What is Intrinsic Stability and How Can It Transform Safety and Culture?

In this episode, Mary Conquest talks with Chris Smith. Chris discusses the role of safety in an organization, elements of safety culture, leadership, trust, and effective communication in safety, amongst other topics.

Chris Smith is the author of ‘Intrinsic Stability: How Organic Leadership Breeds Excellence’ and an experienced EHS Manager and Certified Safety Professional (CSP) with a pure passion for creating excellence. Throughout his career, he has successfully developed and led continuous improvement initiatives to achieve Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) success and OSHA Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) Star status.

♪ [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] ♪ Today I'm joined by Chris Smith. Welcome.

- [Chris] Hi, Mary. Thanks for having me.

- Yeah. Chris is the author of "Intrinsic Stability," and an organizational change leadership consultant. Feel free to correct me if that's not how you...

- Well, I do do that, yes. So I'm a 29-year safety professional. My roots are in nuclear power, naval nuclear power, so I have a very strong understanding of concepts and what really makes safety important and what we should focus on. I am a CSP, although interestingly enough, my book that you cited, "Intrinsic Stability: How Organic Leadership Breeds Excellence," is not necessarily a safety book, but it's the techniques I've used inside of this profession to become a niche player inside of our EHS profession.

For my 29 years, 23 of those I've been internal troubleshooter for some of the biggest and best companies in the world. It's kind of an interesting thing when I say that, because you wonder, "Well, why did the biggest and best companies need somebody to go around and help organizations that have legacy poor performance improve?" And really, that reason is a lot of the organizations out in the world have done a lot of changing in the landscape as far as acquisitions, and buying new companies up, and the differences in maturity levels and differences in cultures have really, kind of, defined how those companies can quickly integrate with one another.

So really, having somebody that can go in and understands the fundamentals of what needs to change and how to get them more aligned with the core organization is really of grave importance for those companies. So it's really, kind of, the niche that I fit in. I'm told there aren't many people that do it at the level that I do it.

I don't know, I've never really been in the market for somebody like me. Some years ago people asked me, "Chris, how do you make all these amazing transformations to these large companies, especially these acquisition companies in such short time periods?" And I guess I just assumed everybody knew but they didn't. So I've, kind of, distilled down a lot of the skills and things I've learned in that niche capacity and put it into a book, and in a way that you can go through those processes, understand those concepts.

And they're very different in practice, although they do sound familiar on the surface, and how do I make meaningful changes in my organization? It's easy. It doesn't take special training. It doesn't take any type of belt certification. It's really a very simple process and that's what I hope to talk about today. We make it much harder than we have to, and I really want to delve in a little bit about how the differences in cultures really drive how change is affected by each organization, organizations that are very mature with lots of layers, and organizations that are smaller and want to make those changes but don't necessarily have the resources.

So that's really where I'd like to go today, if that's possible.

- Ow, yeah, for sure. Yeah. The whole point is that really effective safety comes from all kinds of places, right? It doesn't only come from safety training and safety management, it comes from psychology, and leadership management, and all kinds of things. But one thing that you said that caught my eye in your book immediately was that you called EHS the "ultimate change leadership position."

- It is.

- Yeah, so can you tell me a bit more about that?

- Ow, absolutely. So Mary, the EHS position is a very powerful position inside of an organization and it does wield a lot of influence because many of the things that we touch are really the core of what the business values. Not just the people side, and certainly, that's most important, but the equipment, and the processes, and all the things that intertwine, all the connective tissue that an organization has to maintain a strong health around really runs through the EHS position where we touch it at almost every level.

There's no doors closed to us. There's no meetings we can't have. So I think that's a very unique position in terms of how an organization values a specific function. So inside of that we do meet with upper leadership. We do meet with leadership that are lower in the business. We meet with team members, and really we have a platform and we can set a stage and a cadence that is unique to this profession.

And I think that's really... If we understand that going in, then really we can leverage a lot of that in a constructive way to help the organization improve and grow the cultures and the types of things that we want those organizations to reflect. Training in all of those things are very, very important, and I don't have to tell this audience.

It's important we maintain compliance. That certainly is part of the luxury of having the EHS people, professional EHS people in those organizations. We don't leave it to chance so we hire very smart people and they understand the compliance. But the compliance by itself doesn't get us a world-class culture and that's really the soft skills that you referred to, Mary. How do we refine that?

And the other thing that really, coming out of the nuclear navy, and I went right into a Dow 30 company. I actually started as a maintenance manager. Believe it or not, I'm a millwright by trade and I fell into safety completely by accident, probably a story that's been told over and over. But having a perspective inside of a Dow 30 company and how they function, and how culture functions, and then moving through organizations like Toyota, and then Owens Corning, and companies that are amazing, amazing companies, the same as International Paper, where I started, those companies all are very successful leaders in their field.

Cultures are 180 degrees from each other and none of them are the same. But I think having that large spectrum of reference to frame from has also given me unique perspective. And being a change leader, and even in the Toyota environment, I had a role outside of the EHS by helping the vendors and suppliers learning safety.

So even in that organization, I have a perspective, and I'll share some of those stories as we go. But really, that role and responsibility as the EHS person is unique. I would also tell you that safety and safety inside of a company is almost a perfect indicator of stability.

If we've got high incident rate we probably have instability in places that we either do or don't know they're there, and how do we look for that to be more effective? And the last thing I would add is that internal troubleshooter. My barometer for 23 years wasn't a reduction in incident rate. My barometer was to build excellence inside of those organizations, and effectiveness was the only measure that I had.

So a lot of what I talk about today shouldn't be foreign in larger terms, but I've distilled it down to the three or four things you need to know to go to practice tomorrow to maybe, kind of, pull away some of the clouds, some of the mystery, and say, "Well, if I just do these three things I'll get to where I need to go."

And really, just please have that in mind as we discuss and we'll rail through it.

- Yeah. Well, so that is a perfect segue into what I was going to go into next. So the first part of the title of your book is "Intrinsic Stability." So I thought, let's just start at the very beginning and ask you, what does intrinsic stability mean for an organization?

What are you talking about here?

- Well, it's a big term and it has a very concise definition. But a lot of times we talk about stability almost as a descriptor of what happened that became stable. But what if you're able to take it and make it an action, where I can actually do things inside of my organization to create stability in areas where we focus? How do I make it holistically better every day?

And really, it's really that, but let me talk about culture first, and let me walk into that stability discussion, if that's okay, Mary.

- Yeah.

- So culture is king, and I know everybody says it and it's very cliche, right? But people have been asking, "Chris, how do you do these amazing transformations?" And in truth, well, after I get to know them a little bit, generally, I'll say, look, the truth is that organization went from the worst to the best in less than a year, a year and a half in a lot of the meaningful metrics, and I never went after safety.

That was never my objective. My objective was always to create stability, and it's because I understand the holistic nature of how manufacturing in organizations work. Everywhere I had quality issues, everywhere I had process upsets, everywhere I had...it didn't matter if I was shuffling chairs inside the safety environment. I had to fix the process, and which leads me to the next thing I would say.

It was a little bit sacrilege in our profession, but I'll tell you that in my experience safety is an outcome, not a destination. If I do enough things right, my processes are stable, they're well thought out, good engineering. If I've got good process in all the places where it's critical to my operations I'm rewarded, I'm rewarded with quality, good efficiency, good profitability, and also, good safety.

I cannot uncouple those. So the ingredients to...I'm sorry, did you say something?

- I was just going to say that also in your book you said that traditionally safety is about the business of managing failure, and what you are trying to push it towards is the business of gaining process stability.

- That's right. Very perceptive, yeah. That is... So inside that envelope of building stability and being rewarded with all of the things that our business needs, that's where the culture comes in. And I do say often when I speak on this that I think our profession has a fatal flaw in it. We've taught generations of managers to manage failure.

It's like slapping them on the hands and saying, "Don't touch that." And really what it leads to is also a culture of managing failure, and we don't learn the skills in our profession to build an organization that maybe doesn't manage failure but doesn't tolerate error, or doesn't tolerate variation in process controls, who looks at the safety profession in its own lane and somehow decides that that lane can somehow provide enough gravity to pull all the excellence we need in and around it, and it simply isn't true.

Safety isn't an input, it is an outcome. And looking at it as an outcome and looking at process and process capability and process stability as the objective, it changes the way we look at how we do our hazard assessments, how we engage our people, how we engage our leadership.

I'm not discounting all of the very important things we do around compliance and training. None of that gets lost in this discussion. But how do I generate a culture that values stability and is willing to not value error in a way that they're willing to fix process incrementally every day? And there's some things we'll talk about around that, and there's some things, I think, that add to or enhance our ability and capability of being effective and improving those processes.

Error creates variation in our process, and I'll just go through really quickly. That variation, as it continues through our process, creates unpredictability when operators get to it. "What time do I have to shave it? What time do I have to saw it?" I have to do changes to it to make it sellable. It's no longer first run, first quality.

And if enough of those craftsmanshipping things outside of our processes happen over time then we're paying people to fix error. But a funny thing happens in that first dynamic inside the factory from error to variation. The first domino that always falls is quality. Quality follows first, and then as it continues on in our process, depending on the types of errors, they get added to that process, and then the safety domino falls.

It always falls after quality. And if it continues on through the process, and I've got people doing craftsmanship fixing quality, quality, quality, now I'm paying people to fix error and my efficiency falls off. And that's the process that happens in many of our...whether I'm talking about manufacturing of an office environment, we end up paying people to fix error. But in a manufacturing environment specifically, that error could lead to injuries.

So people ask me, "Chris, how do you get to zero harm?" Well, I've got to fix quality. I have to fix error and variation in my processes, and that is the magic on how I've always been able to do these conversions. Because I understand by shrinking the magnitude of the error and lengthening the frequency between errors, I'm also shrinking the pool, the magnitude of potential safety and harm and the length between harm.

And the better I get at it, the less the changes and having more incremental and compounding effects positive to the culture that I want, which is one that doesn't tolerate error and values process. I'd like to stop here because I think I'm probably uncoupling a little bit from our EHS managers, and they're thinking, "Well, what about safety committees, or what about JHAs, and all the things that we do?"

That is infrastructure inside of our profession that we have to maintain and sustain. None of this takes away from that. But focusing the organization differently in a way where they want to go anyway only enhances our capability of being effective. What do I mean by that? Well, if you're in a production environment, my job is to get the production out, the quality, the time, and the planned rates.

We have to, otherwise, we don't make money and nobody eats. So anything that makes that process improve is certainly something they're going to be engaged in. If I had at the end of your day the 30 things I need you to do for safety is adjunct or bolt-on activities to that, well, I may not get to that today. I'm still busy running my things.

So how do I ingrain my processes and align my priorities with theirs? Mary, something funny about safety, and I've been doing this a long time, as I said, I can't tell you how much safety weighs. I don't know what it eats. I couldn't tell you what it looks like in the wild. I don't know if it's tamable. What I'm saying is, safety is kind of a nebulous concept to rally an organization around.

If I lined 100 people up and asked them what's safety, I'd get 100 different answers because it really is, it's very intangible. It's kind of, like, pretty. I mean, everybody has a different definition of pretty, right? My mom says that I'm pretty.

- Well, moms are always right.

- Well, yeah, they're supposed to do that. But those are the things that really are difficult because when we talk about rallying around safety, and zero harm, and safety culture, it doesn't mean the same thing to everyone and everybody doesn't have the same level of focus around that objective. But if I rally around error and process controls and I can put together things and safety that helps enhance those processes, and I get you into continuous improvement to make processes better, and I make things 10% better, 15% better, everywhere we're going to continuous improvement.

Do that 10,000 times in small, incremental improvements next year and you'll wake up with a different company at the end of the year. Ow, go ahead. I'm sorry, Mary.

- Well, I was going to say, one thing that really struck me about your book is a very practical evaluation of where an organization is and understanding the relationship between organizational maturity and organization size as well. So yeah, let's share that.

- So very interesting perception because there's a few pillars inside of this discussion and maturity certainly is one of them, and usually I'll talk about this in this way initially. One of the things that, when I come into an organization and they have a desire to change, we typically go out and we hire people that have done something similar in mature organizations and we hope that that can somehow translate into this less mature organization, and it generally doesn't, the way you think.

Now, I'll talk about that in a moment, but generally, I'll ask those people initially, "How do you lead an organization you don't love," is the first question that I'll ask, and I'll explain that. The other thing is, excellence is so well understood and there are so many good practitioners, as everybody tells me they are, and they all tell me that they know. Then why is it so rare?

I mean, true excellence is truly rare, so why is the gap so large for all these great practitioners? And then often I'll ask them over time is, "Well, what are you waiting for if you've got all this knowledge?" It really isn't meant to be an insult or drive them. If I can't step into the role that I am today that I've been asked to fill and love that organization as they are because I'll never be smart enough to turn the organization that I work for now into Owens Corning, International Paper, or Toyota.

Those are distinctly different companies with different cultures. They have different value systems, different markets, different name it, and there's nothing in common about them other than they've all reached the pinnacle of excellence inside of their organizational...their business envelopes. But loving organizations at the maturity that they are and understanding this is who they are, and starting there, that incremental improvement, that's job one.

If I would have... The last organization I worked for, an amazing, amazing organization, the biggest transformation in my career. Often when I talk about it, it almost sounds like a lie coming out of my mouth how amazing that organization was able to go from the worst...or, sorry, the middle of the road in the worst industry to top tier in all industries in less than three years.

Kudos to that. But job one for me was, go in, love the excellence that they are, and they had excellence. Were they as mature as Toyota? No, but I had a lot of success in Toyota with lean safety. I didn't use any of it in that organization. The infrastructure wasn't capable and that isn't what we value.

So we built on what we had and we grew the excellence that was available to us, and that excellence was our excellence, and our excellence is the only excellence available to us. We'll never turn into a Toyota or another organization because that isn't our culture. It's very foreign. So those are... But maturity, loving the excellence we are, starting where we are, I'm actually not a fan of best practices.

If we think of this very same discussion, right?

- Yeah, I actually have a great quote from you about best practices right here. I pulled out all the good ones, and this one because it's potentially controversial.

- [inaudible] - "My experience is that the pursuit and implementation of best practices cannot only make us lazy but are counterproductive to real growth." So I'll let you contextualize that so that doesn't sound like such a shot across the bow.

- I know, because everybody's...you even see it on job descriptions how to implement best practice. But best practices change, and it goes part of a larger core. But if I'm struggling with being effective and efficient as I am, and I'm continuously launching change on my organization with the expectation that somehow they're going to gain utility from that change and it's going to somehow transform, it rarely ever does and the reason is this.

When we work through processes in our business we define things we have to do by taking some foreign culture's best practice, which is the culmination of that foreign culture's wisdom, as they go through their process and retain, and refine, and do all the things that they do really good, "And this is how we do this. Well, we've got people and we could do that. Let's drill it on top of that."

But you're taking something foreign in a foreign culture that has a whole bunch of metrics of things that feed it that may or may not exist here, infrastructure that may or may not feed it that doesn't exist here and you're asking them to adopt something with no real capability or possibly even the infrastructural wisdom to gain the utility out of it.

And so what it looks like to manage or to the people is a flavor of the month. We launch it on them. We mess with it for a little while. We can't make it work, we run around like chickens with our heads cut off. They give up on it and then they launch another one on us and we wait it out, and they launch another one on us. And the management would say, "Well, my people just don't want to change."

And the team members on the floor would say, "Well, they're just flavor of the month," and the truth is they're both right. The biggest problem with change management simply has to do with the energy exchange, and I'll explain. What most people think about is, "I have to do 10 an hour." It's an arbitrary number, 10 an hour, and if I do it your way I'm only doing 6.

And if I can do it my way, which gives me the same result, I can do 10. So the energy exchange is too high. You're asking me to burn 10 ounces of energy for 6 ounces of return. I want to work at equilibrium. Cultures work at equilibrium just like everything in nature works at equilibrium. It wants us to take the lowest energy to get the same level of output.

I want to work at 3 and 3, not 6 and 6, 10 and 10. So if we don't understand that and we launch change on them and ask to work at high levels of energy for low levels of return they tend to reject it, which is why flavor of the month typically is called flavor of the month. There's no infrastructure.

There's no dynamic. There's no need. The next thing is, it has to provide utility. If it doesn't help me do my thing and I can do it better then I tend to reject that. So this kind of leads into a larger conversation about engagement, but really the best practice scenario of launching change perpetually on your organization with no infrastructure to support it is generally harmful in the larger process of growing strong culture.

And the reason leadership and management say they don't want to change is because by doing that continuously, we have created a culture that has developed a natural inoculation to push change in that process.

And you know it in manufacturing is they just wait us out until the priorities change, and then it goes away. And that's the nature of....and how did we get to this point? Well, we're good intentioned absolutely as managers and leaders. But we are insufficient in understanding how the impact of that is really impacting our cultures. I had an epiphany some years ago when I'd been doing this for a while with International Paper, nine years.

I was an internal person for them. And I went to work for Toyota, I never understood the significance of culture the way that I did with International Paper, first in a negative way. Because coming out of American industry and seeing how Japanese did it is very foreign to me. I did not understand nemawashi, and why won't my really good ideas stand on their own? Why do I have to talk, and collaborate, and do things?

So very stressful for me going into an environment where a culture was so foreign, but the longer that I was immersed in it, I understood a couple of different things. One, the value of how that sustained their culture, and then two, why have we never got it right on the American side of the equation just looking at the tools and the wisdom that was generated from that culture, but never understanding that that was a summation of their wisdom and the tools were an outcropping of that?

And as I went through the process of putting together the lean safety for the Toyota facility that I worked for, and I actually had a stopping moment with the president, TJ Tajima there in San Antonio. And he asked me a very straightforward, serious question, and I did not grasp the significance of it at the time, but he asked me, "Chris, what do we do here?"

Now I'm 30 something, I'm trying to think of something clever and lean-ish to say. And I'm throwing it out there, I give him the answer, and he says, "No, Chris. No Chris." He says, "Our objective is to make things stable. If I can make it stable I can measure. If I can measure I can improve." And then all of a sudden, lean took on a whole new understanding for me and what it really was.

And the culture of Toyota took on another dimension that often doesn't get talked about, and where I landed was lean is a culture first. It is a culture specifically designed to generate wisdom. That wisdom is leveraged specifically to do continuous improvement.

And all of a sudden, every scheme, DMAIC, and lean, and all the different continuous improvements all opened up. I'm looking at the core of all continuous improvement. I'm looking at the core of all excellence, and no matter what direction you take that make it stable so we can measure, measure, improve.

If it ends up taking a technical slant like DMAIC. If it takes a more holistic, like a lean. If I want to create a culture that values wisdom, all of a sudden I can't fail with that because now I'm down to people interacting with people. Now I'm down to understanding the basics and making my functions inside my business the best they can be.

I'm stabilizing processes and I'm looking for ways to reduce error, which automatically improves safety, it automatically improves efficiency if you agree with the equation. So go ahead.

- Yeah. It seems to me like you're meeting people with their priorities, rather than coming in and saying, "Okay, safety is a priority. This is what we're going to do," [vocalization]. You're looking at both leaders and people on the floor and saying, "How can we give you stability which is what you want where you are right now?"

