In this episode, safety leader David Garner joins host Mark McBride-Wright to share his remarkable journey from growing up in a world where safety didn’t exist to leading cultures that put people first. Drawing on decades of hands-on experience across manufacturing, architecture, and the military, David reflects on what it takes to move beyond the outdated “name, blame, shame, and retrain” mindset and create systems that truly learn and adapt.
He speaks about trust, psychological safety, and the human side of industrial work, reminding us that leadership isn’t about punishment, it’s about understanding. Through vivid metaphors and lived experience, David offers a vision of safety rooted in empathy and growth, where every action plants a seed for future leaders to nurture and sustain.
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Mark McBride-Wright 0:00
Hello. Welcome to the next episode of the safe leader podcast. I am your host, Mark McBride-Wright, and today I am joined by David Gardner, who is a certified safety professional, a certified Hazardous Materials Manager and a safety management practitioner. He is the Environment Health and Safety Director at Walden Environmental Engineering, bringing over a decade of hands on experience in environmental health and safety leadership across manufacturing, architecture, military and nutrition sectors known for building strong safety cultures from the ground up. David previously served as EHS manager at glanbria Nutritionals, where he reduced recordable injuries by two thirds within two years and developed foundational programs at a site with no previous safety infrastructure. His work at Nucor Steel included building a safety culture that went 37 months without a recordable injury, and leading corporate audits across a dozen sites in nine states. David was instrumental in managing the first ever OSHA approved lockout tagout variants, a landmark achievement in industrial safety. His diverse background includes roles in architecture, the National Guard, agriculture and fish farming, giving him unique hazard awareness and cross disciplinary insight. David is a certified Hazardous Materials Manager, OSHA trainer and ISO 14,001 auditor with deep regulatory experience, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Transportation, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and local permitting agencies. Today, he uses that breadth to provide full spectrum EHS consulting and compliance support to businesses and governments. David, welcome. Glad to be here. Thanks for Thanks for joining the the podcast so you and I met when I was living stateside a few a few months ago, and we we connected on this shared passion of safety. Absolutely.
David Garner 2:22
We had a great event where we partnered with the boulder group, and we’re learning about how to implement both communication and safety together and how they go hand in hand.
Mark McBride-Wright 2:35
It was a great event. It was a great event that and we can come on to that in a moment, but I like to start off and grounding ourselves in in the podcast with understanding the motivations about the person in front of us, person in front of me, and thinking about the learning arc that you’ve been on, what you’ve experienced to get to where you’re at now, what influences you’ve had that led you to pursue a career in safety. So if we can just get in a little mental time capsule and go back and meet the young David, tell us about him. Are you are you doing now what he thought he would be doing in the future?
David Garner 3:22
The young David, probably not so going back in my arc, my first job was when I was five years old. Wow, that was working on a chicken farm, and I had my first industrial accident at seven years old, and still have a damaged fingernail as a result of it, but basically went from a culture where safety didn’t exist, and growing up did lots of hazardous work as a child and a teenager, and there was kind of no history of safety there. And slowly, as I grew through my life and experienced more things and was exposed to more companies and more places, grew from not even knowing anything about safety to now being able to lead it. Fantastic.
Mark McBride-Wright 4:18
And so what? What was your moment? Then that made you think, yeah, there’s something in this discipline, like, did you come into it by chance? Or were you working in a high hazardous sector? Because you’ve got a really, probably the most, one of the broadest backgrounds I’ve met of a person in quite a long time in terms of all the the sectors that you’ve covered. So, you know, was your military? You mentioned the military there, you know was, were you serving in the military early on, and this is when you discovered safety within that context. And tell us a bit about how you how you discovered it.
David Garner 4:59
The military was probably one of the first places where I worked and actually had safety training that was a dedicated part of it and but because it was my first introduction to safety, I was able to follow it, but it really didn’t, kind of become a core of who I was at that time, okay, and probably the first time that I worked somewhere that safety became super important and was voluntary, was when I was working at architecture firm in Alaska, and they had a safety committee. It was the first time I’d worked somewhere where the safety committee It was first time that we had done evacuation drills and earthquake drills and things like that. And so that’s a probably a big tip into doing all the other things that led me into the safety career.
