ALIVE AND WELL AT THE END OF THE DAY
Second Edition
PAUL D. BALMERT
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Set in 10/12pt TimesLTStd by Straive, Pondicherry, India
To All the Good Safety Leaders the World Over
should be equally applicable to leading and managing safety performance. It might seem that way, but that’s not how it works in practice: managing safety involves factors and issues that are unique to safety, and different from everything else in the business. That difference begins and ends with the cost of failure: you can’t put a price on human life. Yet there was little to be found in print on the practice of safety leadership in business industry targeted for supervisors and managers working in operations.
Having written and taught courses on the subject, authoring a book was not a giant leap. In 2010, Alive and Well at the End of the Day was released by Wiley; the book was intended to fill this void by providing industrial leaders with practical written advice on how to lead and manage safety performance.
The decade that followed produced more than a few surprises.
Alive and Well, as we like to call it, was written with the thought in mind that its audience would be largely based in the US, and primarily consist of front-line leaders looking for practical answers to the question, “What do I do to make sure everyone I supervise works safely?” The second title of the book does read: The Supervisor’s Guide to Managing Safety in Operations.
Those two assumptions seemed reasonable: what supervisor wouldn’t be looking for help to manage safety performance? But the scope of the audience for those practical answers far surpassed anything that I ever imagined possible.
As things turned out, many readers were leaders well up in the chain of command: Department and Project Managers, Safety and Health staff, Plant Managers and Vice Presidents, and even Company Presidents. In retrospect, I knew leaders at these levels would be much more inclined to read a book about safety leadership than their good leaders serving at the front line.
It would have been better for me to have thought, “This book is written about the front-line leader.” But the interest and benefit from the book by senior leaders and executives was more than just to get practical advice as to how to help front-line supervisors lead and manage safety performance better. From firsthand feedback I’ve received all over the world, it’s now clear that leaders at every level have found the principles and practices defined and described in the book to be of value to their practice of leadership.
I should not have been surprised: a number of the safety leadership practices came from leaders I knew who worked well up the management chain of command, including a few Company Presidents and CEOs. On the other hand, most came from leaders whose careers were spent in operations, including front-line supervisors.
The bigger surprise was the degree of interest in the book’s content from the rest of the world. Alive and Well has been translated into upwards of a dozen languages.
I suppose that should not have come as any great surprise, either. But I will admit that I grew up in a world that was to my thinking limited to forty-eight adjoining states. Now I understand and appreciate how big the world we live really is. Having travelled extensively I can tell you that industrial leaders the world over are united by their desire to see to it that everyone working in their operation does so safely.
Moreover, I can confirm that leaders the world over face virtually the same set of challenges in doing so, simply because people are people. No matter what the industry or the geography, managing safety performance ultimately boils down to
In that sense, safety performance is the purest form of competition between managers. Within any given industry group, the technology is fundamentally the same, as are the safety rules. Companies have essentially the same access to people, and pay is comparable. That means safety performance represents the value added by leaders.
Frankly, that’s a message many leaders would rather not hear. They are convinced the fault lies elsewhere, and the way to improvement is to buy a solution. Buying a solution is easy: write a check and install the fix. So that’s what they do. When that solution comes up short, they try something else. Improving leadership effectiveness is often the last place executives look for improvement; it should be the first.
As to why it is not, as simple as it seems, improving the quality of leadership is process that demands time, energy, commitment, teaching and coaching. It requires leaders to want to improve themselves, to get better at their leading. Then to be able to coach the leaders they lead. Using coaching as an illustration, to be able to effectively coach up a subordinate in how to lead and manage safety better, the executive or manager serving as the coach must first know what to do, how to do it, and why to do it that way. They must observe performance, analyzing what is being done against what should be done. Finally, they must coach in a way that helps their subordinate perform better. When it comes to the process of safety leadership, there are leaders who have that capability, but I have found them to be relatively rare.
This begins to explain why great safety performance is not the norm. If being great at safety leadership were easy, every operation would be world class at safety.
A second problem with the state of the art of safety management involves its language: conspicuously absent is a common vocabulary for safety. Business leaders the world over know the definition of financial terms such as earnings per share, return on net assets, and gross margin. When I ask what some of the words leaders regularly use in their own practice of managing safety mean, words like risk, culture and accountability, seldom can the leader offer a simple operational definition.
