Rob Archer, Director at LPP Consulting, kicked off 3M’s Safety Network Live in Bracknell (UK) on 27 September with a fascinating talk about stress and resilience – which featured the inner chimp, sex and bananas.

If a client came to us saying, “We know we have some leadership and culture issues: upward communication is poor, skill level of supervisors and managers in inconsistent, our people don’t un-derstand system thinking, and behavioral reliability is sketchy. We want to develop a high performance culture. How should we approach it?”

The social networking phenomenon has fostered many, usually misguided and ill-advised, attempts to capitalize on the popularity of the medium to boost sales, and to market to new (and usually younger) markets.

I’m not sure about you, but when I don’t sleep well, I can be pretty miserable. I’m not much fun to be around and I don’t work well – I can’t sustain my focus. We already know that sleep deprivation among workers is a billion-dollar problem across the globe. But how about the absence of sleep quality for your leaders – what impact does it have on subordinates?

Obfuscation is one of those interesting words that sounds like it means – to make obscure. Obfuscation is often associated with excessive wordiness and the use of technical jargon that is meaningful to “insiders” but not to others.

One of the on-going obligations I have is to complete the CLE (continuing legal education) necessary to meet my state bar obligations. This includes completing 6 hours of ethics training.

Suppose you want to accelerate the safety performance of your organization, but you have limited resources to get started. You can only invest in one of the following strategies to improve safety: You could build a stronger safety culture, improve your safety management systems, build an inherently safer facility, reduce at-risk behavior, or strengthen safety leadership.

Oftentimes, many of us like to discuss safety influence at the supervisory level where much can be accomplished to keep workers safe. But like you, I’ve seen what subtle actions can do when it comes to influence from the top – both good and bad.

We know that “leadership creates culture;” any leader will tell you that. But oddly enough, “knowing” in this case doesn’t reach very far. What is required is finding the connection between what I do as a leader and the kinds of cultural attributes I would like to change. Here is an example from my experience: