have a process, the energized approach, that’s going to help you identify where are the weak links and why is this not performing?

I love this contrast of a program that you do really well, like when you talked about on-time performance, because every organization is really good at certain things. Then contrasting that with the safety program in general and just seeing what’s different in terms of how we bring this to life. I think it’s a very simple concept, but it’s very powerful.

Yeah. In all honesty, truthfully, it was totally out of selfishness of going, how do I reduce resistance? How do I reduce pushback? I’m not coming in to fight with you. I want employees engaged. I want them having fun in a trading session. I want employees in all due respect to all the other programs companies do. There’s typically only one program that is for the employees, specifically. True. And that’s safety. And yet it’s the least popular. From the employees. I’m like, Oh, my gosh. I have employees tell me all the time. They’ll say, Michael, you are one of the funniest safety speakers I’ve ever had. And I said, you got to understand, that’s not a compliment. It’s not a compliment because the R is so low for people going, safety is fun and enjoyable, and I appreciate it. It feels personal and engaging. I rarely hear people say that about whatever their existing program is. And quality control Soul does not have to be fun or engaging. It’s your job, do it, we’ll give you a paycheck. On time delivery, do it or you don’t work here. Safety is an invitation. We can’t make a person be safe.

We have to engage them and invite them and get them energized around it. We do that all the time with our kids. We do it with our family members. We want to make sure you’re not driving home if you’re not feeling safe or you had too much drink or whatever it’s going to be. We don’t sit on the and go, God, I really should tell them to be careful that I’m so comfortable right now. We don’t do that. If I’m an employee and I don’t see the company putting forth the energy to keep me safe, what message is that? That’s saying, you do not have the value for me to put out the energy to do that. In many instances, what I’ll tell my clients is, I’m not saying you have to care about this person. I’m saying, you need to learn to act like you do.

Ideally, you can actually like the person and care about them for a real reason.

I just love it if you actually like them. But I’m going to at least show you by the way you can do this stuff to have a person watching what you’re doing in the name of safety and actually say thank you and appreciate it instead of here we go again. It creates such a different environment than the typical program that’s coming in.

Awesome. When we spoke before, you mentioned 10 energy sources as part of your energy. Yes. Can you tell me a little bit about what those 10 energy sources are? What are you trying to get to people to reflect against those programs? How you found work?

Well, and again, these really were energy sources. They weren’t called energy sources before I grabbed them and did this, but they were core ingredients of my client’s successful programs. The first one was commitment. The first question I ask every client in an opening interview is, I’m just curious, has your company ever started and then stopped a program in the past? Sure. They’re going, Oh, my God. We do it weekly. I’m like, okay, so I want you to imagine now being an employee watching this ping-pong of starting and stopping and starting and stopping. If I’ve been there for 20 years and you say, hey, we’re introducing a new program, how much am I willing to invest in it? If I think it’s not going to be here in three months, I’m going to look silly. I’m going to actually wait until you’ve demonstrated the commitment, and then I’m going to get on board. And then we talk about what would make it look like you’re committed. Communication, the same thing. I’m like, if you’re walking through your facility and you see somebody doing something inappropriate and safe, number one, do you say anything? If you don’t, that’s also communication.

Absolutely. You are telling them it doesn’t matter to me. But the other thing is, how many of your employees are working safely? How often are you communicating with them about that? Because those are the people you have got to keep motivated. They’re sitting there going, I think the only way to get communicated with here is to do something wrong or to go slow or to break something. It changes the role of a supervisor. I’ll tell you a quick story. We gave us supervisors that accompanied these little business cards. On one side, it said, Thanks for making this a safer place to work. On the flip side, it was like 25 cents off of something in the cafeteria. Every supervisor started the day with a dozen of those in their pocket, and they were told, Go finds 12 people that are keeping this place safe. Thank them. So, part of their job became finding good things to talk about. A supervisor told me once, he said, Michael, I handed a card to a guy that was wearing his safety glasses because we just started a new safety glass policy. I handed it to him, and I just walked away.

One of the other employees saw me hand it to him. He goes up to the employee that got the card and said, hey, what happened? The employee said, oh, I just got this little coupon thing because I’m wearing my safety glasses. The other employee said, well, I’m wearing my safety glasses, too. The guy said, well, you’re just going to have to work harder to get caught. It’s creating a want to get caught environment instead of trying not to get caught, be an unsafe environment.

That’s a fair point. Most safety programs are all based on catching you do something wrong, and it’s all in the negative, but you also need to focus on the positive. What are the things people are doing right? Yeah. Absolutely.

Absolutely.  

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Consistency is one, meaning if you’re going to say that safety is number one, then define for me what that looks like and then go do it. Otherwise, take the poster down, because you’ve got safety is number on a poster, and safety is not even on the scale in your environment. You’re forcing people to not look at the poster, or at least not believe it. Accountability. Do you have clear accountabilities for who’s responsible for what? Inclusion. If I’m going to go do training for employees, the first thing I’ll do is I’ll try to wander through the facility and talk to employees and say, hey, here’s what I’m going to be talking about. Have you heard programs like this in the past? Anything that really resonated for you?