Things get even more interesting when I ask a management team for a common definition; definitions vary significantly. As one example, if leaders don’t understand or can’t agree as to what “holding someone accountable” means in practical terms, how can their followers be expected to properly manage accountability for them? I’ve witnessed a heated debate between a CEO and his Safety Director that turned out to be a simple misunderstanding as to the definition of risk, as was used in a newly launched Field Risk Assessment. As the CEO understood it, it was an attempt to undermine what he saw as an inherently risky business; the form was simply intended to identify hazards.
Once, when I asked the management team at a site for their definition of risk, their collective answer was emphatic and uniform: “In our global company, we define risk to include. . .” and they proceeded to rattle off a list of factors such as the severity of harm and the number of people potentially impacted by an event.
While any operation is free to define any term the way they see fit, when the company changes hands or the managers turn over, their definition is subject to change. Which is exactly what happened at this site, when risk was redefined by the new owners.
It’s not hard to imagine how these things are seen by those at the front line of the operation. “There they go again.” The goal of safety would be better served by a common vocabulary, free of the clutter of the program of the day.
you know about the fine reputation DuPont enjoyed for industrial safety: in that era, DuPont was revered as the world’s best at industrial safety.
I only knew that Dad headed out the door to work in the morning—or, when he was a Shift Superintendent, the afternoon or evening—and showed up back home, alive and well at the end of every day. But I can tell you I was raised under the DuPont safety culture, not that I understood that until decades later.
Of course, safety culture is what it’s called today; back then, it was just how we did things around the house: carefully and safely. I thought that was what everyone did. When we needed some kind of tool to perform a repair, Dad would bring it home from the Tool Room. We drove what must have been the only 1961 Corvair on the planet equipped with seat belts. They weren’t original equipment: the belts were installed when Dad brought them home from work one day—an off-the-job safety award from DuPont.
When I turned eighteen, I followed in my father’s footsteps into the chemical business. Two weeks after graduating from high school, I got my first real job in the plant where my father worked. It helped that he was the Plant Manager, but not that much: I was hired as a General Helper and assigned to midnight shift, reporting to a Production Foreman, Andy Varab. My first boss.
It was just a summer job, intended to do nothing more than earn spending money for college. The rest of the year, I was a full-time student, attending Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. For the four years spent in college, I spent my summer vacation working as a General Helper. Little did I know it would be the beginning of what turned out to be a thirty-year career in the chemical business.
I can honestly say, “I started on the ground floor, on midnight shift. Some days I was sweeping the floor.” I had no idea just how valuable the experience would prove to be. At the time, I thought my college classmates getting summer internships in cushy office buildings were the lucky ones. I was fortunate to experience the world of industry from the standpoint of someone who does the real work of the business, at the lowest level in the business. I sat in safety meetings, watched safety videos, was handed safety procedures I was expected to follow, made safety suggestions, and went home tired after working twelve-hour shifts in the summertime heat.
Truth to tell, I had a significant near-miss while driving a forklift; it went unreported. And I got hurt not once, but twice; seriously enough to have my name show up on the plant Injury Report. That did not escape notice by the Plant Manager.
How many eighteen-year old General Helpers experience firsthand what it’s like to be held accountable for unacceptable safety performance by a site leader old enough to be their father? It was the first time I got in trouble at work.
“Paul, if that is your approach to doing your job, you are not going to make it to the end of the summer.” The conversation took place at the breakfast table at the house on a Saturday morning. Thanks, Dad. It left a lasting impression, not just on my behavior, but my appreciation for the process of managing safety performance.
In four summers, I worked for more than a dozen front-line supervisors; foreman, as they were known back then. Occasionally I will visit a site where that job title still is used; most places these leaders go by Supervisor, Front-line Leader, Team Lead, Coordinator. No matter what the title, the job responsibilities are little changed from when I was working for Andy Varab: production, cost, quality, schedule—and safety.
Still, as college student majoring in Industrial Relations, my lens in looking at my supervisors and their managers was highly unusual: little did they know their management practices were being observed and evaluated by “that kid.” Fifty years removed, I can tell you by name who was really good at supervision and who was bringing up the back of the pack, and what made some supervisors far better than their peers.
