Hey Everybody it's Red Beard with, isitrecordable.com, safeopedia.com, and AccuStatsUSA.com. How do you revive a safety program in a company that is too far gone? How would you start reviving a program where there is low trust, where there are silos built? Well the very first step in any program is to destroy those silos. The goal of safety is to learn and any barriers to learning need to be aggressively removed.
There are people in companies, and every company I'm sure they have at least one, I call them grabblers. And what these are basically little "Sméagols" like the Sméagol from Lord of The Rings. Little grabblers or Sméagols that basically lurk around the company. They build silos and they live underground. They live in these little caves and they build walls and go behind your back. They make it so they destroy teamwork.
They make it so you can't trust what they say because you never know how they're spinning, what they heard, or what they told someone else. And, you know, and I realized that these people really are Sméagols and there's a lesson here from Lord of The Rings. And the lesson is the ring of power, because these, that's what they do. That's all they are, is that they're, these are people who are focused on trying to climb the ladder to get more power, to influence others. They're very selfish. They put themselves before the company. They put themselves before the safety of others. And essentially what they're doing is, is they are looking for the ring of power for themselves.
And in the movie, do you remember what that ring of power does when you put it on your finger? It makes you invisible, right? So anybody who works in the shadows, anyone who works in invisibility, they're problematic and they're antithetical to safety and they will destroy your efforts to create a just culture. They will destroy it. The solution is transparency. Bring about transparency, recreate that trust with employees. And those people will skitter away. Those little Sméagols, if you take away the ring of power they can no longer remain invisible, and that is key to turning the tide in a company that desperately needs a change in their safety performance.