Over my career I’ve had the learning experiences of being told I will not succeed and that I am not good enough to lead. While I see those comments as motivation, my real motivation is to have an impact/legacy on my profession for my family and leave a vision for the next generation.
Google “safety culture” and you get about 1,600,000,000 results in 0.95 seconds. Safety and health managers have long known the importance of culture – the organization’s values, beliefs and leadership - on safety, morale, productivity, engagement, presenteeism and absenteeism. Culture has been at the top of safety and health issues for the past ten years at least.
The focus on human performance has quickly become no more than human error of yesteryear. I’m amazed at how many “neuroscience solutions” there suddenly are that can fix human (safety) performance.
"The concept of organizational culture is hard to define, hard to analyze and measure, and hard to manage," Schein states in the preface of his 1992 book (p. xi).
James Reason’s Swiss Cheese Model of safety is a remarkably simple way to think about how organizational culture and climate turn into injuries and incidents.
Heading into 2013, I am asking ISHN readers (there are 71,000 of you out there across the U.S.) for input on issues of leadership and organizational culture.
For more than 15 years, there has been a growing body of knowledge regarding serious accidents and their precursors. Largely, precursors provide observable cues and manageable signals that something very bad might be about to happen.