Safety Leadership

By Jerry Pounds

Jerry Pounds is Senior Vice President-International at Quality Safety Edge and publishes a blog on positive leadership.

Leadership gurus have made a fortune defining what leadership is because most men and women aspire to be identified as representative of the elevated stature associated with being a “leader.” Leaders have followers: leaders are purportedly charismatic and transformational. Managers have subordinates: managers are transactional and influence through the authority provided them.

by Gail Snyder

When a company has not only survived, but excelled for more than two centuries, that company is doing something right.  Not only lasting, but growing (and exponentially so), requires the ability to evolve with the times via a continual quest for improvement. This approach is the current that has energized Tucson Electric Power (TEP) since the late 1800s. Today, this principal subsidiary of UniSource Energy Corporation generates and transmits electricity to more than 400,000 customers in Southern Arizona.

By Terry E. McSween, President and CEO, Quality Safety Edge

In past articles, I have discussed leadership’s most important activity, which is regularly reviewing safety efforts within the leader’s area of responsibility. For the past decade, Quality Safety Edge has promoted the use of safety leadership checklists to help ensure the consistency of visible safety leadership practices at each level of the organization.  In many ways, we view this as behavior-based safety for leaders, and directly analogous to the safety checklist used by observers to increase attention and positive feedback for safety practices on the job.

By Gail Snyder

When Terry Nay joined Arizona’s Tucson Electric Power (TEP) several years ago as its corporate safety director, he already knew from firsthand experience how a behavior-based safety (BBS) process could be made to fail through improper implementation. So when several safety representatives at TEP expressed an interest in BBS, he not only knew what to do, but what not to do.