Anything that you’d like for me to cover? Then when I launch the presentation, the first thing I say to employees is, hey, thanks so much for helping me put this presentation together. Now we co-own it instead of, I’m the expert, I shall now share my wisdom with you. Or I’ll say, you know what? I’m going to be here for an hour. It’s too long of a time to sit for an hour. How frequently would you all like to stand? Then I it based on what they’ve recommended. Otherwise, it’s me unilaterally deciding when you should stand. Then that’s more ownership than I want. It’s not my program, it’s theirs. Flexibility. If something’s not working, don’t keep doing it. They’ll sit there and go, oh, yeah, we’ve been doing it the same way. How’s it working? Not very well. I’m like, well, you don’t say that about productivity and quality. Our productivity is terrible, our quality is terrible, and we’re not doing anything about it. You do something about it almost every day, and yet you’re doing safety the same way you’ve done it for 30 years, they notice that. Sure. You are flexible with the important things and not as flexible.

The last one the last energy source of the 10 is actually fun. And what I tell my clients is, they go, well, you don’t want safety to be silly or over the top. I said, that’s not what I said. What I said is fun. Fun is an energy. That fun. The fun is the culmination of commitment and communication and consistency and accountability and flexibility. My clients, unfortunately, before I get there, have tried to just go directly to fun. They’ve skipped communication and consistency and accountability and said, well, let’s just have a safety banquet. People are like, but you don’t take safety seriously here. Why am I supposed to be celebrating it? Versus when all those other nine energy sources present, fun happens. It’s not like you’ve gone after it, it’s the culmination. All I tell my clients is, how about periodically, maybe on a monthly basis, at least, maybe quarterly, if you can’t do that, go do an energy assessment, look at your programs and just be asking, how are we doing on commitment? How are we doing on consistency? How are we doing on accountability? It just adds a layer to the conversation. I leave them with this.

I Look, when you’re putting together your programs, yes, you need your policies and procedures, you need your PowerPoints, you need your posters, you need your handouts. Just make one of the line items, do we have the energy we need to make this successful. In many instances, it will stop you in your tracks, and it will save you the pain and agony of pushing uphill against resistance that has nothing It’s not to do with the program itself. It’s that you haven’t created the environment that’s conducive to its success.

You’ve talked about the revolving door of safety programs. If somebody’s got a program that wasn’t launch with that energy, that enthusiasm, which I think there’s a lot of people who have programs like that. Is it easier to bring the energy to the existing program or is it better to start new and bring the energy to the launch?

That is a wonderful question. I’ve had both opportunities to do both. It really depends on leadership because I have worked with some leaders who have been willing to pull together a core group of employees and actually go, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. We are seeing how ineffective this has been, but we think this thing has legs. But we now know that we need to bring you in. We need to be getting feedback. We need to be flexible with the approach, and we’d really like to give this another shot. In many instances, the employees are just flabbergasted that they’ve even been invited to this party. They’ve never heard the management apologize in any way about, we were doing this wrong. We were doing this in effectively, but we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I don’t encourage that necessarily. But I do say you got to be willing to unwind in other words, it’s like you can’t just start tomorrow, and now the energy around it’s going to be all positive. You have to unwind some of the negative energy, and it’s going to take a little while to do that. From that standpoint, it is often easier to be starting from scratch and sitting there and going, hey, you know what?

We’ve got a new, let’s say, employee assistance program that we’re introducing or whatever it’s going to be. Let’s get the employees engaged in this. Let’s really take a look. Let’s ask the right questions. Let’s be flexible. Let’s include the right people. Let’s talk about, ahead of time, how we want to demonstrate commitment. Let’s not wait till somebody goes, oh, I don’t think they’re doing it anymore. Let’s already know what we’re going to do. It just allows you to come out of the gate without any of that resistance, as much resistance. The other beauty of it is, when I tell employees or employers that that’s the energized approach, the groups that I do the training with and I do the meetings with, that I do the meetings They’re the only ones that really call it the energized approach. To everybody else, it just looks better. It just looks like, oh, they’re just doing this better. This is more fun. This is more engaging. The communication around it is better. But they’re not associating that with a program. The energized approach is an approach. It’s the packaging. It’s not the program.

It reminds me of many moons ago, General Electric used to have something they called the change acceleration process, and they I thought it was a beautiful equation. It basically was Q times A equals E. This was particularly in the quality movement days. They would say quality of the change times the acceptance of the change equals the effectiveness of that change. Obviously, if you have a lousy quality of program, then nothing’s going to work if you have zero on that or one. But you actually don’t need the best program, 10 out of 10, let’s say, if you don’t have acceptance. You’re really focusing on; how do I get that acceptance? In some ways, you’re better off having a good program, but excellent acceptance of that program.