Mark McBride-Wright 5:56
And how have you found then across? Can you take us on that journey, then across those different contexts that you’ve worked in, and how safety has been present in each of those different industries, you’ve got, architecture, agriculture, the military, fishing, I think was mentioned in One in the introduction, yeah, fish farming. Fish farming.
David Garner 6:21
So as I said, I’ve been working since I was a child, and I’ve been paying taxes since I was 11 years old. Every year since then, I’ve paid taxes, and so a lot of those were weekend or summer jobs where I was doing tree work, or I worked for a seed and feed store for one summer, and they had large fish farming operation both, but they were selling fish to other farmers to stock their ponds, but also they were growing them for sale and basically very little safety and lots of accidents. I didn’t recognize them at the time as accidents, lots of near misses, and I still bear a few scars from my time working there. And as I got into high school, I saw that I really enjoyed construction, and I really didn’t want to be one of the 40 year old people with broken bodies that I saw working all around me. Okay? And like, what am I good at? What do I enjoy? And that’s why I decided that I wanted to go into architecture. But also I came from a fairly poor background, and so I saw the National Guard as a way to be able to serve the country, but also be able to help fund my education. And so seven days after my 17th birthday, I joined the National Guard on a delayed entry program, and was able to finish out my senior year of high school and then go off to military training when I left high school, or left high school, I left university, had an architecture degree and went and worked in architecture for several years, and through the Oh 809, market crash, architecture jobs kept getting scarcer and scarcer, and by 2011 I wasn’t able to find any more work In the architecture field, and ended up getting hired by new core steel at one of their metal buildings plants doing drafting work for the erection drawings and the shop drawings for metal buildings. I was at their office location, and their plant was nine hours away, and I got involved in the safety committee through the office location, but it’s a little bit more limited in what you can do there. And then about a year into my employment with them, they decided they need to get better communications between the office and the plant, and opened up the opportunity to move with the company and moved to the plant location, and they wanted to set up engineers and detailers there, and basically said, if you go you’ll have more opportunity for professional growth. And in that, I ended up getting involved with the safe committee at the plant location, and within a year, I was leading the safe committee there, and the position became available for the safety coordinator at that position, and we were in the middle of our worst year and a decade and at. And I took on the role, and really didn’t have a background in safety. I knew how to read and interpret codes and rules based on my history with architecture, yeah, and I knew how to relate to people. But as far as formal safety training, I didn’t have any, and the company had six recordable injuries in the first nine months of the year, and in that fourth quarter we had six more. So it was a real trial by fire, and through gaining the buy in with the team, we were able to turn that around. And the next year we had four. The next year we had two, and it was a very rapid improvement.
Mark McBride-Wright 10:52
So how did you take it, then, from the place where it was, where you were having 12 I guess in that 12 months, from what you said, and then to, you know, having, then none within 37 months. How did you? How did you the 37
David Garner 11:18
months was actually at another location. I question. It was mostly about two things. It was about getting employee engagement and giving them the opportunity to do the things that they were passionate about that contributed to safety. And it was about getting better incident reporting and getting better, corrective actions out of our incidents.
Mark McBride-Wright 11:46
Okay, okay, and was there a culture previously of blame, or, or, you know, like a lack of trust, or, because sometimes you hear that, that you know things are happening, but people aren’t reporting, and so there’s a whole sort of mystery set of events that are or things are occurring that you’re just not seeing because they’re not getting reported. Did you have to have a phase of trust building between leadership and shop floor workers? Was Was that in the mix,
David Garner 12:22
absolutely, we had the traditional model of name, blame, shame and retrain and you would doubt who touched it last. They were the one who got blamed. They had to stand up in front of the group and tell everybody how they messed up, and then you would punish them and retrain them, and then nothing would change. And it was not uncommon to come out onto the floor and see a handrail that had been dented by a crane load or a forklift, but nothing got reported, and so we had to build more trust in the team, and part of that was showing them when they did report issues, we were actually addressing the root causes and not addressing trying to fix the people instead of fixing the system. And part of that was we got the safety committee involved in reviewing the incidents with the supervisors and the people that were there. So once a month, we had a meeting and we reviewed the incidents, but it was led by the safety committee, and they were trying to determine, is this an effective solution to this problem, or are we just punishing people and not fixing the system?
