“Strategic Planning Series”
Five Critical Steps on the Journey To Excellence
 

“The future ought to be planned, because it’s going to happen anyway.”  -- Phillip Crosby

STEP #1 - Raising the Safety Bar on PURPOSE.

This session identifies why ‘clarity of purpose’, i.e., recognition of safety as an operational effectiveness issue (not a program) is critical to attaining safety excellence.

The presentation starts with a teamed word search in which participants are challenged to find the seven keys to business success. This activity establishes safety as one of the key factors that must be planned, managed, and led to optimize operational results in a business process. This session explores the first critical issue of safety excellence, the question of ‘PURPOSE’-- i.e.,” Why do we do safety?”… What is the purpose of wanting to prevent accidents? An exercise entitled ‘Are You Headed in the Right Direction’, reveals the diverse beliefs managers frequently have about why safety is pursued, and exposes how these divergent beliefs can lead to disjointed efforts and disappointing results. The session builds the business case for safety, citing Peter Drucker’s position that: “the guiding principle of business economics is not the maximization of profits, but rather the avoidance of loss”. A Cost of L.O.S.S. (Lack Of Safety Strategy) model, and a journey down “Big Bucks, Inc. P&L statement helps participants see the differences of money in an organization, (top Vs. bottom), and recognize safety as a process of effectively managing ‘middle money’, which adds shareholder value to the bottom line of an organization. This is a difficult jump for many organizations to make. It’s critical that line managers understand the difference between production and productivity, in order to clear the bar of ‘higher purpose’ in safety.
 

STEP #2 - Sighting - In a VISION of Safety Excellence

This facilitation addresses the third critical issue of the strategic planning process: ‘Creating a Vision of Excellence’. John Gardner, founder of Common Cause states: “Most ailing organizations have a functional blindness to their own defects. They are not suffering because they cannot solve their problems, but rather because they can not see their problems.”--They lack vision; that uncanny ability of high performing organizations that allows them to ’sight-in’ operational excellence!

This session addresses the vital importance of creating a clear, detailed, and shared safety vision to the attainment of safety excellence. It guides the strategic planning team through the four critical stages of a visioning process:

• Identifying the current reality—What/where are we now?

• Determining the desired future state—What/where we want to be?

• Mapping the Journey— How will we get there?.…and

• Defining the Destination— How will we know when we have arrived?

This session guides participants in defining their current safety reality, and in forging their vision of safety excellence. Sessions which compare and contrast these two very different states of being and levels of performance, help the group identify performance improvement targets that need be addressed to attain excellence. The deliverables from this session are:

• A group crafted safety vision statement specific to the organization, and

• A prioritized list of organizational impediments to be targeted in a safety excellence action plan.

Bottom line- an organization doesn’t have to be sick to get better--this facilitated sighting-in process brings value to an organization by providing a process for identifying problems and generating solutions, which allow poor organizations to get better…and good organization to become great!
 

STEP #3 – Leading Safety from the VALUES Dimension

Tom Peters and Bob Waterman scoured the business world for almost a decade in search of those elements critical to producing excellence in the business process. When their “Search for Excellence” was complete, they summarized their findings to American management in one simple, yet powerful statement: ”Figure out your values.’’ Some years later, the U. S. Department of Commerce further confirmed this insight by basing the highly competitive Malcolm Baldridge Award on a set of Core Values driven by visionary leadership. In the 1990’s, researchers Collins and Porras further substantiated the power and critical role that values play in generating high performance in their quantitative research on Visionary Companies. Values are at the core of excellence companies, and, this holds true for safety excellence as well. The conclusion to be drawn from all this is simple; to improve ‘bottom line’ results, we need strengthen the ‘top level’ values that drive them.

This session engages participants in identifying and defining a set of core values that will lead the organization to safety excellence. Progressive organizations such as General Electric and Chevron have recognized that ‘how’ managers achieve results, (value supporting behaviors) is equally as important as ‘what’ (hard number) results they achieve. The deliverable of this session is of a group evolved set of ‘Core Values for Safety Excellence’--values which when embraced will guide decisions and actions leading to safety excellence in the organization.
 

STEP #4 -“It’s a Matter of PRINCIPLE(S)!

A wise sage once said, “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything”.

And, it’s indeed amazing how true these words ring in the business environment today! When accident rates spike, and loss costs escalate, many companies react by throwing more ‘fixes’ at symptoms…more SOP’s, more training, more high visibility awareness campaigns. And when these don’t work, well there’s always more discipline! Do these acts of desperation work? NO and NOT for long! These symptom-patching efforts fail to address the systemic causes of at-risk behavior deeply embedded in weak organizational values and poorly defined guiding principles. When these critical elements are weak or unclear, employees become confused about expectations, and frequently fall victim to an incipient production culture that compromises safe process and leads to increased risk taking. The net effect is depreciation in real Productivity with higher human scrap costs diverting revenue from reaching the bottom line!

This facilitation helps participants recognize the role of guiding principles in forging some of the world’s most enduring institutions and successful business enterprises. Is this enduring success luck? No, it’s the product of strong basic beliefs and solid-operating principles that keep them aligned during times of turbulent change (like now and the future!).

A proprietary workshop leads the safety excellence steering team in a discovery exercise which ‘digs deeply’ into the safety value system of the organization to surface those principles they uncompromisingly believe will lead the organization to Safety Excellence. The deliverable of this session is a Guiding Principles document that will keep the organization focused, when faced with conflicts, or pressures which could compromise human safety and health.
 

STEP #5 - Your MISSION…Should You Chose to Accept It!

This is a facilitation in how to craft a Safety Excellence Mission Statement. The end product of the session is a team crafted Safety Mission document which unifies the purpose of safety, drafts the organization’s future safety direction, and satisfies the ten tests of mission effectiveness.

Organizations generally fail in performance improvement initiatives for one of three reasons, and occasionally, for all three. They can be:

• Direction impaired – lack understanding and insight; (“Hmm…I didn’t know that!”),

• Knowledge impaired – lack information and data, (“Just the facts Ma’am), and/or,

• Credibility impaired – lack sincerity and commitment, (“Watch my lips…”)

It is no different with an undertaking aimed at achieving Safety Excellence. This presentation guides the organization over the first hurdle to safety excellence— the need for unity of purpose and clarity of mission as the foundation blocks of a safety excellence process. This facilitation engages the strategic planning team in crafting a customized ‘one size fits us’ safety mission statement, for the organization, which satisfies the ten, tests of mission effectiveness…”Ah, a work of art to be viewed with pride!”
 

THESE POPULAR SEMINARS vary in length from 2-hour sessions to 1½-day seminars.  All sessions can be customized to meet your specific content or duration needs.  Please phone me at (315) 383-3801 or e-mail me to discuss any title listed, or to collaborate on a specific requirement you have.