Absolutely. I, very early on in my career, I had grown up in school with everybody saying, Here’s the right way to lift. Sure. I started taking this into companies and finding out that the majority of people, knee problems, back problems, limited flexibility, impaired balance, whatever it might be, can’t lift right. But I’m not trying to create bodybuilders, and I’m not trying to create Olympic weightlifters. And so, I shifted completely to, can you lift better? Can you actually minimize or reduce the demands? Here’s a few principles. And what I found was 100% of my audience could lift better, and none of them were pushing back because all of them were having success. Versus Well, I can get 5% to lift right. Sure. 95% are going, I can’t bend my knees like that. I can’t do whatever. I think that, once again, it’s the idea of going… It’s really about empathy. And sitting there and going, if we’re doing safety, who’s it for? I’m going to pretend like I’m sitting in the class that we’re getting ready to deliver to them. Is this going to feel good? Is it going to feel personal? Is it going to feel like it’s for me?

Or is it going to feel like this is something that’s actually being done because the company needs to cross this off the list for the insurance company or for OSHA or for whatever it might be? As soon as you step out of your own skin and step into the audience and go, as we build this program, I’m an employee. What would feel respectful to me? What would feel like good communication? 100% of the time, they know the answer. They haven’t been doing it, but they know the answer. But it’s more work. It is more work. Again, I leave it with my clients, and I tell them, look, you can keep shopping for programs, and because you have the budget for it, that’s going to feel like an easier thing for you to do than what I’m going to ask of you. Because what I’m going to ask you of is going to be change and communication and hearing feedback, whatever. I’ll be honest with you; it is harder to do. The payoff is much bigger, but it’s harder. Yeah.

Tell me a little bit about the way you implement to make this work. Obviously, you talked about the energy assessment, getting a baseline, getting a sense in terms of what core skills, capabilities the organization already has to make things go really well. Tell me a little bit about other parts of the secret sauce.

Well, I’ve been doing this for over 30 years now, and I can’t cold call a client a potential client and sell myself because they’re not in the place where they’re going, Boy, I really would like to do some change. I’d like to make things a little bit harder. I’d like my responsibilities to change. I’d like to have to communicate more. Almost 100% of my clients have come from me presenting somewhere, and then it resonated. I may be at a national safety conference; I might be at some other regional conference. More often than not, One, two, three, five, however many, a handful of people will come up and go, oh, my God, we need you. I’ll say, all right, well, we’re going to do a preliminary assessment. I’ll either get on a conference call with a bunch of people or whatever, and I’ll lay out the process. We call it an energized approach to maturity assessment. All it means is, do you want to play? Are you willing to make these kinds of changes? What What’s the level of communication that you have throughout your organization currently? How have you implemented things in the past? And let’s play pretend, and let’s talk about the kinds of things that I may be coming in with, because what you don’t want to do is I don’t want to come in and upset the apple cart.

I don’t want to create conflict for you. I don’t want to create anxiety for you. I want people to be hungry for this stuff. So, let’s just see what the appetite is. That being said, I’ve never done any two clients at exactly the same pace because their maturity level for doing it or the population that they have, they’re not all the same across the board. So it might be that I’m working with one client on one energy source a quarter. And all we’re going to do is go, can we spend the next quarter having our employees go, wow, they are really committed to safety. Boom. Knock that energy source out. Let’s go to the next one. Now we’re going to look at consistency. What you say becomes what you do. What are the different ways that you can make that happen for the next quarter? So it might be that it’s a yearlong process. There are others where over the period of a quarter or maybe even over a month, we knock them all out because they really only were lacking in three.

Sure.

Let’s really hammer those home. But it does require leadership commitment.

Of course.

I spell out for them, what does that look like? It’s not going to be extraordinary, but you cannot… If you start this and then pull the plug on it, it is going to bite you. You really got to decide, we are going to stay in this We’re going to get the feedback. We’re going to make the changes that we need. But what I let them know, too, is you can make those as small as you want. Because if you typically walk by somebody in the hallway and you never say anything to them, in fact, even look away for five years, and then one day you walk by them and you just give a nod, you’ve just increased by 100% the level of communication with minimal effort. We talk about What are the minimal things that you know you can continue to do that will reinforce these things? I’m not asking for anything extraordinary to begin with, but what you’re going to find is when the responses from employees and supervisors are really positive, that’s going to energize you to want to do more of that because you’re going to like that result.

For sure.

So, it becomes a loop. It becomes a loop.

Excellent. Michael, thank you so much for coming on sharing your story. If somebody wants to have more details, learn more about the Energize approach, how can they do that?

Well, there’s multiple ways to reach me. My website is just energizedapproach.com. What’s also on there, and I love to talk to people about this stuff. Anybody that’s listening to this, it probably could tell that I like to talk this stuff, and it never notice. It really excites me.

Never noticed.

They can certainly give me a call at 612-940-3242. Happy to take people’s calls, or it’s just [email protected]. is my email.

Perfect. Sounds good. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate you sharing a story, and I very much agree your approach to how much energy is it and how you contrast it to the things that people are able to do well inside an organization, and how do you bring that into the safety arena?

Eric, I appreciate the opportunity to talk to your listeners, and hopefully I’ll hear from some, and we can continue the conversation.

Excellent. Thank you so much. Take care.

You, too.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. 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.