- Right. And let me just take a moment and talk about the function of leadership. And this is the most thrown around, overused, over iconized phrase. I read cliches all the time on the internet and roll my eyes, and it isn't that there aren't truth in those, there are, absolutely are. Most leaders didn't know they were great leaders until they were analyzed after they did the great thing.

The confusion and the not knowing, all of that was part of the process of getting that great leadership function done. It was us doing the analysis later. So I really covet a lot of the symptoms that get described around leadership and the characteristics that people assign leaders in saying, "These are great characteristics." My experience is even more basic than that.

Leadership is simply, practice collaboration. The old Patton on the battlefield, "Men, we're going to go that way and most of you are going to die," doesn't work in a real-world setting, right, maybe in a war. And there are times where we have to take those levels of stance, but really practice collaboration.

And let me put some caveats in that. Practice collaboration every day at every level of the organization, and what are we practicing? Well, we're practicing with the specific goal of creating partnership. Now that's not a loose word I'm throwing out and it's not something that I'm pretending to be cliche. Really, partnership to be effective requires effective boundaries inside that relationship, boundaries we practice every day, boundaries that get good exercise between every levels.

I know what you're going to do if you do this, you know what I'm going to do with that. It does not mean servant. Try being in a marriage where you're a servant, it's not going to work. There has to be give and take. It's okay that I have objectives. I'm married 21 years, so... But there has to be objectives.

There has to be boundaries and we have to abide by those boundaries, because if that element is missing, we'd never get to what we were really looking for, and that's trust. I can have a relationship, we can disagree. If I'm inside the boundaries and we're practicing that every day based off of the things that what our organization needs, I'm asking for input.

But I need that trust and that trust is only going to come by practicing those boundaries and me pursuing that relationship in a way that builds trust. Now this is where it gets really crazy because once trust happens, the boundaries are even more critical, right? As that relationship grows and that trust grows, our capability of doing things inside that relationship is also going to grow, but those boundaries have to be maintained and have to be strong for that trust to be in.

And only after that, only after trust do I have the capability of being influential in that relationship, only after trust. I don't jump because I'm boss and I go right to influential. If you think I'm influential because I'm boss, I'm not influential because we've built it on trust. I'm getting compliance. That is not the same thing. So if we're interested in having that organization that learns and values those things, building collaborative relationships every day with the pursuit of partnership so I can build trust, so I have the potential to be influenced, only at that point do I have a leadership role.

Not the leadership role, but a leadership role inside that relationship. And that can be practiced on any floor, in any office, in any building. I don't have to be a perfect communicator, I just need to be a good person who's a straight shooter and will build boundaries that will function for our relationship that's mutual and that we both agree, and then to practice that every day.

And all of a sudden, I have effective communication. I have effective partnership in which I can ask, I can ask you to help me solve a problem. I often tell my EHS team members in the course of our relationship, when you walkout and talk to people and start building this process, it's often like dating.

It's a little bit like dating. What do you like? What do I like? Where are our boundaries in relationships? How do we... For that frame of... And I'm not advocating dating, but a lot of the mindset you have of getting to know them, understanding those touch points and things that can be effective in maintaining and sustaining those boundaries, it's critical that we have some frame of reference.

The last thing I would throw on that is that I'll never talk to somebody today that I don't need. I'll never have a conversation, whether it's up or down, for me in the organization, I'll never have a conversation I don't need. And I think that gets lost sometimes, especially in our profession where many times we get pigeonholed and almost become cops in our organization and we lose the capability to be effective in that space.

- I was thinking as you're talking about trust, I was thinking...and boundaries, there's an element of predictability. You know what to expect from me, I know what to expect from you. Those are the boundaries, and within that safety almost, people will flourish, right? Another concept that you had talked about is people will always work their ideas harder than they'll work yours.

So I think this is, sort of, your secret sauce to get there, right?

- It is. It is, yes. Now when that practice collaboration starts taking hold and we want to make changes, I talk, starting the discussion about 5,000, 10,000 little changes in the organization. I wake up in a different company at the end of the year. That's true, and when I'm doing continuous improvement I'm often asking those team members, "What are your constraints? How can I fix it?"

Now I'm not offering them my solution and saying, "What do you think?" That's not the same thing. It's very specific. I've got some issues with some of the feedback things we're having. I really want to make our process more impactful when we do this. Do you have any ideas that maybe just based on your experience and from your side of it that we can work on?

And then now I become an advocate for you. I'll invest my time and energy in you and your ideas. And if anything happens, you're going to work your ideas very hard. You'll even troubleshoot your ideas. If we get 60% of it and we say, "Hey, we got 60%. Let's lock that in and then let's go after the other 40." And then you'll come up with ideas and you'll help me come up with the other 40.

And the cool thing about it is you'll change the way you work. You'll lock it into your process controls. I'll never have to come back. It's 100% sustainable when you are the person that's driving the change. Now let's do that in contrast. So I come to you, Mary, "Look, this is really what I think we need to do. We need to get some setups in our microphone. The lighting is all wrong. We need to put some banners up that show-up behind you so we're keeping people's attention."

And I say, "Let's make that happen." And you're thinking, "Well, that's not possible. It's distraction. I can't concentrate," whatever, right? So what happens in that space? I come back and say, "Well, Mary, we talked about this. Two weeks we're going to have this done." And you're going to give me all the things, why you couldn't do it, all the constraints.

You're going to give those to me as things I have to go fix and make perfect, and when I can fix them, come back and we'll talk about implementing them again. And I know that scenario plays out on every factory floor, and in every office, and I even sometimes when I'm speaking with team members, I really feel like, "Well, this is something they don't want to do or even contribute to."

I'll often ask two or three layers of questions, and if they'll continue on with the constraints five layers down, it gives me a pretty good feel for how obstinate they're feeling in making these changes. But it happens to us all the time. It's a trap for change leaders but we have to understand the energy exchange. We have to understand that people will work their ideas harder, so I need to become a master of learning to work other people's process and help them work through their constraints.

And all of a sudden the problems start solving themselves. Do that 10,000 times and you'll have a different culture and a different organization. It's very simple, straightforward, easy to do, and it doesn't take special training. I remember back in the early corporate days, and I'll talk about what's different about large corporations and small corporations in a minute for culture.

But it really has to be an understood effort to work their ideas and invest in them. And even if they don't get it, invest in them again, because a failed opportunity with collaboration and partnership is going to pave the way for a successful one next time.

- I have two questions. You don't just say leadership, you talk about organic leadership. So is that what you mean when you talk about this engagement, this, kind of...

- Yeah, it's kind of a compilation of two of the discussions we've had so far, understanding the maturity level, and then that practice collaboration. And often I'll use a sports analogy, kind of, how as the maturity of the organization grows, understanding as basic as it grows, and how the organization changes, and we have a responsibility to understand it.

Now many people know football, the little pee-wee football, the little guys on the field, right? And I often ask, "Well, where are the coaches in that environment?" Well, they're on the field, right? They're picking up kids, and putting them in holes, and trying to get them to just stand in front of somebody, but they're trying to get the basics of the game understood, just trying to get the game in play.

All the energy and resources for that organization is being used just to stand up football players in a pee-wee organization. As that organization grows in a football standpoint, then I get to something like a high school where they're teenagers. I don't have to spend as much of my organizational energy in getting them to stand up, and block, and run plays.

Now I start teaching cadence and rhythm, and able to get a little more sophistication because they're spending less bandwidth doing the walking and the tackling, just standing up, and they've got more resources to, kind of, grow that operation. Those leaders have to grow with that organization to reach those pinnacles of development. Now let's move onto college and professional football.

The coaches in high school, they're on the sidelines, right? And some of them are...but mostly on the sidelines calling, running day-to-day. But coaches in professional sports are aware. They're up in the booth. Well, why are they in the booth? They have coaches on the sidelines. The people calling the plays are over the...they're looking in an organization that doesn't spend any energy on blocking and tackling anymore.

Their maturity is at the point where their whole excellence is built around creating error or not having error created in them, right, make them miss a block, miss a read. And so they function almost solely on cadence and rhythm, so that coaching and leadership team has to develop to a point where they're able to run a system that is able to prevent the generation of error.

And they're calling plays in real-time, they're making adjustments in real-time from the box. The players on the field are responding in real-time, being able to adjust in the field. That is the pinnacle of coaching and playing in an organization. Coaches aren't hired because they're great people, they're hired because they have great organizations and they have great process controls, and that's what defines the difference between a pee-wee, a high school, a college, and a professional coach.

And they don't buy players, they buy systems, and players fit into those systems to be able to function in that environment.

- I was going to ask, a good leader, when we're talking about that we're talking about how their capacity is growing, right, and you have to spend lesser energy on the core, like, this is how you hold a ball, for example. Do you have any insight into pacing? How does a leader know, "Okay, we've done that 5%? It's locked in. Okay, it's good. I think we're ready for the next 5%."

Is there...

- Well, interesting, because when people ask me, "How do you know you're winning," I personally have to fill momentum, right? When I'm looking at the organization, is the organization sustaining all of the aspects that are generating that 5% on their own, or am I having to go back and nudge, nudge, nudge? And there's something about learning. The most amazing organization I talked about that I worked for prior to this one, the president of the organization was asking me, we were having...because of COVID and a lot of new employees, and actually, we had found that our ability to bring on new team members in this very complex manufacturing environment was not as robust.

And we were starting to see spikes of injuries and everybody's panicking a little bit. And I said, "Relax, we've got our countermeasures. Here they are." And the next question from them to me is, "Well, when are we going to start seeing results? Can we look back every week?" And my response probably shocked them a little bit. I said, "Well, my experience in our organization at our maturity level and our level of leadership today, it takes about five months for our organization to learn the skills at the levels we're asking them to do. I won't know."

Now I'll see indicators along the way and obviously, we'll spend energy trying to help those leaders inside the organization be able to support the functions that they're initiating, but my organization takes five months for me to learn. I have to know that, otherwise I, kind of, back-door launch that process issues where I'm launching new initiatives on them all the time, like the best practices.

I have to know. I have to learn how my organization learns, and that's part of my seasoning inside as a leader inside that organization. I have to know what touchpoints need to be reinforced, where I need to put new skills or resources in to help those leaders be more effective. My objective every day is not to shape a culture.

My objective every day is to optimize one, and there's differences in that. And my thinking around, "How do I optimize this versus..." Because I already love what they are, they're already excellent. They're doing more right than wrong, and they have to be reminded of that even when we're struggling.

But we learn how we learn, and we have to become masters of understanding how our organizations learn so we're doing enough support in our roles to support that learning. If I want to get it in in four months, three months, two months, I've got to support, or I've got to help that organization learn better then. They cannot jump from a low maturity to a high maturity. The infrastructure and the wisdom created to sustain it just doesn't exist today in this organization.

It will never. Remember what I said earlier, Mary, the only excellence available to us is our own? And I've never met an exception to that. Maybe there's some caveats people could think of but we'll never be smart enough to turn our company into somebody else.

- I wanted to turn back time for a minute and ask you this question. If you could travel back in time and speak to yourself at the beginning of your safety career but you could only give one piece of advice to young Chris, what would it be?

- What a great question. Relax and have fun, and if I had a second piece of advice, excellence doesn't stay in its lane. And I probably spent too many years thinking that EHS was a stay-in-my-lane profession, and it wasn't until I opted out of that mindset that I was actually able to be more effective in a troubleshooting capacity.

But an organization that wants you in a lane is going to be very resistant to that. So the skills that we build around staying in your lane or staying out of your lane really... how do I prepare that business in a way that I'm going to come and talk about sales issues sometimes, especially related to the fleet? I'm going to come and talk about maintenance activities.

I'm going to talk about things that wouldn't necessarily be obvious. Many times in the early days maintenance managers said, "Chris, why are you always in here troubling us about our PM program?" I said, "Well, that motor has a life cycle of five years and you're burning it out every year because it's not being PM'ed properly, or we don't have the right skill set for the things that we have. Then I'm generating a lot of extra cost, a lot of extra exposure. I've got maintenance guys rigging things in, rigging things out. I've got burn hazards. I've got systems downs. I've got downtime, and we're working weekends to make up for lost productivity."

Everything in this business has a holistic nature to it, and we all, in our profession, safety, if we have to be able to, one, get out of our lane but be able to make meaningful contributions to areas we wouldn't necessarily be confident in making a contribution. Now my being a millwrighter or a nuclear mechanic certainly helps me in the maintenance environment but I had to learn things in security.

I had to learn things in shipping. I had to learn things over the years and I made that part of my own professional growth to understand that holistic nature of my business or the businesses I support. And the higher we get into our organizations obviously things get more general, but we have to be able to function in every lane and make a contribution. Because, one, we have the influential position that has a pulpit that's different than almost every other position inside of a company.

But two, everyone acts in their self-interest, and certainly, safety is part of that. And that helps us, kind of, at least break the ice for the initial discussion, but what has to come out of our mouths next has to have utility. So those are for those portions of the organization. So if I could go back and talk to myself, learn how to get out of your lane quicker, I think that might've made it a little more fun, but that would be probably the biggest advice I could give our team members now inside this profession.

- Yeah. You talked about safety culture being, sort of, a sub-culture, and how that's not the way it should be. That's, sort of, staying in the lane. You also said that a lot of leaders, and this is maybe the process of getting out of your lane, resist collaboration to address process stability.

Why do you think that is, and how would you...I mean, you kind of pointed to it when you talked about utility, but how would you overcome that?

- Well, that's an interesting...because it really, kind of, points back to how organizations function. So large organizations seek improvement differently than small ones, and a large organization typically has many, many layers, many, many layers. And I hold the position as a gatekeeper often in that one layer, and large organizations covet very smart people who know a lot about a subject but not necessarily a lot about how to implement that subject.

They'll hire specialists, where smaller companies can't afford specialists. They hire generalists. So a generalist in a small company generally has to know how to penetrate four layers down and four layers up because there's nothing in between them. So those organizations that have specialists, and they often don't know how to get three layers below.

They don't know what created that excellence. They don't know what creates those processes. They know a mile wide and an inch deep in terms of what's going on in the organization. Not their fault, they're hired for that specific skill. It is an amazing skill. They should pay them for it if that's what they do in the organization. But often they don't know about how the excellence was created.

They can't reconstruct. I had an incidence where they hired some extremely good EHS managers for a company in a startup and it was basically a greenfield. They didn't have anything. So they didn't have any machine policies, processes, programs. I would've hired those guys all day, all day to manage the safety, twice on Sunday, to manage the safety in that program.

I wouldn't have hired any of them to build it, not one of them, because they were excellent managers but they didn't understand, "How do I build a lockout program? How do I build a confined space program? How do I build all those aspects that lead to the structure?" And because they've never had to, they've always gleaned from their positions what it must be like or they've read that they've never done it. And how do I organize my time?

How do I talk to maintenance or my shareholders while we're building these things? All of those questions become very obvious that I don't know. So they tend to be very ineffective, not because... So those cultures that seek, and I'm going to jump around, but large companies that seek change don't necessarily have the agility to make changes the way a smaller company that has more generalists. And frankly, they have the culture they want, so they have the culture they want, they have the excellence they want.

They didn't hire somebody to be witty, and innovative, and turn everything upside down and create the chaos condition. They want somebody who's very good at maintaining, growing, sustaining that aspect of that, that culture, that portion of their business. So there really is a difference in how those organizations function and the skill sets they hire.

What I typically see, Mary, is those smaller companies who want to covet, they covet those large companies' excellence. They'll hire those leaders into those smaller companies and they struggle. Those leaders struggle because they didn't create the excellence they maintained and they have a very difficult time understanding how to build. And it's frustrating for the organization, so what happens in those situations is they start nesting.

They start saying, "Well, culture is not responding. I've got all these good ideas. I'm just going to start putting things in place and bringing people in that know what I'm talking about. And then, when that happens then somehow the culture is just going to shift." It doesn't, by the way, but the effect is they create a sub-culture inside of a leadership class that's different from the others, and then the rift starts to build, the trust, and everybody starts staying in their lanes because they don't know what's expected of them.

And it just ends up being this, I'm going to throw it over the wall because I can't impact that. And they're going to throw it back because they can't impact it. Everybody's doing that and the culture starts to get really divided and divisive. Understanding that our maturity, level what our organization covets, the type of people that we hire, all of those really do impact our capability and effectiveness in implementing process, and in fact, in culture, effectively.

I had an interesting dynamic once and I thought this was, kind of, a validation of my discussion about the many layers. Large organizations typically look at bodies and go, "Well, we don't need those guys. We're going to farm it out overseas." Well, perfectly, little, fine business decision, but the people above them have no idea what they're doing.

So all the jobs get re-jiggered a little bit and everybody's got to do something different but they don't know the job and they don't know the process, and fear starts to set in, accountability for process [inaudible] Nobody's calling for this report so I'm going to stop doing it. And five months go by, and so who's responsible for that? And all of a sudden, that dysfunction starts to creep into a very stable organization that's restructured in a way not understanding of the constraints that they've created.

And as I'm talking to these people working at a very massive company, and they were all describing that fear and that not knowing, and didn't know what went into that job. And it really kind of goes back to that whole holistic nature of how organizations function, and leaders have to be plugged into that. They have to understand what makes those organizations grow, that, what did I just do to my company?

What's going to be missing in 30 minutes after this decision, and how am I going to close that gap? Because in the morning, when that dust settles this organization has become a new organization, where the training isn't effective anymore. The tiers that I have to do my job aren't there anymore. All of those things are missing but I'm still expecting an output, and honestly, I'm expecting a higher output because that was the calculus we made to make the changes.

And in real-time, the effect, we did just the opposite. All can be done. We just have to understand what it is we're doing and how we're impacting the organization and the capability of it. And in the example that I gave you of a large company that does the layer shearing, they've created error, massive error in some cases.

And they're creating variation that there's no process to soothe, much less improve. So just very, very...I didn't mean to get off on a tangent, but there really is... The leadership has to understand maturity and has to understand how the organization functions, how it learns, and then understand what impacts they're making on organizations when they make those changes.

- Yeah, I think that's vital. I think that it's a part. I was just thinking safety anthropologist in my mind, just cultural observations, really understanding the way things are and how they change...excuse me...how organizations learn would be vital. There's something else I want to do here, I'm going to call it the University of Chris.

So last time...

- It's a thin book. It's a thin book.

- Well, last time we talked about what advice you would give yourself, so that's on an individual level. On a larger level of the safety industry, if you were to develop your own safety management training curriculum, where would you start? What core human skills do you think are the most important to develop in future safety managers?

- I would start with the concept of risk first and I would become a master of risk. And the reason I say risk is actually what I do. I use risk as the thing that I open with generally when I come into a new team because it's scalable.

I can do a little or I can do a lot. It can be very advanced or it can be very simple. I can scale it to the maturity of the organization and I also want to make sure that I have a platform with which I can get some of the continuous improvement activities and some of those concepts start going, however that looks for us. So I think becoming a master of risk in a way that we can scale it inside of every organization or any organization based on their maturity is imperative.

I think all the compliance things and things that we do, and those aspects we learn in school certainly understand the basics there and able to apply. That is why we're hired to do that function. But the next thing is really relationship building, interpersonal relationship communication. Doesn't have to be a master at it.

I remembered that the organization that I talked about had the most amazing transformation in my career was I started bringing on EHS people to support different functions. All of them to a person told me that they thought I was crazy because I said, "Go out and spend the first three months, I want you to go out and build relationships. Meet every supervisor. Meet every manager. Be part of the teams, solve problems. We'll get paid on the backend. Help them solve quality issues. Use the power of your position to gain trust and influence inside of that organization. Help them solve their problems."

And as they're learning those relationships we're layering in the EHS and the big stuff, right? But that relationship building was key to that organization with the EHS function and that leadership team. And I remember being in an auditorium and I had two hourly EHS people standing at the top. It was an auditorium filled full of salary managers and they're training and doing presentations, and talking about continuous improvement and everybody is listening.

And think about, would that be true in your organization? Could you pluck two hourly team members out of a support function, put them in an auditorium with your management team, and ask them to pay attention, and learn, and execute against that? And that is the power of relationships.

I'm not saying everybody has to be that, but those relationships and interpersonal skills are the pivotal thing that you'll rely on to do all of the things that you need to do to build excellence in your organizations. And really, if that's all I was good at, really good at communicating and engaging people, that's still pretty awesome.

- Yeah, and not just within safety but certainly within safety as well, right?

- Right. Right.

- So now I'd like to get practical and talk about...this is where I ask for your best, most practical tips or resources for safety managers looking to improve their work relationships and their core skills. So this could be a book, it could be a website, it could be a concept.

- Well, I would tell you that "Intrinsic Stability: How Organic Leadership Breeds Excellence" is a pretty good book. It's all of everything I've talked about and distilled down, it's actually a lot of stories to teach concepts, some very small, and then small, inter-instructional type of activities, conversational, instructional, and then a story that kind of demonstrates.

So I would say that's probably a good place to start. I'm a fan of that. The book that I gained the most out of interestingly enough wasn't a safety book. It was "The Goal." It was "The Goal," and it really made me look at a business differently. And it's a theory of constraints, but it made me look at, as I took my skill set inside of EHS and then I started layering it in on things like constraints, it really brought another dynamic to how I looked at the job, how I interacted with the businesses.

I like the human performance stuff that's out there. I think there's a lot there. Being a naval nuclear power plant operator, actually, I had three licenses in my career, operate three different nuclear power plants. I'm kind of proud of that since I was only in the Navy for six years. But understanding the human performance stuff, I think, definitely gives insight, high-performance workgroups, looking at those tools and skills to layer in.

My advice is, take what works for you and leave the rest. Don't try to be a perfect practitioner, one that feels clunky and people look at it and it's clunky, right? Neither one of us can wait for that interaction to end, generally, if you're trying to be a perfect practitioner.

But take the things that you like to do that interest you and that add utility to your toolbox and practice those. And I think also, I would tell you inside of my profession, and in my profession, being our profession, that the biggest killer of effectiveness is ego. Ego is murder to EHS people, and it is to managers and leaders, too, although I think we give them a pass at the executive level with ego a little bit.

But it does tear away at their effectiveness in leadership. We don't walk away thinking that's something I want to emulate, but that's on them. We do 99% of our interactions with director, manager, and below. So really having those practice skills and being effective in your envelope of capability, and practicing that every day and grow that from wherever you are today.

Maybe you're horrible at it, but you'll be less horrible tomorrow and less horrible the next day. And some day you'll be good, then you'll be great, so that just depends on how much you do, and how often you do it, and how much energy and sincerity you put in building those relationships, and collaborating and sustaining those boundaries in those relationships you're working on.

If you don't value those more than anything else, the other people will pick up on it and then it'll just be lip service. And then you're back trying to sell it, and that's really where I think many, or too many, of our people in our profession have end up almost becoming used car salesmen in a lot of ways. "Well, no, it's got all the bells and whistles. It's everything you want it to be." And we try to get it, thinking, "If I could just get it in the door they're going to see the utility."

But then, of course, we run up against the energy exchange and it dies for all the wrong reasons. But I would say that. I don't have a lot of resources that I would point to other than the ones I've talked to, mainly because my skill set was built on my capability, my understanding, my reflections. I think if you have a book that interests you, a thing that adds to your skill set, great, but in the end, you're going to be you standing on that floor or in that office.

You're going to be you informing those relationships on whatever tools you brought to them. And also, I stay away from books of influence and things personally just because it feels gimmicky to me. And once people figure out that I'm using a gimmick on them I think they'll be less inclined to engage me next time.

I'd rather make mistakes for my own personality through sincerity, and being candid, and owning up to things that I do wrong, which I do often. Hey, sorry I missed the mark on that. I step out in front of it right out of the gate, and that way they understand where I'm not working against the ego. I made an honest mistake and I'm also going to be an honest broker in putting the energy in to fix it, even if it isn't mine to fix.

So those are, kind of, my own personal learnings but I think everybody has a version of that. The last thing I would say about this profession is we have to have a very strong internal barometer and a good, strong method of reflecting on the things that we do in this job. Was it effective, and why wasn't it?

And news flash, it might be a spoiler alert, but you're always part of the ineffective things, too, so you have to reflect on those because you had a role. My son does a lot of speeches. He has a nonprofit. He goes around and talks about his Tourette Syndrome to medical groups, and psychologists, and things, one of the most famous cases in the world.

One of the things that always stuck with me as I sat and listened on his presentations was his theme was, "I only own my half." I can only own my half, and I do own my half, good or bad outcomes. So I have to be able to reflect on that. I have to be able to be honest with myself as I reflect on those interactions, and I have to be okay with the fact that maybe I stunk.

Maybe I wasn't very good and maybe I said the wrong things or I was being abrasive in a moment because it was touching on something that was generating an emotional response in me that I felt strongly about. And maybe the reaction that I got was deserved, so negative or positive. So those are really things that, as we look at our profession and our internal barometers and how we reflect on our performance and getting rid of ego, and I have ego.

We all have ego, I have ego, but every time I've put it out front I lose because there's nobody I'm going to talk to today that I don't need. And if I'm turning them off because I'm saying, "I'm the smartest person in the room," then they're going to stop participating.

I'm going to get a label that I can't work off easily and my organization and my profession has just become less effective since that last interaction for that person. So those are important things for me to learn, and I will tell you, I learned many of them the hard way.

- As many of us do. Yeah.

- Yeah, I wish I could say I had it right out of the gate but I've stuck my foot in my mouth more times than I probably would like to admit. And so those are hard-learned lessons but valuable lessons as I'm progressing in my own career.

- And I think the ability to reflect on, the ability to own your half of relationships, reflect on them, and be honest about that with other people is really a building block for trust, right? You're allowing yourself to be vulnerable and say, "Look, I messed up." And there's something that connects you, people will trust you more because they think, "Okay, okay."

