The Impact of Silos on Workplace Safety

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Jim Loud, a safety management consultant, sought-after speaker, and respected author with over 40 years of experience in the EHS industry.

Jim has seen many changes during his illustrious career in HSE. However, despite progressive new approaches to workplace safety, it is clear that silos still persist.

This causes organizational inefficiencies, adds unnecessary costs and crucially undermines workplace safety. So, how can EHS professionals break down safety silos?

Jim believes you can play a key role, using your relationship and influencing skills to build bridges within the organization and involving non-HSE co-workers in safety management initiatives.

Never afraid to challenge safety traditional, Jim focuses on the Deepwater Horizon disaster to show that more safety people or procedures and quick fixes don’t guarantee safety success.

Instead, EHS professionals should prioritize more collaboration with people who aren't in safety to improve the overall safety effort. Jim implores you to build relationships with people and not machinery!

Jim’s safety management consultancy is called James Loud Consulting, and he’s based in Colorado, United States.

♪ [music] ♪ - [Mary] My name is Mary Conquest, I'm your host for "Safety Labs by Slice," the podcast where we explore the human side of safety to support safety professionals. We move past regulations and reportables to talk about the core skills of safety leadership, empathy, influence, trust, rapport.

In other words, the soft skills that help you do the hard stuff. ♪ [music] ♪ Hi there, welcome to "Safety Labs by Slice." In a sense, safety professionals are connectors. To foster a safe workplace, they need to understand and support both organizational goals and workers and bridge the gap between idealized procedure and reality.

One of the most common issues that plagues organizations is the silo, and breaking down silos is a hot topic across the business world. Today, we'd like to look at silos from the lens of workplace safety. How do silos affect worker safety, and how can safety professionals build bridges instead of silos? To help us explore this, I'll be speaking with Jim Loud.

Mr. Loud is a safety management consultant, with over 40 years of experience in management and EHS positions, primarily in high-hazard high-consequence organizations. His experience includes responsibility for corporate-wide programs, such as worker safety, quality assurance, nuclear safety oversight, training, assessment, and regulatory compliance.

Mr. Loud has served as the corporate lead for nuclear safety oversight at the Tennessee Valley Authority and is director of the Performance Assurance Division for the Los Alamos National Library. Jim is a sought-after speaker at international conferences, on webinars, and in university classrooms. He's authored numerous articles on safety management for professional and general industry publications.

And he joins us today from Colorado. Welcome.

- [Jim] Good afternoon, Mary, good to see you again.

- Good to see you. So, let's start by just making sure that we understand our terms of reference here. So, in general terms, what is a silo in an organization, and how does it manifest?

- Well, if you look at a silo, like on a farm, you know, it's a reinforced building where you store some uniform item, like corn, wheat, whatever it might be. In the corporate world, it tends to be built in support organizations, HR, IT, maintenance, and so forth.

And it's when those support organizations look at their job as supporting those support organizations, making them bigger, stronger, and competing, actually, with other organizations, with other support groups and so forth in the organization, it's inefficient, it's not integrated with the overall goals of the organization, and it tends to be very expensive, too, because it's a common practice for a silo, for a support organization silo, to try to make themselves more powerful, more people, more influence, more money out of the budget to their silo rather than what the actual needs of the organization might be overall.

- A little fiefdom there. So, you touched on this, but why are silos a hot topic? What effect do they have on an organization's ability to function?

- Well, yeah, they are dysfunctional by definition because they're not working together for organizational goals, they're working for their own individual goals. Which aren't necessarily bad goals, and they may, in fact, support the organization. But they don't look at it holistically, and they do tend to add expense and can be very cumbersome, too.

Quality assurance organizations are a bad actor, can be a bad actor in that respect, and safety organizations, I think, in particular, are. And they have a rather unique set of circumstances that help safety build silos, maybe more so than other support organizations.

- Okay. We're going to come back to that because that's really the crux of it. But I wanted to start a little more generally on the safety industry. How do you think that the safety industry's approach to creating and maintaining a safe work environment has changed over the last four or five decades?

