INTRODUCTION

In the twenty‐first century, if you work in industry anywhere in the world you know how important safety is. Whether you own the business, serve as the CEO, are a general manager, department manager or you’re a front‐line supervisor, managing safety performance—leading people to work safely—is a huge part of your job. When that responsibility isn’t carried out effectively, the consequences can be devastating to the people working for the business, the company you work for, and for you, professionally and personally.

You would think that every business that takes safety seriously would teach its new managers and supervisors how to manage safety properly. That’s often what’s done for the other important functions managers and supervisors are responsible for, such as production technology, information technology, accounting, sales, project management, and human resources.

It seems like common sense, but it’s hardly common practice. Recognizing that to be the case, shortly after starting up my consulting practice, I developed a practical course on safety leadership. It was called Managing Safety Performance, and its premise was simple: if you’re a leader and your job is to send everyone home alive and well at the end of every day, you need to know what to do, and how to do that.

That course was written in 2001. In more than two decades since, I’ve enjoyed the privilege of teaching and consulting with tens of thousands of industrial and business leaders from the front line to the executive suite who work for hundreds of manufacturing and industrial services operations all over the world. In those businesses—from small, privately‐held family businesses to the biggest publicly traded industrial names in the world—it’s fair that safety is a core value, not something given lip service. Yet a few of these well‐managed businesses have a formal process to teach their new leaders what to do and how to do it to achieve the level of safety performance they desire.

Given its importance, you would also think there would be any number of books written on the management practices necessary to achieve great safety performance. Books on great business performance are plentiful, for functions such as sales, marketing, strategy, planning, quality, reliability, customers, and teamwork, written by academics, consultants, and successful business leaders.

You can find numerous books written on leadership, dating back to 1954 when Peter Drucker authored his epic, The Practice of Management. Since leadership is leadership, you would assume a book on the topic of leadership and management 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 leading people to do the right things, and do them in the right way. That being so, why wouldn’t every leader in the world be interested in a book describing what works?

As the author of Alive and Well, I’ve been invited to speak to and teach thousands of industrial leaders the world over. Whether speaking in my version of the English language or using interpreters, who are often left puzzling over my use of the language, there has been no finer privilege and pleasure than spending time with these good leaders, sharing principles and best practices to do the most important work of a leader. Friendships have been created all over the world that will last a lifetime. Even better, I’ve seen ample evidence confirming that these best practices, well executed by leaders, have helped make the world a safer place to work.

Why wouldn’t they? The principles and practices came from the best leaders I’ve seen in action. If the practices made a difference where I worked, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t make a difference anywhere they are employed.

As gratifying as the experience has been, as I’ve travelled the industrial world, there are times when I’ve found myself frustrated with the state of the art of managing safety performance. Leadership practices are highly inconsistent and often subject to the fad of the day; safety performance in some businesses and operations is poor. It shouldn’t be that way—and doesn’t have to be that way.

The best example is found in the injury rate, which measures the bottom line of safety performance. Within most industries, comparative safety performance is periodically collected and published. The performance differential between the best in their class usually stands in stark contrast with those bringing up the back of the pack. It’s not uncommon to find the best twenty times better at managing safety than the worst competitor in their industry group. That is exactly what injury frequency rates of .2 versus 4.0 imply.

When that’s the case, you would think the worst performers would be studying every move made by their best competitor, asking, “What do they know that we don’t?” and “What are they doing that we aren’t?” There is without doubt one thing the best aren’t doing: spending a lot of time investigating injuries.

Ironically, when it comes to sharing safety processes and practices, seldom is there an unwillingness to share. But it takes two to benchmark, which must start by admitting there is something important to be learned from industrial peers. For some, that is apparently too big a pill to swallow.

Occasionally, in lieu of benchmarking, I’m asked by an executive, “Just tell us what they’re doing, so we can follow suit.” The question reflects the thinking that benchmarking is a simple matter of copying a successful program. That may work for some things, but most likely won’t guarantee improved safety performance.

Why not? As someone who’s been inside operations that are world class and those that are farthest from being the best, I can tell you the answer to the question is stunningly simple: the difference that makes the difference is leaders—and their leadership.

As...