In their collective support and defense, none were trained in supervisory skills in general, or more specifically, how to get unskilled, untrained (but highly motivated) followers like me to work safely. One day, they were doing the work themselves, quite well to be sure. A job in supervision came open and they were offered a promotion by a leader who’d recognized their work—and their leadership potential. They accepted the job, making the biggest career change anyone in management will ever make: going from doing the work to leading those doing the work, and doing their work safely.
When you think about it that way, being a supervisor is an awesome responsibility.
After college, diploma in hand, I went back to work back at the same plant, this time in a professional capacity. Three years later, I joined what was at the time the second biggest chemical company in the US, Union Carbide Corporation. When I was hired, I was one of 125,000 Carbiders, as we called ourselves, working in operations spread all over the world.
You might associate the name Union Carbide with the Bhopal disaster. In 1984, thousands of people living just outside the fence line of the company’s agricultural chemicals plant in India died when a toxic chemical was released. But in the part of Union Carbide where I spent my career, safety was wonderfully well-managed by leaders who I came to know personally. The best of them served as role models for managing safety performance.
I feel as though I was given a gift: spanning three decades, the opportunity to be on a first name basis with more than a thousand leaders; to work at multiple sites including world headquarters; to work with leaders with job titles ranging from frontline Supervisor, Shift Superintendent and Department Manager, Plant Manager and Vice President of Manufacturing, Division Presidents and three CEOs. Add in the Fire Chief and Emergency Director.
Like the different Foreman I’d worked for in my summers working as a General Helper, some leaders were better than others, and yes, there were those who didn’t come close to knowing how to lead and manage safety performance. In these ranks were a few top executives with a genius for business, but clueless about safety leadership. I am convinced had they worked for a summer as a General Helper, and reported to a really good front-line supervisor, they would have been far more successful at seeing to it that everyone went home alive and well at the end of the day.
Eventually it became my turn to serve as a line manager. At one point I was responsible for managing more than a thousand people who did the work to operate and maintain a huge chemical plant. I had an advantage: all the things I learned from closely watching the safety leadership practices of the best leaders, as far back in time as those of my first plant manager and the dozen front-line leaders I’d worked for. But it should come as no great surprise that I found out there is no substitute for trying them out on your own.
Training would have helped. I had plenty of good company.
The irony is that while everyone knows how important safety is, rarely are supervisors—or their managers—taught what to do and how to do that to make that happen. On that point, I really wasn’t any different than the front-line supervisors I worked for over those summers in college.
The good news is that statistically, serious injuries are relatively rare, and over time, many leaders figure out how to lead and manage safety performance reasonably well. It’s what good leaders do. But, even under the best of circumstances, this method of learning comes at a cost to the leader: stress, frustration, mistakes. There are cases where the cost shows up as serious harm to those working for the leader. When that happens, it’s been known to leave a lifelong scar on the leader.
Doing something to change that practice was the motivating factor in writing Alive and Well at the End of the Day
Looking back on the thirteen years I spent as a line manager, in the everyday practice of leadership. I now realize my talent wasn’t leading: there were others far better at that than I was. But, like a golf teacher who once tried his hand as a competitive player, I turned out to have a different gift: insight.
Not only did I get to see leadership as it was practiced by good leaders from the CEO and executive vice president to the good follower in the machine shop filling in for the boss, I got to experience firsthand the challenges leaders face in sending everyone I was responsible for home alive and well at the end of the day. I was fortunate that most days this was successfully accomplished. But there were days I wound up visiting my followers and their family and friends at the hospital.
Now, more than a decade removed from its release, this is the perfect time to revisit what was written and to create a second edition of Alive and Well. It’s not because the book’s principles and practices have become outdated; nothing could be further from the truth. To have found their way into the first edition, every principle and practice must have stood the test of time and use in the real world of operations.
Yes, the times change. People change and so does the culture. But some things do not: there will always be people who do the work of the business, and hazards present as they do their work capable of hurting them. As desirous as anyone might be to work safely, leadership will always be required to make that happen.
As to the practices of effective safety leadership, those based on the principle of treating people the way the leader would want to be treated will never have to change with the times.
