David Galloway has never held an “official” safety leadership role, yet he maintains a keen understanding of how a company can decrease risk-taking and bring greater hazard awareness to its employees.
After 35 years of manufacturing and business leadership experience, he’s worked with several safety professionals to develop a safety strategy centered on leadership.
“That passion is driven by a couple of very painful and personal stories in my life that I experienced while I was working,” David says in this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. “I always felt like there was a huge component of leadership that determined whether or not people could work safely or not.”
As the author of “Safety WALK Safety TALK,” and as the Founder and President of Springboro, Ohio-based Continuous MILE Consulting, LLC, David offers companies strategic leadership advice geared toward improving safety performance — an area of business development that he says few senior executives take the time to plan for.
David argues that if business leaders don’t take the time to learn how their employees think and what drives their actions, they won’t be able to improve safety performance because employees won’t feel cared for.
“It doesn't matter how proficient I am at creating a safety rule,” he says. “It doesn't matter how much technology I deploy. It does not matter how much structure I follow. If it doesn't start with … ‘I'm doing this because I care about others and I do not want to see them get hurt,’ then we will often fall short of the mark.”
In addition, David says leaders need to look beyond compliance — simply following the rules isn’t enough to ensure a safe work environment. Employees are humans, therefore they will make mistakes, but understanding why people take risks that lead to mistakes is one way to get to the root of the problem.
He also touches on confirmation bias as a blind spot for leaders, the endowment effect, and other factors that prevent companies from reaching their full safety potential.
Featured Guest👉 Name: David Galloway
👉 What he does: As an author and the Founder and President of Continuous MILE Consulting, David uses his experience in business leadership to help clients improve safety measures and productivity via a leadership-based approach.
👉 Company: Continuous MILE Consulting
👉 Key quote: “We have to come up with a strategy that says these are the things that are most important. These are the actions that we need to take as leaders … so that we become role models for and set the expectations for our employees.”
👉 Where to find him: LinkedIn
Safe Takes⚠️ Humans are prone to mistakes, but if leaders show employees they matter and are cared for, they’re less likely to take risks that could lead to mistakes and/or injury.
⚠️ Simply being compliant isn’t enough. Leaders need to recognize their confirmation bias becomes a blind spot for many leaders, so when approaching situations such as incident investigations, carefully formulate objective questions so that you can properly determine why employees have taken a particular action.
⚠️ Safety is a “continuous improvement journey,” and by making small improvements to how they communicate with their employees and show what’s “in it for them,” leaders can have a large impact.
Resources⛑️ Lean Six Sigma –– Many of David’s methods are based on his understanding of this process improvement technique.
⛑️ “Safety WALK Safety TALK” — David’s book about how leaders can create a sustainable, injury-free workplace.
⛑️ “Start With Why” — Simon Sinek’s book on the importance of understanding the “why?” in leadership.
Top quotes from the episode:“The people who are most successful are those who recognize that you don't just need the data to understand the process, but you need to understand how people think, how they behave and what drives their actions.”
“It matters not how compliant we are with the rules or procedures. Human behavior will drive us to make a mistake or to take a risk.”
“It doesn't matter how proficient I am at creating a safety rule. It doesn't matter how much technology I deploy. It does not matter how much structure I follow. If it doesn't start with … ‘I'm doing this because I care about others and I do not want to see them get hurt,’ then we will often fall short of the mark.”
“Principled, prevalent, and personalized … that's an easy way to think about how to make [your safety pitch] relevant or what's in it for an individual.”
“Safety, like anything else in business, is a process. It's a complicated, interwoven, interconnected process … and so we need to view safety as the way that we do business.”