Many of you have heard me mention (or read about) one of my former plant managers who was a pioneer in safety and he never even knew it. Claude was well ahead of his time, and well ahead of the likes of Dr. Geller and Dr. Krause when it came to motivating workers (people) to put their safety first. One day at a staff meeting Claude was not happy about our safety indicators and their trend. Of course, our OSHA rate was superb so many managers were slipping in their daily/weekly/monthly safety objectives. A debate (rather heated) went on for about an hour and although Claude could have squashed the up rising of his staff he did not, he let them go on and on about how the results were there so why did it matter about the leading indicators. I was of course, fuming that he was not defending the metrics and putting down this uprising. The next day he was a genius and this is an activity that ALL safety people should use…
Claude walked in and we started the meeting as usual – safety first. We went around the table and since there were no accidents/nearmisses there was nothing to talk about. Another pet peeve of mine that drove me crazy and Claude knew and always reminded:
“Crawl first, then walk, then jog in preparation for the marathon we are getting ready to run”
After the normal staff meeting, Claude passed out a pad of paper and pencil to all the managers and asked them to draw a picture of a “Didgerido”. Of course,