The Pain You Must Suffer For Safety
“We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.” – Jim Rohn
When a 20-year-old is electrocuted on the job, it affects more than another blip on a spreadsheet. Every injury or death touches the lives of parents, kids, spouses, and coworkers. Listening to Jason’s story makes you actually aware of the true price we pay for work-related deaths.
However, Jason’s story is preventable. The best practices that could have prevented his death already existed and could have been applied. So, why were they missing? Was it to save time, cost, or effort?
The Role of Leadership
We hear these excuses, but leadership has the power to prevent this problem. Leadership is responsible for the management system. The system that governs the expectations for how work is performed, and the responses when reality fails to meet those expectations.
As the one responsible for this system, leadership has a choice to make. Suffer from the pain of discipline or regret. Now, when I say discipline, I do not mean punishment. See my article on the difference between the two types of discipline. When I say discipline, I am referring to:
Discipline – train oneself to do something in a controlled and habitual way.
People often shy away from creating a culture of discipline because they are very costly to cultivate. It requires extreme commitment to get started. It could impact speed and increase operational costs at first. It may require firing employees who are unwilling to meet the standard. The most difficult part is that it requires management to have both technical knowledge of safe work practices and the ability to communicate their importance. However, once the culture is in place, it’s the small daily decisions that start to add up. The small daily difficulties of doing things the right way prevent the much larger difficulties of dealing with a fatality.
Learn More About Cultivating Culture
If you want to learn how to investigate when things go wrong and understand the best practices you need to be cultivating, the best opportunity is in the 5-Day Advanced TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis Team Leader Course. This course walks you through the TapRooT® 12-Step Interview Process, advanced evidence collection, proactive use of TapRooT®, and a deep dive into the TapRooT® Root Cause Tree® so you can lead investigations with clarity and confidence.
