Though well-intentioned and often lifesaving, adhering to and enforcing safety rules can be burdensome. It takes extra time and effort, and frequently slows down production. Workers -- and sometimes managers -- may think they can do their jobs without safety requirements. Worse yet is the pervasive, though all too human, belief injuries "won't happen to me."
"Everybody in the course of their career has been tempted to violate a rule," according to James "Jim" Wetherbee, a former naval officer and aviator, test pilot, aerospace engineer and NASA astronaut.
But what happens when safety rules are violated?
Most of the time, nothing happens, Wetherbee said, because traditionally there is a level of "conservatism" built into safety rules. But he warned delegates at the Operational Excellence in Refining and Petrochemicals Summit held recently in Houston, "Be very leery of people who think safety rules are always going to save them and protect them.
Recalling his service as a test pilot in the U.S. Navy, Wetherbee said he witnessed several times when safety rules were not conservative enough.
"When I found those, I would have personal limitations in operations to make sure I had enough conservatism so that I would not run into an accident," he said.
In his presentation, "The Ten Common Adverse Conditions in Organizations That Failed to Prevent the Next Accident," Wetherbee noted almost every accident or near-miss occurs as the result of somebody violating a rule.
Even worse, and perhaps most difficult to prevent, he said, is when upper management permits safety to be sacrificed to meet production quotas.
"They not only implicitly hint that they want you to violate the rules, but sometimes they tell you to violate the rules," he said, adding workers occasionally even are rewarded for violating rules.
"When you're violating rules, essentially you're telling everyone else in the organization that you're not trustworthy," Wetherbee insisted. "I don't care if you accomplish your mission or not; you've just lost your integrity. My father used to say to me when I was growing up, 'Your integrity is all you have.'"
Noting workers' safety and wellbeing must be held at a higher value than the tasks they complete, Wetherbee urged conference attendees to remember "it's people who are sending people to the moon -- not rockets and systems. It's people who are taking hydrocarbons out of the air -- not the systems."
Leadership beyond safety
"Who in the organization is creating value in your organization?" Wetherbee queried. "I did not say, 'Who's doing valuable work?' We're all doing valuable work and something that's necessary. But who is actually creating value?"
Answering his own question, he said it's the frontline workforce "who is extracting the hydrocarbons, putting them in the pipelines and shipping them downstream to the refineries. It is the people in the refineries who are creating the products and shipping them out to the people who are paying for it."
But if a company's value is being created by the frontline workforce, why does management "get paid bigger bucks"?
Managers and owners, he explained, are paid specifically to fulfill the "transformational purpose of leadership."
Wetherbee said leadership can be transactional -- giving orders, setting schedules, and making sure that training, logistics and tools are in place.
Transformational leadership, as opposed to transactional leadership, he explained, helps frontline workers to do their jobs better under their guidance
"My job as a leader is to encourage, motivate and inspire you to work better," Wetherbee said. "And if you're not doing that, you don't deserve a paycheck."
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