Media - Podcasts

Have Kevin Burns On Your Show

A worldwide Amazon best-selling author and 25+ years working directly with industrial supervisors — ready to talk about safety culture, leadership, and why most companies are solving the wrong problem.

Request Kevin as a Guest

Worldwide Amazon bestselling author

#4 Top Workplace Safety Book

25+ years working with industrial supervisors

Clients across North America

kev-burns-podcast-600Kevin Burns has spent 25+ years working directly with industrial operations, watching the same mistake play out: a company takes its best technical performer, promotes them to supervisor, hands them zero people-skills training, and hopes the leadership part figures itself out.

Kevin calls this a “Hope Promotion” — and he can show your audience exactly how it's quietly driving safety incidents, turnover, and disengagement numbers a company is trying to fix everywhere except the source.

Kevin is the founder of PeopleWork Supervisor Academy and the author of PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety and The CareFull Supervisor.

VOCABULARY KEVIN USES ON AIR

1

Hope
Promotion

Promoting your best worker to supervisor and just hoping the people skills show up.

2

CareFull
Supervisor

The fix — a supervisor who treats care as a leadership skill, not a soft trait.

3

The
16/84

Kevin's frame for the companies that act on this now vs. the ones waiting to see proof first.

EPISODE ANGLES

1

The Hope
Promotion Problem

Why most safety incidents trace back to a promotion decision made years earlier — not a failure on the day it happened.

2

Compliance
Isn't Culture

Why checking the box on safety training doesn't create a team that actually looks out for each other.

3

The Supervisor
Nobody Trained

What happens when you take your best welder, operator, or tech and make them responsible for people — with zero prep.

4

Care as a Strategic
Leadership Skill

Why “soft skills” like care are actually the highest-leverage, most strategic skill a supervisor can build.

5

What Working With Supervisors Taught Me About Safety

Patterns and hard-won lessons from manufacturing, oil & gas, mining, utilities, and construction.

6

Why Your Safety Program Isn't Working

The gap between what leadership rolls out from the top and what actually happens on the floor every shift.

Sample Questions

  • What's a “Hope Promotion,” and how do you spot one just by looking at an org chart?
  • Why do you think safety culture keeps getting treated as a compliance problem instead of a leadership problem?
  • You've worked across manufacturing, oil & gas, mining, utilities, and construction — what's the one thing every one of those industries gets wrong about supervisors?
  • What does it actually mean for a supervisor to “care” as a leadership skill, not just a personality trait?

  • What's the real cost when a company skips supervisor development — in dollars, not just culture?

  • What's a moment from your 25+ years that changed how you think about safety?

WHAT LISTENERS WALK AWAY WITH


A new way to diagnose why their safety numbers aren't moving

A name for a problem they've felt but couldn't put into words

One concrete move to make with their own supervisors this week

LOGISTICS

Remote guest only — no travel, no scheduling friction. Records live from a dedicated studio setup (no pre-recording), comfortable on video or audio-only.

 

PODCAST GUEST REQUEST