STEP #1:
Raising The Safety Bar On PURPOSE
Note- This session
identifies why clarity of purpose and definition of mission are critical to a
strategic safety excellence process. The session provides an understanding of key concepts and
principles necessary for the creation of a Safety Excellence Mission
statement.
This 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 results in a business process.
This session explores the first critical step of a strategic planning
process; the need to clearly define and develop group consensus on the PURPOSE
of safety in an organization i.e. why we do safety…beyond wanting to prevent
accidents? An exercise entitled
Are You Headed in the Right Direction, reveals the various beliefs about why
safety is pursued in an organization, and exposes how divergent beliefs can
lead to disjointed efforts and disappointing results.
This 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 a
corporate P&L statement helps participants see the difference in value
between top money and bottom money, and recognize how safety can add
significant shareholder value to the bottom line of an organization.
This is a difficult jump for many organizations to make.
Most managers can’t clear this bar!
Can yours?
STEP #2:
Your Mission…Should You Choose To Accept It!
Note:
This is a facilitation in how to craft a Safety Excellence Mission
Statement. The product of this
session is a team crafted Safety Mission document which clarifies the purpose
of safety in the organization, and which satisfies the ten tests of mission
effectiveness.
Performance
improvement initiatives in an organization generally fail for one of three
reasons, and occasionally, for all three.
They are either:
-
Direction
impaired – lack understanding and insight;
-
Knowledge
impaired – lack information
and data, or
-
Credibility
impaired – lack sincere interest and commitment.
It is no different
with an undertaking aimed at achieving Safety Excellence.
This presentation addresses the first hurdle to safety excellence—
the need to develop understanding and Clarity of Purpose as the foundation of
a safety excellence process. This facilitation engages the strategic planning
team in crafting a one size fits us safety mission statement.
The session identifies Safety Excellence as a process, which begins
with a common understanding of why an organization does safety, and of the
many values produced by an effective safety process.
It then guides the group through the process of crafting of a Safety
Mission document, which answers the five questions critical to defining
Purpose. The deliverable of this
session is a customized Safety Excellence Mission Statement for the
organization, which satisfies the ten, tests of mission effectiveness…”Ah,
a work of art to be framed and viewed with pride!”
STEP #3:
Sighting-In Organizational Safety Excellence
This facilitation
addresses the third critical step of the strategic planning process—Creating
a Vision for 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 organization that allows them to sight-in excellence!
This facilitation
aids the strategic planning team in understanding the vital importance of a
clear, shared vision to the attainment of excellence.
It guides the group 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 do 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
employs breakouts, group reports, and forced ranking techniques to guide
participants in discovering 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 gaps and performance
improvement targets that need be addressed to achieve excellence.
The deliverables from this session are:
-
A group crafted
safety excellence 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 can bring value to most organizations.
It provides a process for identifying problems and generating
solutions, which allow poor organizations to get better…and good
organization to become great!
STEP #4:
Leading From The VALUES Dimension
Tom Peters and Bob Waterman scoured our nation for
almost a decade in search of those elements critical to producing excellence
in the business process. When
this “Search For Excellence” was complete, they delivered their findings
to American management in one simple, yet powerful statement: ”Figure out
your values system.” Some years
later, the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award further confirmed this
insight by basing its highly competitive award criteria on a set of Core
Values driven by visionary leadership. In
the 1990’s, Collins and Porras further substantiated the power and critical
role that values play in generating high performance in their quantitative
research and findings on Visionary Companies.
Values are at the core of excellence companies.
And, this holds true for safety excellence as well.
Don Eckenfelder, a friend, an insightful leader of our profession, and
the author of Values-Driven Safety, a book well ahead of its time,
makes a convincing argument that values are the ultimate predictors of our
results. He further says that:
“Our actions are a moving picture of our deepest beliefs…our values.” The conclusion to be drawn from all this is simple, to
improve our results, we need strengthen the values that drive them.
This
session, engages participants in identifying and defining a set of core values
that will lead to safety excellence. More
progressive organizations such as General Electric and Chevron have recognized
that how managers achieve results, (values supporting behaviors) is equally as
important as the results they achieve. The relationship is critical—values predict results!
The objective and deliverable of this session is of a set of Core
Values for Safety Excellence; values which when embraced will form the solid
foundation for decisions and actions leading to safety excellence in the
organization.
STEP #5:
It’s A Matter of Principle: Building
A Moral Compass
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, particularly in
safety! 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 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 lack of clearly defined guiding principles.
When these critical elements, which define importance and guide
decisions, are weak or missing, employees become confused on what’s right,
and frequently fall victim to an incipient Production Culture that compromises
safe process and leads to increased risk taking, accidents, and loss cost.
The net effect is depreciation in real Productivity with higher human
scrap costs and operating inefficiencies 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 with their true north during times of threat and turbulent
change (like now and the future!).
A proprietary
workshop leads the management or project 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, and guide the decisions of all, when faced with circumstances which
pose question, challenge, conflict, or pressure to compromise human safety,
health or well-being…a Moral Compass for Safety Excellence!
STEP #6:
Building A B.R.I.D.G.E. To Safety Excellence
“We’ll jump
off that bridge when we get to it!”
Unfortunately this
all too accurately describes the level of strategic thinking embodied in many
organization’s safety planning…and as a consequence it also describes what
many managers think about doing when disappointing results continue.
This Performance Improvement team facilitation is designed to build a
B.R.I.D.G.E. (Building Reality Into Decisions Guiding Effectiveness) to safety
excellence by addressing the core elements (Gap analysis and SWOT assessments)
of the Strategic Planning For Safety Excellence Process.
This facilitation engages the management/planning group in addressing
the following critical issues:
-
Defining the
current safety reality
-
Exposing
polarization and perception gaps in the organization
-
Creating a
Vision of Safety Excellence
-
Identifying key
impediments…and
-
Determining
change targets
This process
guides the planning group in the assessment of ten critical organizational
elements critical to safety success. Using breakout SWOT (Strength-
Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats) sessions and issue specific worksheets, the
planning groups identify areas in which change is necessary and develops
consensus for driving this change within the organization.
