Kevin Burns Blog

In the workplace, safety is fast-becoming the new leadership. I say it in my keynote speaking presentations: leadership has nothing to do with management. Safety leadership, therefore, has nothing to do with safety management. You don’t have to be in management to be a leader. Leadership is not a position. It is an attitude - management is the position. One has nothing to do with the other. Safety too is an attitude. It is a state of mind and a way of living your life. Safety is the result. Safely is the choice in every moment of every day. Those with a safety leadership attitude, will choose to do the job safely in every moment. Companies are waking up to the fact that people who blindly follow orders on a job site still get hurt. But safety leaders who choose safety in every moment save themselves from harm by the choices they make. In the workplace, safety is fast-becoming the new leadership.

Organizations say they want to build a culture of safety and then, what they do about it, is a contradiction. I had the pleasure of speaking at a safety meeting last week that broke the mold of boring safety meetings. They organized a quarterly safety event which replaced their monthly safety meetings. According to the safety manager who organized the event, my book, The Perfect Safety Meeting, played a big part in their new attitude toward safety meetings.

Safety managers and advisers must recognize that they are essentially game coaches - coaching to win in safety. I’ve met some great middle managers in my day. I’ve also met some incredibly arrogant and self-centered ones too - holding the keys to their little silos and kingdoms. I’ve met empathetic senior managers and egotistical ones. I’ve met caring supervisors and tyrants. I’ve met General Managers who treat others as equals and GMs who wield their power like a Star Wars light saber.

Employees don’t want your smartest person to run the safety program. They want the one with the best leadership skills. Historically, Google has been the catalyst of many changes in how we view and access the knowledge of the world. But it was in 2009, in a study that Google did internally in an effort to develop better managers, that they made a finding that every single safety manager should be paying attention to.

If you’re handling crisis after crisis, you’re not leading your safety program - it is leading you. You might be in charge, but you’re not in command. You’ve seen it: construction material plastics and debris flying through the air in high winds or caught in the protective fencing because the garbage bin was overstuffed. A disorganized, garbage-strewn work site is indicative of two things; apathy of construction site management and a poor safety culture from workers. But question a site manager on why there’s so much garbage, and you’ll hear that there are other crises to deal with.

To keep safety top-of-mind, appeal to employees like television networks do during the Olympics. The Olympics are on. I find it difficult to get any work done during the Olympics because I’m an Olympics junkie. Once I’ve cleared off my desk for the day, it’s to the big chair, remote in hands to jump back and forth between the almost dozen channels that feature Olympic coverage.

Just when you think you’ve sanitized your workplace, some joker finds something you overlooked in safety. I travel all over North America speaking at safety meetings. I wander through a lot of airports, stay in a lot of hotels and eat in a lot of restaurants. I’ve gotten pretty good at traveling. It doesn’t bother me much. My favorite, though, is driving into the rural parts of this great continent.

Safety meetings have the tendency to be a one-room schoolhouse: too many subjects all at once. I have been the featured keynote speaker at a lot of safety meetings over my twenty years in safety management consulting. I have witnessed some meetings that created incredible focus for attendees and other meetings that were attention-deficit disasters. In safety meetings, it’s not uncommon to see 18 year-old first-time workers sitting alongside 3-more-months-until-retirement seasoned veterans - very similar to the one-room schoolhouses of old. Children of all ages would gathered under one roof to be taught by one teacher across all learning levels.

Safety meetings are NOT about filling time. They are about ensuring that you engage your attendees in safety and help them to make better choices. (An excerpt from my free e-book, The Perfect Safety Meeting)

Safety attitude doesn’t come from compliance. Safety attitude comes from aligning the safety program with a worker's personal values. After delivering a safety keynote presentation, I spotted a driver in treacherous, icy winter driving conditions fly through a yellow light with vehicle windows, side mirrors and tail lights completely obscured by snow. Upon parking, the driver, a construction worker, emerged from his vehicle in full PPE prepared for a full day of working safely.