Page 62 - Serious Incident Prevention How to Achieve and Sustain Accident-Free Operations in Your Plant or Company

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40 Serious Incident Prevention

company’s quarterly report and its advertising. Let us suppose that the de-
partment managers also swear a firm belief in safety. The catering man-
ager says he believes in safety. The pilots say they believe in safety. The
flight crews say they believe in safety. Everyone in the company practices
safety. True? Or might everyone simply be paying lip service to the idea
of safety?
On the other hand, if the president states that safety is company pol-
icy and works with division managers to develop a plan for safety that de-
fines their responsibilities, everyone will have a very specific subject to
discuss. Safety will become a real concern. For the manager in charge of
catering services, safety might mean maintaining the quality of food to
avoid customer dissatisfaction or illness. In that case, how does he ensure
that the food is of top quality? What sorts of control points and check
points does he establish? How does he ensure there is no deterioration of
food quality in-flight? Who checks the temperature of the refrigerators or
the condition of the oven while the plane is in the air?
Only when safety is translated into specific actions with specific con-
trol and checkpoints established for each employee’s job may safety be said
to have been truly employed as a policy. Policy deployment calls for every-
one to interpret policy in light of his own responsibilities and for everyone
to work out criteria to check his success in carrying out the policy. 3

Achieving and Sustaining
Effective Leadership

If leadership is critical to success, how do we achieve and sustain it?
Author John C. Maxwell’s observations are directly applicable to the lead-
ership requirements necessary for achieving and sustaining a safe work-
place. Maxwell’s “Law of the Lid” accurately recognizes that an individual’s
effectiveness within the organization is a product of both individual leader-
ship ability and dedication. My experience indicates that, as a group, the
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dedication level for both line and staff personnel responsible for safety per-
formance is already very high. There is limited capability for significantly
increasing the level of dedication. Thus, the key to increasing effectiveness
in achieving and sustaining safety performance for most managers is to in-
crease their leadership abilities.
Becoming an effective leader requires that individuals develop influ-
ence within the organization. Developing influence is a step-by-step process
that requires commitment and an investment of personal time. Managers
must work to leverage their strengths and to shore up weaknesses—much
like Demosthenes, who in the third century B.C. trained by shouting above