The teachers in our practice and I have another decade of experience teaching them to industrial leaders the world over. In the process, we’ve gained more insight, discovered more about the process of leading and managing safety, and learned how to explain things better. We realize there are principles that deserve a more complete and detailed explanation: the principle of Performance Visibility is the best example. Sadly, significant tragic events have occurred around the globe that offer more lessons that serve to illustrate the book’s principles and practices and underscore their value.
I am confident what you will find in Alive and Well will help you protect the people you supervise on the job. I can think of no higher business or professional objective any leader can have than to do exactly that.
Paul D. Balmert
THE LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE
Leadership commitment without capability won’t produce excellence.
Plant Manager Van Long
What do I do to lead people to work safely? How do I manage safety performance? These are two of the most important questions every leader in business and industry needs to ask. But, asking is not enough: every leader in business and industry must have practical answers to these questions that can be counted on to work in the reallife world of operations.
That is exactly why Alive and Well at the End of the Day was written. It’s a book about the practice of safety leadership, written for leaders in business and industry the world over.
CALLING ALL LEADERS
Who are the leaders in business and industry? What makes them leaders? In a book written on safety leadership, answering these two questions is the perfect place to begin.
Likely you’re a leader. You may hold a formal position of leadership: supervisor, manager, or executive. Normally, when you hear the term supervisor, it’s used to describe the front-line supervisor. However, the definition of a supervisor is someone responsible for the work of others; in that sense the CEO and the plant manager are supervisors, too.
Yet, in practice, not every leader is a supervisor—and not every supervisor is a leader. There are always leaders who don’t hold formal positions in the ranks of management and supervision. There are leaders in staff organizations: safety leaders can usually be found in the Safety Department. There are safety committee members, safety stewards, and on every crew, peer leaders, who for better or worse, have their influence. Technical leaders are looked up to when troubleshooting an operating problem. Have an emergency, everyone takes orders from the Fire Chief.
Alive and Well at the End of the Day: The Supervisor’s Guide to Managing Safety in Operations, Second Edition. Paul D. Balmert. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Understood in that way, leadership can be appreciated as a game played in the five and half inches between the follower’s ears. That view begins to explain why leadership is such a great challenge—it’s about creating followership—and why so many attempts to lead so fall short of the mark: followers simply don’t want to follow.
In many cases, who could blame them?
THE SAFETY LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE
Running a business producing products and services makes leaders in operations responsible for production, cost, quality, schedule, reliability, business process improvement, morale, teamwork, customer satisfaction, environmental performance and safety. Making all that happen the way it’s supposed to is a daunting challenge: every one of those business functions is important and each function comes with a nearly unlimited supply of things that can go wrong. They often do. That’s why leaders in operations are some of the busiest people on the planet.
In theory, of all of those responsibilities, safety should by far and away be the easiest to manage. The goal of safety is simple: seeing that every follower goes home alive and well at the end of the day. Either they do or do not.
If you’re a front-line supervisor, working for a large industrial operation, you’re part of a management team. You’ve got a manager, a site leader, a director of operations, a vice president of production, a division president, a company president, and a CEO. Do all of those leaders above you want to see that every one of your followers goes home safe? Of course they all do.
What about your followers? If you asked, “Do you want to go home safe at the end of the day?”—what would they tell you? “Of course we do. Nobody wants to get hurt.” The answer seems so obvious that leaders seldom bother to ask the question. “It goes without saying.” Leaders should ask: it makes a point.
But the point served here is to demonstrate a fundamental truth about safety: perfect goal alignment exists from the top of the outfit to the bottom. Everyone wants to be safe. Every follower wants to work safely; every leader wants every follower to work safely. This alignment is not a matter of people nodding in agreement when there is none; it’s not a case of checking the box saying there is alignment. Rarely can that be honestly said for any other business objective.
That degree of true alignment should make managing safety easy: the easiest of all the responsibilities a leader has.
That’s the theory. In practice, managing safety performance is a brutally tough challenge. It might be easy to send everyone home alive and well at the end of a single day; making that happen day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year is daunting challenge. Being safe yesterday guarantees nothing today. What is standing in the way? What makes the challenge of safety that tough?