Mark McBride-Wright 13:33
Do you find something Well, do you find something to when you do that root cause analysis that you don’t actually get to the root of the problem.
David Garner 13:44
Well, you said root cause, and almost never is there just one root cause. And that was definitely one of the issues. The mentality at the time was follow the five whys and yes, why five times, and you get to the root cause. But often that maybe gets you one of the multiple causes. But you have to understand what happened in the incident, in context of what was happening, what the employee was thinking. And until you get to the point where you would make the same or maybe not, you make the same decision, but you understand how they chose to make that decision, you really don’t understand what was happening and the full scope of what’s going on. And when you investigate in that level of detail, by the time you get to the time where the incident happened, you already know that it was going to happen and why it was going to happen and what was contributing to it,
Mark McBride-Wright 14:40
yeah, yeah, yeah. So it’s, it’s, there’s almost like an expanded layer or approach needed when you’re doing that sort of investigation to then think about the context, the communication, the culture. Or the and I guess this is where, where we met. You know, the session on communication and behavior fits so nicely into like safety culture and the sort of things that are perceived currently as the fringes of safety culture, because we think we just need to look at the core technical things that went wrong. But actually, there’s so much more in those shadows, isn’t there that? Do you think we’re doing that enough like are our tools and processes and methods and approaches and mindset within the safety community. Are we? Are we bringing process safety leadership, safety leadership into that way, like, are we? Are we? Are we? Are we putting light on challenging the norms of the past, like doing a five wise investigation and then being surprised that it happens again. You know, are we training people up in alternative ways, complementary ways? I
David Garner 16:11
think that we’re making progress, but we’ve still got a long ways to go to get it to be the industry standard. I work in a lot of different facilities now as a consultant, and I still see companies using the traditional five whys and still blaming employees and not fixing the system. And so we’ve still got a lot long ways to go to be able to transition to really treating safety as part of the system and fixing the systems. Because most often, yes, the employee made what looks like a choice, but when you look at it in the context of the system that they were operating in, they were making the choice that the system decided that they could make. Yeah, a lot of our decisions are controlled by the systems that we’re working within.
Mark McBride-Wright 17:01
Yeah, so the five wise is obviously really popular because it’s, it’s been done lots of times, and it’s by virtue of scale and frequency. It’s become a standard, you know, or a common approach. Are there? What alternative tools, mechanisms, strategies, are you using to complement that like, or is it case by case? It’s it’s more nuanced, like, do we even have anything yet that helps do a really good, broader root cause analysis that unearths these other contexts,
David Garner 17:43
I try to meet people and companies where they’re at, and some are ready for different levels of it. And so if you’re just always done the five whys, I might suggest that instead of asking, Why did you stick your hand in that machine, change the question to, can you tell me the story of how you ended up sticking your hand into the machine and just that small switch changes it from being an aggressive you messed up. What did you do wrong? To, I want to understand the context. And can you help me understand it little further down the road, we can change it from a five whys to a wishbone diagram, so that you got lots of different things that are feeding into it. But the best way that I’ve seen to change it is to one change the language from incident investigation to a permission to a learning team, and so it’s an event. It’s not an incident, and it the entire goal of the learning is just that learning, it’s not to blame and punish, is to learn as much as we can from that event, and with that, you’re trying to get the employees who were involved as part of it, you’re trying to get leadership as part of you’re trying to get engineering as part of it, you’re getting everybody who this is either designing the system, operating the system, or affected by the system, as a conversation. And you start at the beginning of the day and work all the way through all the issues that you found, and in normal work, the employees are doing so many things where they’re having to manage the risk throughout the day, the procedure as written can almost never be followed the way it’s written, because depending on the wear on the equipment, or the type of part that You’re running, or 100 other variables. They’re having to make changes and make decisions that they’re keeping the equipment running, but you never know that, because it just looks like they’re doing their job, and if you don’t dig in, but then you uncover challenges about, oh, this tool doesn’t work well. The software is frustrating. I’m running out of this, and I have to leave my station to go chase down someone in shipping to bring me more boxes to put things in. Yeah, yeah. Traditional investigation that starts five minutes before something happens. You’re never going to capture all of that, and by expanding the scope of what you’re learning about, you have so many more opportunities to learn and get better, and get so much more buy in, because people see when something happens, instead of getting smacked, they get their life gets easier, their production gets easier, their frustrations start going away, and it helps with production. It helps with quality. It helps with safety and learning. Teams have been so successful that all those departments and more have stolen it as an idea for them to solve problems that they have.