Or in your experience?

- I can speak to the last four or five decades. I was there for them. I think safety started out, and you may not be familiar with it, but I expect some n the audience are, the three E's, engineering, education, and enforcement. And that was what most people considered safety to consist of. And then, up in the 1980s, I guess, there was a movement called Behavioral-Based Safety.

And, in some ways, it was the same thing, it was still trying to get workers to comply. Compliance was the name of the game. And BBS was a way to build in compliance. Actually, certainly, the initial programs were like operant conditioning, you would keep banging on employees, "Did you do this right or wrong?"

And you'd get a sucker or a pat on the back if you did it right, and you'd get, "Oh gee, you need to do better," if you didn't. That swept the safety industry. And it's still very prominent in safety. But more recently, people are starting to look at safety more holistically, or at least I hope they are, because we need to get beyond the symptoms.

An unsafe behavior is a symptom, unsafe conditions are a symptom. They're a symptom of something wrong in the system, something wrong in the culture that may not be easy to fix, but that's where you're going to have to go if you want to influence safety in your organization on a sustainable basis.

So, it's different now. I think we're looking at things...psychological safety is a buzz phrase you'll hear a lot now, and that's where you want people to feel comfortable. Speaking up about problems so you can get them fixed before it's too late. And, in general, I think in the past, and I think really still now, many, many employees aren't willing to speak up because they feel like it'll put them on the spot, might make them look bad, their supervisor look bad, or so forth.

It's really hard to overcome that. But I think there's a growing sense that we need to if we're going to really succeed and have attained safety excellence. And then you hear relationship. A friend of mine, Rosa Carrillo, wrote a book, "The Relationship Factor in Safety," an excellent book.

And she contends, and many others do now as well, that we need to build relationships with the workers to get them to cooperate and partner with us to make safer workplaces, not just to control them. This is beyond control, this is cooperation, engagement, and participation in the safety effort. Again, it's not easy, and it's really kind of a sea change from where we've been for most of my career in safety.

And I'm happy to see it, but there's a long way to go before we get, I think, to what I consider to be a better place.

- Yeah. In one of your articles about engagement, I'm going to read out a quote here, "Attempting to change employee behavior without changing the systems and environment that impact the work is an exercise in futility." So, I think that kind of speaks to the difference between control and engagement, or compliance and engagement, I suppose.

- That's right. If you really want compliance, you better get engagement and get that extra effort where the workers want to do the right thing because they know they'll be rewarded for doing the right thing and they feel like they're in a partnership of mutual respect and trust with the organization as a whole. And that takes some doing to bring around, but it's worth doing, and I think it's a whole lot better than our old command-and-control process where our bulk of our safety efforts have been on trying to fix our careless and not-so-smart employees.

That's just a terrible way to look at your workforce and it's not conducive to good safety either.

- So, yeah, I think it's fair to say, then, that the approaches to relationships with frontline workers have changed or perhaps are changing. As you said, just even the view of workers as the problem to be fixed as opposed to partners in or...yeah, part of the team.

- Yes, assets rather than liabilities.

- There we go.

- And that is the fundamental shift in how safety has been done in the past, and it's an important thing to do.

- So, despite new approaches to workplace safety, it's clear that silos do persist. You've described the traditional relationship between safety managers and business leaders as a silo that both parties maintain and depend on. Can you tell me a little bit about what you mean by that?

- Yeah, I've described it as a codependency, with the safety profession often acting as enablers for it. And often, when you end up with a safety program, it's in response to a problem. You've had a serious incident, a fatality, a fire, any number of things, and so, "Oh, we got to do something about safety."

And most managers don't really know anything about safety, so they're kind of forced to go to the safety experts. And so, they bring in the safety experts and kind of abdicate their responsibility for safety. And it is their responsibility. You know, line management's responsible for the quality of the product, the quantity of the product, how much you produce, sales, and so on.

