Control What You Can Control!

As a society, we’ve seen some tumultuous times in 2020! Whether it was the global pandemic that may just last for eternity, the widespread civil unrest we saw in major cities across the country throughout the summer, or the most toxic poliTICKING I’ve seen in my lifetime that should have took a back seat in early November but just keeps keeping on, we’ve all had at least a few times where we wished SOMEONE would do SOMETHING about it! As we move full speed ahead into a new calendar year, I’m going to issue a challenge that I truly hope you’ll take me up on: Control What You Can Control!

For around 15 of the nearly 20 years I worked in manufacturing, I was involved at one level or another in a process known as behavior-based safety. Rather than focusing on rules and regulations, we paid very close attention to the behaviors our peers were using while doing their jobs. One of the key tenets of this approach was it did not involve any type of disciplinary measure. To ensure that held true, the teams that I worked with were almost completely made up of shop floor employees with no supervisory or management responsibility. To that end, that is exactly how I got involved in the process to begin with!

As we performed those behavioral observations on our peers as they did their thing, we made notes on a form to keep track of what we saw them do to avoid risks as well as what we saw that could potentially result in an injury at some point. After observing the person for 10 to 15 minutes, we were responsible for providing them with very specific feedback on both the safe and the at-risk behaviors we saw them use. Detailing what they were doing to avoid specific risks reinforced those behaviors and discussing what we believed had potential to contribute to an injury often uncovered ways the task could be completed more safely.

While I’m completely convinced that was the most powerful part of the entire process, and I’ll explain why shortly, we were also able to compile a massive amount of data that was used to create action plans for addressing some of the most significant risks in the facility. On a periodic basis, we would run reports from all that data, breaking it down by department, shift, and even process, and begin to work through the most glaring issues. Doing this typically involved the department manager, at least one of the supervisors with direct responsibility for the process we landed on, some level of engineering support, and a few employees with extensive knowledge of the process. In many cases, we came up with outstanding ways to reduce or even completely eliminate the hazards that had been identified through those observations. The real challenge in implementing those action plans almost always came down to cost. If there had never been an actual injury, only perceived potential for injury, and the action plan involved significant capital expenditure to put in place, it rarely survived budgeting scrutiny. 

Overtime, that became extremely frustrating for many of the people involved; continuously observing and noting something they believed posed a tremendous risk for injury and nothing being done… (and here’s where I get to circle back to explain why I’m convinced the feedback and interaction was the most value part of the entire process!) As I noticed the frustration building in a number of the folks who had volunteered to help perform these observations as well as with those action plans, I realized we needed to change our focus!

We never stopped providing that data and putting the teams together to address the bigger issues that often required big bucks, but we did get really serious about controlling what we could control! During the feedback portion of each observation, especially if we identified any behavior we believed may contribute to an injury, we became very specific about how we explained our concern and we did everything we possibly could to get the person we had observed to agree with what we felt posed a risk. Once they agreed to the potential for injury, we worked with them to identify alternative ways they could perform that same task that would reduce or completely eliminate their exposure to the hazard. And believe it or not, we were successful in doing that the majority of the time!

By choosing to control what we could control, rather than simply getting bogged down by the things we had no control over, we soon saw a significant decrease in the total number of accidents in our facility and a decrease in the overall worker’s compensation costs. Overtime, this resulted in our plant being recognized throughout the company for having the most effective behavior-based safety processes out of nearly 100 facilities worldwide. 

So what’s all this got to do with leadership? Well, everything!!! Over the next several days in A Daily Dose Of Leadership, I’ll be working through some key areas where we should be taking complete responsibility to control what we can control!

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