That question has been asked to a hundred thousand leaders the world over— leaders from CEOs and board members, to front-line supervisors and informal leaders; leaders in business and industries such as agricultural products, construction, chemicals, energy exploration, production, refining, manufacturing, maintenance, pulp
environment where there are hazards, and everyone knows why they are there: to get the work done.
To provide practical answers to these kinds of challenges is exactly why this book was written, and what it is intended to do. Sure, there’s a place for academic research and leadership theory about safety management. And yes, in theory, engineering out every hazard would solve every safety challenge. Then it wouldn’t matter what people do, because they just couldn’t get hurt. But that’s simply not practical.
Leaders must have practical solutions guaranteed to work. They need these solutions in a readily usable form: simple, practical, and effective.
If you’re facing the same kind of leadership challenges as do your peers all over the world—attitude, awareness, behavior, compliance, complacency, culture… zero—this is the right book for you. The answers are here: proven techniques successful leaders, in operations all over the world who have faced the same challenges, use to ensure that people work safely.
This is a book written for use by leaders in real life—in real time.
You’ll find the answers laid out, one challenge at a time, one chapter at a time, in a logical sequence. For many of the challenges there are real-world scenarios to illustrate how the challenge manifests itself out on the shop floor, and examples of how the techniques might look when properly executed. You won’t need much imagination to picture the problems—most likely you’ll think the situations came straight from your operation, maybe even from one of your followers.
LEADERS MUST LEAD!
These challenges are tough, universal and totally predictable. They don’t show up all at once, but over time leaders will face almost all of them. For example, the senior, experienced followers easily get complacent; when they are promoted or retire, their replacements lack training and experience. Eventually the new people will become complacent.
But have the unfortunate experience of a major incident, the next day nobody will be complacent. It’s as if facing complacency is the reward for succeeding in getting followers to work safely.
So, what do you do about your tough safety challenges?
It’s not enough to make the list; if nothing is done to solve the challenges found on the list, sooner or later someone will go home hurt. If you doubt that, look at the root causes for the injuries that happened in your operation and see how they compare with what’s on your list. When you read findings like “failure to recognize the hazard,” “rule known but not followed,” “common practice,” “in a hurry,” “defective equipment,” you’re getting confirmation that you’ve identified the right challenges.
Not that you need it. Most leaders know exactly what they’re up against.
You could hope the challenges will take care of themselves. But hope is not a method. It would be nice to think your followers would solve the challenges for you: after all, it is their safety at risk. The great paradox of safety is this: all followers want to go home alive and well at the end of the day, but without strong and effective leadership, that simply will not happen. Your boss might decide to intervene on your behalf; but if that’s what it takes, your supervisor would have to question why you’re even needed.
Bottom line: there really is no escaping the fact that no matter what your job title, if you are a supervisor—responsible for the work of others—managing safety performance is your job.
Leaders must lead!
The injury rate an operation experiences reveals how well the leaders collectively perform their job of taking on these tough safety challenges. The injury rate reflects the collective value created by the leaders to the business’s safety performance. A comparison of the injury rates across any industry is bound to show a huge difference between how well the best do, compared with the rest of their industrial peers.
That difference is found in their safety leadership practices.
THE FRONT-LINE SUPERVISOR
No leader plays a more important role or contributes more value to the bottom line of safety than does the front-line supervisor. Not that they typically see it that way. Ask a front-line supervisor, “Who has the real power in your organization?” they invariably point in the direction of the front office. “That’s where the important decisions get made.” The widely held perception is that those few at the top of the organization wield the power and make all the difference.
It’s true that the role of middle managers and front-line supervisors is to get behind their leaders and carry out what’s expected. The organization pyramid neatly sums up that view. It may well be the oldest management concept on the planet, one that everyone understands all too well. The higher up in the pyramid you move, the fewer leaders there are, the more important those leaders are, and the more power those leaders have. Follow the model to its logical conclusion, and you find the person at the pinnacle of the pyramid. In the conventional wisdom of organization power, that’s the most important and powerful person in the organization.
There is an alternative way to view the relative value and importance of those working for a business. It begins with the fundamental purpose of the business, why the business exists in the marketplace. In private enterprise the goal of a business is ultimately to create value for the owners. It’s the doing of the work that creates economic value for the owners. That value-creating work is not a management function.