But somehow, over the years, the tradition is safety is different, safety is separate. "It's over there, keep it over there, I really don't want to fool with it, I'm more interested in production or whatever, how I got my job here to begin with." And a lot of people in safety still, I think, are more than happy to keep all those resources and be in charge and feel real important because they are the ones that are running safety.

And that's just fundamentally wrong. Again, it's a line management responsibility. If you take it away from line management, you're doing something that's dysfunctional and detrimental to safety. You can't make your line managers, with the ultimate responsibility, passive bystanders. They need to be engaged along with the workers and with the workers to get to a place that's not in a silo and is working together for the overall good of the company.

- Yeah, I hear from a lot of safety managers that it's one of the most difficult things about the job, is that they're seen as responsible for safety and yet they don't actually have the authority or the...there's a weird division between who has the authority to make decisions that affect the environment, that affect, ultimately, safety.

And, you know, like, if your safety manager comes in and says, "You have to do this safely," and then your boss comes in 5 minutes later and says, "You have to do it by tomorrow." Who's signing the paychecks? You know, it causes problems.

- Yeah, who hired you, who lays out what work you do, who promotes you if you get promoted, who fires you if you don't do well? All of those are line management jobs, are not safety jobs. The workers don't work for the safety office. They may love the safety guy or gal and want to please them, but, ultimately, they're going to do what they think their boss and their management wants of them.

And that's not the safety people.

- Yeah. And so, you mentioned a little bit about how safety managers or the safety profession contributes to this. What do you think has to happen for this kind of codependent relationship to change? What is required of management, and what is required of the safety professionals to shift that?

- Well, some of it is education, managers need to understand. I think if you really sat down and looked them in the eye and asked them, "Who's responsible for safety?" they would say, "Oh, well," you know, "I am." So, "What are you doing about it?" "Well, I hired all these guys over here, put them in a silo. What else do I need to do?"

We need to make them a little bit smarter. And I guess the people best positioned to do that are, in fact, the safety folks. And they need to understand that they shouldn't be part of a dysfunctional relationship and a codependency that's sub-optimal at best and destructive at worst.

- Yeah. I was just thinking about...maybe it's hard, I guess, in a sense, we're all human, we all have our pride, and, you know, we're not necessarily all power-hungry but we like to feel that we have expertise. And I think, you mentioned this before, that staying in that silo kind of gives us that expertise or that veneer of expertise.

- Yeah, yeah. And I think the best way to work out of that is to take every opportunity you can to bring in multi-discipline folks to do things like accident investigations. Why is that? "Did you have an accident, or did a person or something happen to line manager?" people. They're responsible for those accidents, not the safety department.

So, your expertise is important in those investigations and sharing that expertise with others but getting the people in the line that have that accident involved in it. And the workers, too. They can add a lot to an accident investigation if you're willing to share that with them. Safety inspections, the same thing.

Why is that just a safety person's job? We can do things to train people to identify hazards and so forth, and then let them work with us or even by themselves to do safety inspections procedures. Safety people shouldn't be writing safety procedures, they ought to be overviewing them, but they ought to be written by the people who do the work.

[crosstalk]...

- Otherwise, yeah, there's a real danger of...

- Yeah. And until we're willing to share those type of...everything that the safety person does, they ought to look at, "Is there any way I can involve people from inside the organization and outside of safety in what we're doing?" Because, ultimately, it's their job and their responsibility, and they're the ones that pay the price when it doesn't go right.

So, to not involve them, I think, is a big mistake. And, you know, not enough safety people to do this, they'll never be enough. And I've been in organizations where, every time you have a problem, they hire more and more safety people. And two of those organizations had the worst record in their industries, and they had the most safety people. So, that's not the cure.

More safety folks is not the cure. More involvement with people who aren't in safety, to help the overall safety effort, I think, is the cure.

- Yeah, I mean, unless you've got a one-to-one relationship overseeing safety, no single safety person can understand the intricacies of what the worker does on a day-to-day basis. And therefore, they don't understand, they say, "Don't take this shortcut because it's unsafe," but they don't understand the implications of not taking that. Yeah, I mean, no one can hope to understand the real scope of the work except the workers who are doing it.

Right?

- Yeah, and shut them out of the process, then, is just an exercise in folly. Why would you do that? Why would you shut out the people that understand the work better than anyone from doing controls and procedures for that work? It makes no sense to me. But that's often what we do.

- I think, too, some of it is just inheriting traditional thought patterns of this is kind of the way that safety is done, and this is...you know. But it's pretty likely that a lot of our listeners are in a situation where maybe they're keen to break down silos. They might be in an organization that doesn't really support more open communication or that organization just doesn't understand the effect of silos and that they actually affect safety.

So, do you have any advice for someone in that situation?

- Well, I mean, so, look for a different employer, would be some advice. But I know that's not always a practical thing to do. But it's really tough, if you're in a command-and-control management system, it's really tough to break out of the silo. If you got hired and the job announcement said, you know, "You are going to direct safety, you're in charge of building the safety culture," and so forth, that's clearly...it's not a job I would take, by the way, but it's clearly the expectation is for you to run safety so management doesn't have to.

Breaking out of that is damn hard, there's just no two ways about it. But still, you can incorporate people in the activities that you're doing from outside of the safety organization. And ultimately, I think that will give you inroads into breaking out of the silo and getting the whole organization involved, as it should be.

But I'm not going to sit here and tell you, "I think that's easy." I've worked in command-and-control management systems and much more humane systems. And the more humane systems are a whole lot easier to function in and they'll listen to advice, and command and control can be very difficult to that.

But even without giving advice to management, you can, on your own, in safety, do these things that reach out to interdisciplinary groups in the organization to help you do your job. And a lot of times those people are more than willing to do that. And ultimately, that gets at least more people involved in the safety effort, and that's a good thing.

- Yeah, I do think people like to be asked respectfully, "Hey, what do you do?" like, "Let's talk about..." you know, being involved in and really being listened to in terms of their own work environment really. So, what's the best way to go about building relationships, in your opinion?

And would it be different if you're building them with the workforce versus the management, or is it all kind of the same?

- Well, I mean, you need to do both. Ultimately, what you want is the management to build those relationships because, again, that's who the people work for. But to start off with, I think it's terribly important for safety folks to build those relationships with their employees as well because that's how they learn how the work is done, not just how you imagine it's done.

A great book by Hollnagel, safety as imagined versus safety as done, it's real easy to sit in your desk and you put out all these rules and told people to follow them, and then you kind of sit there and hope and expect that that's the way the work's going. That's almost never the case. And unless you get up and actually get out and interact with people who are doing the work, you'll never really know how it's going.

And unless you do that carefully, and listen, and want to learn, not just correct and teach, but actually you're there to learn, they know the work better than you do, and you'd like to understand it better. "Can you help me do that?" And listen, you mentioned it actually, I think the best way to form relationships is to listen to the people you want to have a relationship with.

I've seen ratios where it's advised, you know, you should do 30% talking and 70% listening. And I don't know that there's a perfect ratio, but certainly, you should probably listen more than you are broadcasting. Because you want to learn, and you want these people to trust you and understand that you're not there to scold them or correct them, you're there to learn and help with them to make their jobs more efficient and safer.

- As you were talking about going out and building relationships, I had this quick thought, like, "Oh, all the introverts in the crowd are freaking out." But, introverts, be calm, because actually, it seems like people who are introverted are actually better at listening. Which is exactly what you're saying is needed here.

- An excellent point. I'm not an introvert, and I'm not [inaudible], I have to force myself to listen, but I know how important it is.

- Well, and maybe introverts aren't attracted particularly to safety, I'm not sure. I mean, I do think people who care about people are attracted to safety. I don't think they do it for the glory and millions.

- Well, I think you can be an absolutely outstanding safety professional and be an introvert. You know, and you can be an introvert and be a lousy safety professional, but I don't think it's a game changer or certainly something that would exclude you from succeeding in your field.

