As a safety person, I have found myself wearing many hats for an organization. I was the one that had to set the vision, make the plan, and lead the work to be done. Early in my career when asked to do all the things, I had no training or tools at my disposal. I had to make it up as I went and hope that it was right. Honestly, the planning process for some organizations was me taking the OSHA recordable incident rate and reducing it by 10% each year for 5-years. Then, praying that I could achieve those numbers with no real investment, support, or leadership training. For many years I would then report a statistical miss on the 5-year plan, get yelled at on a conference call, then perform the same 5-year 10% exercise using the current OSHA RIR.

It was later in my career that various organizations started teaching real lean theory and how to use the tools to benefit the safety organization. What I love most about lean or six-sigma is that there are so many tools at my disposal. That is also a problem, though. Not every tool is needed every time. It is up to the practitioner to choose the right tools for the right application so that they can be effective. One of those tools that I have used many times to help create the vision, plan, and tactical steps for a safety program is an X-Matrix or Hoshin X-Matrix.

First, a quick side-story. While completing my MBA, I was in a statistics class. The professor was lecturing on the importance of knowing which method to use for which scenario. Which even to this day confuses the heck out of me. He was telling a story of a Ph.D. student he was mentoring. He has asked the student what their plan was for their dissertation. The student expressed that they would gather sets of data and run pretty much every statistical model they had learned on the data. The professor let them follow that direction. Long story short, the student discovered that not every statistical model was needed to create good conclusions.

This is the same with using lean or six sigma tools. Not every tool is needed for every job. It is necessary to know the tools and their uses. That way when there is a situation where planning or data is needed, the person is aware of the tool. These methods of organization are tools just like physical tools in a toolbox. If all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail. But if you have a well-stocked toolbox, then you can adapt to the job and the circumstances of the work that you need to perform. Part of being a mentor is to help equip someone with the tools they need at this stage of their career and the future they want to create for themselves.

It has taken a while to get to the point. The X-matrix is not a tool that is used in every single circumstance. If you need to help focus on the 3-5 year goals, your 1-year objectives, the metrics that need to be influenced, and your top-level priorities, this is a tool that can help bridge the short term to the long term. It helps to crystalize the actual plan. When I have been in a position where I was setting these visions, the x-matrix is invaluable. I routinely review the matrix with the top-level leadership to remind all of us about the top-level priorities. It helps to keep the safety mission on track while still making the necessary course corrections.

Next time I will walk through the process of using the x-matrix, but until then here is the blank copy that I use. Enjoy! 🙂

When I started the series of mentorship blog posts, I never expected to find such a personal passion for planning and prioritizing. It was quite strange to realize that over the years I have developed a layered approach to keeping myself on task and track. I also look back and see all the tools, tricks, and mistakes that I made in trying to keep myself organized. What I thought would be only part of one blog posting is now evolving into so much more.

Being a mentor is about helping teach and coach skills that would benefit someone through the rest of their career. The ability to prioritize all the work that we do is critical to success. The beginning of good organization for me was my digital bullet journal. When I take notes throughout the day and during meetings, I am capturing all of the items that will need to be completed, followed up, researched, planned, or remembered at some unspecified date.

A RAIL is a “rolling action item list”. I have a reference page dedicated to actions that need longer than one business day to complete. This is where technology has been amazing, With the click of a bookmark, I can review and update my list. Hopefully, the actions that have been created in my journal are ones that I can complete before I complete my workday. Oftentimes, there are tasks that I am not able to finish or know will need more time. My RAIL is dedicated to those actions that will need more time. During the first part of the day, I will review the day before and find the actions that I was not able to complete. Those actions are now added to my RAIL.

These separate page(s) in my bullet journal are dedicated to following through on items that I need to complete. I want to be completely transparent in my process and also to show that I am far from perfect in my methods. Sadly, I have found this specific method can have benefits. I call it the 48-hour rule. I also must admit that a wonderful mentor of mine taught me this technique. The premise is that some tasks will resolve themselves in 48-hours.