- Right, yeah. Well, and you said it better than I could. I had a general manager once, or I made an obvious mistake. It wasn't something that I intended to do. It impacted a lot of people. After my conversation with them on the operations side, I said, "I'm going to go out and I'm going to tell them why I did it and what I did."

"No, don't do it. Don't do it." And that old-school thinking, right, don't admit your mistakes. Just move on. But something inside me compelled me to do it and I did. I know that it wasn't a popular thought at the time because it did impact so many people from people around me. But being true to myself and being true to the team members that I have those bonds or trusts with, that's what they would expect me to do.

And if I would have followed that advice I fear I probably would have lost a step or two in those. And it kind of brings me to the other thing. It's difficult to have courage in these jobs and I understand that. We make decisions and we can make comments that'll impact the course of something very big if we're not careful.

I know it's difficult to have courage, and if that's something you're struggling with, especially organizations in our...those relationships help that, too, right? Having those relationships gives you opportunities to have candid conversations, to have discussions that may be hard where you have safer environments, where you've said things maybe in the past and you've been corrected.

You agreed and changed, but this is important, and those relationships are the things you rely on to be able to have that courage. If the only time you speak up is when you're asked, then courage is a very difficult thing. Because I got 1 shot in 50 days before they ask me another one, and if it doesn't pan out and I have no relationship to massage and work through those issues, especially since I can't see how it's going to play out then it can be very scary to put your neck out there, which ultimately makes us less effective as EHS people.

And the other byproduct is it probably makes you less desirable as a professional to leadership above you, because, one, you're not being candid, two, you don't have the courage to call a ball and a strike when they're thrown and step outside of what's comfortable and do what's right.

And those character issues kind of eat away at your capability, and your capability, and your effectiveness as an EHS person. So just maybe some thought around that, and maybe another pitch for relationships because it does impact their effectiveness in the job, specifically around courage, and specifically in industries, companies, or situations where you have dire things that you have to address.

You know they're important. You know they're impactful and you know that they're going to change the face of the company but you're not speaking up because you don't feel safe, and I think relationships help that. Not 100% panacea but it is important and it's more likely you'll have the courage you need to do what you need to do for that organization through the course of building strong relationships.

- Yeah. And I think, yeah, practicing courage with baby steps creates that psychological safety for you to be able to say, "Okay, this one's bigger than the last five."

- Right. Yeah.

- But I'm going to go there because I feel safe enough that I know that people like to forgive, too.

- Yes.

- They like honesty.

- Yes. Yes. And people like human... People like humanity We come in all shapes and sizes. You shouldn't be in the EHS profession if you don't love people.

- That's true. I mean, the whole job is to protect them, right, so you've got to love them to protect them.

- Right, and that means I have to have influence. It means I have to have trust in backing up which means I have to be [crosstalk] I don't have effectiveness if I don't have influence. And if I don't have influence I don't get the other things. So you're really, kind of, running in a world where you're somewhat incomplete, and it doesn't mean I can't walk out in the floor and get compliance.

I can get compliance all day long. I can stand there and say, "I'm the cop. I'm the authority. I'm going to get you to do this," and I would get them compliance. But when I move away they're not going to be compliant anymore. And what happens in my experience is the organization starts inoculating itself from you, and how does that look?

Well, you'll come out saying, "I want compliance," and they'll say, "Well, that's not correct. You need to go out and tell me specifically. Go get me the citation. Go get me the role. Go get me the policy." And they start putting up barriers and constraints between you and the things you're trying to execute against, and that's the organization inoculating itself from you. In that organization, I had the most influence, and I started on-site medical facilities with a conversation where you say, "I trust you. You did the analysis and here's the money."

How many people live in that world? I'm not bragging, I'm just saying, but that's the power of relationships and building up trust and time. I also had organizations where they said, "Chris, you're full of crap and [inaudible]" And they didn't want to do it because the price tag was too high, but those are all moments that added to that tapestry of trust and building influence.

And I savor those every bit as much as I do the successes in those relationships. And I think that's an important aspect, and I'm saying that mainly because I can't overstate the impact of influence through relationships and collaborative relationships building.

- Awesome. Well, that pretty much wraps us up, but there's a couple of quick questions. A birdie told me that you were writing your next book. Is that happening?

- I am. I am writing my next book. Really the concepts and theory behind "Intrinsic Stability and Organic Leadership" are in this one. Really, how do I gain stability? This is probably more for the technical people who really want to have a footprint of how to do it, and how do I break it down in a way that you can actually go out and lay on top of the organization and say, "This is this."

There's a process for finding corrective actions and building process control in there that's unique to my process, but I think that just helps you get there faster. Again, all of the experience in these companies, things that I've done, I've distilled a lot of the things that we learned through the course of years down to these five or six simple things.

If you do these, it gets you right where you need to be and you don't have to spend time. It really is more for medium and smaller companies that have less maturity and more generalists. It does not mean it can't work in a large company but a large company has a lot of layers. There's a lot there. Large companies move and change when they have to, not because they see...

And typically if they want to go a different direction they buy that talent and capability because the core organization really is very static, and necessarily so. So those really are really the target audiences, or the mid-sized to smaller audiences certainly can be used in large corporations, but for the reasons they typically will not adopt that, that streamline of a process.

- Sounds good. When should we be looking for this?

- Wonderful question.

- Or is it, sort of, so early in the process that you're like, "I don't know, man, whenever it gets done?"

- Actually, I probably would say around June or so I should be done with it. Actually, the books come out of me very quickly. It's the editing and the publisher editing, and rewriting, and then my wife reading it and saying, "It's too technical. You've got to dumb it down." So those are... Yeah, when I take it through its beta phase I usually get the, "It's too technical. Take it down."

So I would say probably around June, but if you want to learn about a lot of things that I'm talking about please pick up "Intrinsic Stability: How Organic Leadership Breeds Excellence." You can buy it on any platform, Barnes and Noble. A lot of people buy it from Amazon, so yeah, just feel free to grab it. If you want to contact me personally you can contact me through my website. It's www.intrinsicstability.com, and then just send a message.

We have some videos and things that kind of summarize some of the concepts we've talked about, but I'm a fan of the profession. I'm a bigger fan of creating excellence in organizations and I really do appreciate the opportunity to talk about it today, Mary.

- Well, thanks so much. I really enjoyed how you tied together all these concepts, you know, culture, and safety, and security, and relationships, and courage actually, which is something people don't talk about maybe enough.

- I know. It's very holistic. Well, thank you very much and look forward to seeing you again soon. ♪ [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] ♪