- So, are there any situations or windows of opportunity to look for when, as a safety professional, you're trying to change or build relationships within the organization?

- Well, you have to convince your leadership that they need to get out and talk to their people, too. One way to do that is all these surprises, especially in command-and-control organizations, they're always getting surprised.

You know, "We told them what to do, and they didn't do it, how could this have happened?" Well, how could you not have known that you were set up to fail? Because you're sitting behind your desk, writing edicts and making speeches, telling people they better comply, and meanwhile, the work is going south. And Deepwater Horizon is a great example of that.

They spent a fortune on safety. They were concerned about safety, I think they were genuinely concerned about safety, but they didn't get out and actually talk to the people doing the work. You know, they'd go out and they'd look at when the last safety belt was inspected and look for slips, trips, and falls.

And that's not a bad thing to do, but you're not forming relationships with extension cords, that's really not that vital to your effort. You want to form those relationships with the people, learn what they're doing, see how it's going, talk with them respectfully as an adult to an adult about how we might, together, and as an organization, make that work more efficient and safer.

And that takes some training, by the way, a lot of people, a lot of managers just aren't good at that. And they can go out and do it badly and actually make things worse.

- Yeah. Two thoughts occurred to me. One, I'd like to hear more about any lessons from...Deephorizon?

- Deepwater Horizon.

- Deepwater Horizon, I'm sorry. I do remember the accident, I do remember watching the news, horrified. And the second thing is that managers are often sort of promoted from technical positions, I find. Rather than coming in as managers with people skills, it's just like, "Well, you're really good at working with the widgets."

So, then the natural course is you get promoted and promoted, and, suddenly, you're managing people, you're off the tools, and nobody taught you how to deal with people.

- Yeah. My work experience, especially, and I hope I don't offend anyone that might be a Los Alamos Laboratory employee or manager that might happen to be listening to this, these people, there's a hierarchy at Los Alamos. And it starts with PhD physicist, not just any old PhD physicist, but from Stanford, or Berkeley, or University of Chicago, one of the top universities in the country.

And I have fabulous respect for these, you know, genius people that the laboratory had many of. However, they often, because these were genius people and they were fantastic at some arcane aspect of particle theory, they made them managers. You don't spend most of your life studying some tiny aspect of particle physics because you're a great people person.

And so, I think these people are actually rather unsuited to be managers, at least interactive managers, and leaders of people. And I say that with the greatest respect because I have great respect for them and many of them are my friends. But they can learn, you know, they can be taught to be better people people, people persons and leaders, not just, you know, managers on high.

But it's tougher, it's tougher. Those type of personalities don't necessarily lend themselves to be great...

- Well, and, in order for them to be taught, that opportunity has to be given to them as well, right?

- That's correct, yeah.

- We can't just assume, "Well, you're good on the technical side, therefore, you'll magically know how to manage people."

- Right. And that's something that safety people can take the lead in, you know, provide that training, either do it themselves, they have to get smart enough to do it themselves, or bring in folks that do that for a living. Although I'm a safety consultant myself, I rarely advocate, you know, "Bring in the safety people from outside and they'll fix everything," but there's some things you probably need that outside expertise to come.

[inaudible] have to be safety expertise either, it's human relations experts is really what you need to do that kind of training. But yeah, they're not going to necessarily pick it up on their own.

- So, just this is my curiosity, but what lessons, you know...again, I saw Deepwater Horizon from the point of view of just a public observer. In the safety industry, what lessons do you think were learned or that came out of that?

- Well, a bunch. I think I've written about this a lot in several different articles. Deepwater Horizon and Transocean, who actually ran the platform, the Deepwater Horizon-owned...well, I'm sorry, the BP-owned, it was named Deepwater Horizon.

They had numerous safety awards, they had a very low incident rate, for example. And that didn't help them in the final analysis. They were really good on slips, trips, and falls. They had a behavioral-based safety thing, they were very involved in trying to correct behaviors and make sure there weren't any of the typical unsafe conditions that you find on an oil rig.