It is important to distinguish the tasks that have to be done by a certain date and those that can “hang out” for that 48-hour period or even longer. Maybe the project never gets off the ground. Maybe the priorities shift. Maybe the person finds a different path. It is amazing how some tasks simply go away after someone has had a couple of nights’ sleep. The human mind never ceases to amaze me. There are times where something that seems vitally important one day, seems trivial after something as simple as sleeping. That is part of the beauty of a RAIL. I have not lost the item. I still plan to do the item. But I am letting a little bit of time help dictate which tasks take priority.

I have found many benefits to keeping a dedicated RAIL. I do not have to go back through pages and pages of notes to find my running to-do list. I do not have to look through scraps of paper or post-it notes to find the task I am looking for. If someone asks me about a task, I can quickly look for its status. If I am asked what I am working on, there is a quick reference to talk about. If I find a bunch of themed items in my RAIL, I can use those to see if that program should be of escalated importance. I can also find if there are significant time wasters or non-value-added items that I am supposed to do. All this is data that keeps me working forward and helps relate to the organization the safety priorities.

To be honest, Industrial and Organizational Psychology was an odd direction for a safety person. I/O Psychologists are more of leadership coaches or Human Resources people. It was early in my career when I realized that the technical aspects of safety do not change easily or often. The more I worked in the field of safety, the more I came to the idea that safety was about engaging and motivating people to follow the safety policies. One of the hardest lessons I had to learn was how to work with people

As a mentor, we need to help further someone’s knowledge of the standards and technical items of the safety profession. I am always amazed at how much knowledge we are expected to have access to: fire codes, electrical codes, chemical knowledge, rigging, trenching, workers compensation, trucking, vehicle safety, road safety, and safety systems just to name a few. There are also the items outside of safety that are equally important: accounting, leadership, presenting, root cause analysis, and lean theory as just examples. So many times, we focus on teaching the technical that we can forget to help mentor the so-called soft skills.

Teaching and learning soft skills are harder than teaching technical skills and that can lead to them being avoided. It is also hard to quantify soft skills. How much time management mentoring is enough? When is someone at an acceptable level of people interaction? How to mentor someone to be focused and ambitious? How can I make the soft skills practice relevant to the person I am mentoring? All these are valid questions and are something that should be considered when becoming a mentor.

Let’s first consider what skills should be emphasized when coaching someone. Similar to my previous mentoring post, this is all about investing time in being a mentor. The should be a conversation about the needs of soft skills. Sometimes, it is apparent how a mentor can be assisted. Other times, a mentor may have requests of skills they want to learn. Good communication is vital to both understanding the needs of your mentee and helping them understand what you will be doing to assist. There needs to be a plan and direction.

I was fortunate to have an intern at one of my positions. One day the plant manager was in my office chatting with me when an intern came in to ask me a question. The plant manager asked, “good to see you, what have you done to make my site safer today?” The intern replied while caught off guard by the question, “uhhhh . . . nothing?” Now the plant manager knew the intern was making a difference. They had projects that were going well. The point of the questions was to give them a chance to shine. It was time for me to start teaching soft skills. In this case, the art of the elevator speech.

I took time to talk about the importance of being ready to be asked questions about what we are working on and the progress that we are making. An elevator speech is a quick 60-second pitch on what you are doing and how you are bringing exceptional value to the organization. The idea is that if you are in an office or in an elevator with a key influencer of your organization, then you can quickly talk yourself up by having a prepared elevator speech. It never hurts to be ready to promote yourself and the safety profession in your company.

The elevator speech is just one of various soft skills that can help someone new to the safety profession. In future posts, we will continue to work our way through other scenarios and how helping a mentor with soft skills can be a huge benefit. I think this is one of the neatest things about the safety profession. We get the opportunity to teach some very technical skills along with key principles of leadership and people interaction.