And they were good at that. They had some top management from both Transocean and BP on board the day it blew up and killed 11 people and dumped more oil into the ocean than had ever happened before. While they were on board, they were looking at slips, trip, they were looking at conditions, which is easier to do than dealing with people.

Meanwhile, they're doing a well-capping operation downstairs, which they didn't bother themselves to look at at all. And it was going south, and it had gone south for a long time, long-standing problems, preventive maintenance wasn't happening, procedures that didn't work, you know, for a long, long time and should've been found earlier.

You don't want to find this stuff after an accident, you want to be more proactive than that. So, I think what we learned is looking at conditions and behaviors does not protect you, certainly not from serious injuries and fatalities. And a low accident record, and there's a lot of data to back this up, doesn't mean much at all.

You know, you can have zero accidents, and what that means is, one, you were lucky, two, you didn't do any work, three, you're fudging the numbers. So, you know, to take comfort in those numbers is a big mistake. And to give awards based on numbers is just a waste of time, in my view.

- So, you're not in the pizza party.

- No, I'm not in the pizza party...

- Zero incidents...

- [inaudible] parties but not for that.

- So, something else that you've mentioned is you're suspicious of many safety programs that guarantee that adopting a certain methodology or tool will fix long-standing safety issues. Why is that?

- Well, because I've seen them not work over and over again. I've seen how expensive they are, and I've seen how they trivialize our profession and, in many cases, antagonize our workforce. You know, the pizza parties, you know, we're treating our employees like children so often, I think. We give them these little incentives and mugs, and they wear a T-shirt that says, "Believe in zero," and, you know, personally, I find all that demeaning, not something that I want to promote within the workforce.

And I guess I really soured on the behavioral-based safety process, which was just huge, it's still huge, but, I mean, it was everywhere, everyone was doing it. And what I found is vast majority of them fail after a couple years, they just stop doing it. And the vast majority of them, the people, don't like that, they don't want somebody to come and observe them to see if they're being naughty or nice on a checklist.

And that's still what it is, we've rebranded it and we called it a lot of different things, but people that want to come into your company and tell you they can reduce your accident rate 30% to 70% in the first 6 months, I would just run so far away from those folks.

And there's tons of them. You go to any safety conference, they're all there, and they're all telling you, it could be incentive programs, it can be BBS programs and rebranded BBS programs, poster programs, you know, "Our posters reduce incidents 50% in the first..." anyway, let's not fall for that crap anymore, it's a sore point with me.

I believe in principles, safety principles. And you can take those into any organization and improve it. And that's like building trust, treating people with respect, interacting with people in positive and collaborative ways. But to go in with the paint-by-the-numbers safety program that's going to give you these results, I just...God, I wish we'd stop doing that.

- Why do you think people fall for it again?

- It's easy, quick fix. "We got a problem, let's get a quick fix, get it done."

- Yeah, they don't have to work.

- [inaudible]...yeah. And we'd bring in somebody, and these things can be very expensive, by the way. And safety consultants stick on the organization like lampreys for years. And, anyway...

- Says the safety consultant.

- Yeah, I really am not a big fan of these safety quick fixes.

- Yeah. All right, well, I have a few more questions. These are ones that I ask every guest, so, they're a little more generic. The first one I'm going to call "the University of Jim." I do change the name for each guest. If you were to develop your own safety management training curriculum, which you may well have done, where would you start when it comes to non-technical training?

So, what core human skills do you think are the most important to develop in tomorrow's safety professionals?

- Well, interpersonal interactions. And that's critical for safety professionals, it's critical for any leader, and it doesn't hurt for the workers to have it as well. How do you resolve conflict and avoid conflict, more importantly, avoid conflict? How do you deal with problems without antagonizing people so you can get that cooperation to get those problems solved?

Interpersonal relations, which, you know, how to listen, how to talk to people without putting them down, how to show respect, how to build trust. Those are...you mentioned, you know, the softer aspects of safety, well, that's what they are. But they're not just safety, I mean, the whole organization benefits from that kind of knowledge and skill set, it's not just safety.

So, it ought to be easier to sell to people than it is. But don't get somebody who says, "I teach interpersonal relationships, and if you take my course, you'll reduce your accidents by 70% in 3 months." I wouldn't trust those people.

- No, I think anyone with really solid metrics where they promise anything by numbers is probably not going to be that reliable. If you could travel back in time and speak to yourself at the beginning of your career and you could only give yourself one piece of advice, what do you think that would be?

- Oh. Learn. Look and learn. Keep an open mind, look and learn. Forget...well, don't forget tradition, you don't want to just throw tradition away before you...but question tradition. The safety tradition, when I started in safety, was command and control, was engineering, enforcement, and education.

It was a extremely sub-optimal set of beliefs and actions that had gone on for years, and so, I just got in that parade with it. And I wish I could change all of that, I wish I'd have been more intellectually curious at the beginning.

I think it would've helped me greatly. You can't ever stop learning. You know, learn, question, get better. Continuous improvement, as Dr. Deming would've told us, that should be the goal and you should always be doing that. And I think question tradition would be my main advice to anybody just getting started in safety, you know, question what I'm telling you, too.

I've told a lot of things over the years I wish I could take back, you know, and I may have said some today that, in 10 years from now, I'll say, "Oh, that wasn't really the best I could've put that or said that." So, you know, you got to find your own way, but there's a lot of people that can help you do that. There's some great safety thinkers out there, Stephen Decker, Todd Conklin, Hollnagel, Rosa Carrillo.

I mean, read the books, you know, take some classes. Don't take them from people that are selling you gimmicks and quick fixes, but take it from safety thought leaders, and there's a lot out there. Get on LinkedIn. I do a lot of stuff on LinkedIn, I've learned a tremendous amount from my compadres on LinkedIn over the years.

It's been very valuable to me.

- Well, I think you may have just answered my next question, but I'll ask it again in case it brings up more, which is, this is where I ask for your best most practical resources for safety managers who are looking to improve their work relationships and those kind of core skills. So, this could be books, websites, concepts, frameworks.

- Yeah, that's it. You know, get a mentor. I've had a couple of good mentors over the years, and just kick stuff back and forth with them. But yeah, I mean there's some great books out there. And there's some that aren't so great, by the way. The books that are trying to sell you something, I'd avoid those. Books that are trying to explain better ways to do safety that aren't paint-by-the-numbers quick fixes, a lot of those are excellent reading.

But you need to read a wide variety of them, too, you don't want to get stuck in a silo of thought either. So... And LinkedIn's great, LinkedIn's great, the debates and discussions you can have on LinkedIn with some very sharp folks, by the way. And some not so sharp, but, you know, that's fun, too.

I mean, you get to see kind of both sides, and then you can have the arguments and so forth that, I think, help drive knowledge and improvement overall.

- So, and my next question was, where can our listeners find you on the web? So, I'm going to guess that LinkedIn is one spot?

- You can find me on LinkedIn. I don't advertise, I'm 75 years old, I don't need to work. I love to write and talk about safety, and I do that a lot, and I take the odd consulting or writing assignment, but I don't need a website because I don't want to work that much.

I'd rather switch. Okay, look, if anything I said today prompted any questions from anyone, I'm more than happy to try to answer those questions as best I can or maybe shovel you off to someone else I would think has a better answer. But you can do that, and this will be printed out, too, I think, later, Mary, but my email address is loudjim, L-O-U-D-J-I-M, 431@gmail.com.

And I'm certainly more than happy to have conversations via email with anybody who has questions or would like to chat.

- Well, that's great. I'm sure our listeners would appreciate that. Well, there you go. Yeah. Well, that's a good place to be in. So, thanks so much for joining us, Jim. And thanks to our listeners for tuning in.

Until next time, stay safe.

- Thank you. I enjoyed it. ♪ [music] ♪ - Safety Labs is created by Slice, the only safety knife on the market with a finger-friendly blade. Find us at sliceproducts.com. Until next time, stay safe.

♪ [music] ♪