Mark McBride-Wright 20:55
Yeah, I love it. I love it. I think that’s really good. And it’s essentially then shifting to that just culture idea where, and I love that. I think it’s so powerful that
David Garner 21:10
re
Mark McBride-Wright 21:12
rebranding safety internally to be an advisory support function than an accusatory police type function doesn’t mean
David Garner 21:27
in my past, I’ve always treated my role as to be a support. I’m a resource for the team, the supervisors, the ones who day to day, have to enforce the safety and make sure everybody’s following the rules. If I’m walking around I’m seeing someone not wearing their PPE, I’m going to absolutely tell them, hey, you need to put your safety glasses on, or whatever it is. But my job isn’t to write them up for not wearing those safety glasses. My job is to be a resource to help them solve problems
Mark McBride-Wright 21:56
the where then this is interesting. So you know, my work’s all about trying to expand then into the what someone’s thinking the brain like they’re physically present. But are they mentally absent? Are they fully showing up? Are they preoccupied with other things in their mind? How are individuals connecting? What are the inter relationships like between the workers on the plan or the designers in the office and the support functions, etc, what’s the dominant culture and the subculture, and where are their tension points? And you know, this is where, well, this is where diversity, equity, inclusion, like creating an inclusive culture for everyone, irrespective of your background and origin, etc, really comes into play, because I question whether or not we have inclusive cultures in some of these environments where we have a majority white male workforce. You know, construction manufacturing has the highest has a very high suicide rate in the United States, as well as here in the United Kingdom. So how can you give us your thoughts on on those comments I’ve just made with regard to the culture of you know, the the the sectors within which you’re now working? Do you think there’s an opportunity for safety to pick up some of the fallout of culture programs, perhaps, or have we missed a trick up until now, like not really making safety also encompass with the same scrutiny, psychological safety as physical safety.
David Garner 23:40
I think physical safety and psychological safety really go hand in hand, because you have to have a comfort level where when something’s going wrong, that you can go to one of your leaders and talk about it and know that they’re not going to yell at you because you brought them news that they didn’t want to hear that their concern is for you as a person and how they can help you be the best you you can be. And really, that’s kind of been my whole mindset when it comes to safety. Is people first, even above meeting compliance, it’s what takes care of the people first, and so if you do that, then you’re going to end up being fairly compliant, but it also allows you that freedom to see what the people need. And in my mind and in my experience, having diverse backgrounds and diverse people makes for a stronger organization. And we learn more. We know more, the more people that we include in that and you mentioned the suicide rate, I do a lot of work in the aerospace industry, and the aerospace industry actually has a suicide rate that’s over three times as high as just standard manufacturing. And it’s one of the highest in the country, and something that, unfortunately we hear about all too often,
Mark McBride-Wright 25:13
and our businesses doing anything about it,
David Garner 25:17
some are, I think that, I know that you’ve got a group in the UK that is trying to do more about it among engineers, and I think something like that could definitely help here. But individual organizations, it depends on where their culture is at. Some like I said, have addressed it, but most have not.
Mark McBride-Wright 25:43
I find really interesting about the US in particular, because, you know, putting aside for a moment all the executive orders and that that came out in February and have affected you know what businesses are confident to do or not? Do you know, the US are world leading when it comes to supporting veterans, for example, when they leave veteran life and move into city life, civilian life. And I believe that this group of people as well also have a high rate of loss of life or mental ill health, things that from what they’ve been through in the military as they then transition out of that life, like being supported and nurtured and cared for. You know, it’s a strong part of American culture, like looking after those who’ve served and and like even when it comes to, well, affirmative action and diversity law and what have you, I think you know, you can still legitimately have programs that support veterans, You know, into into the workforce, and what have you so it just, I wonder if there’s stuff that can be learned from that, if those mechanisms are still being effective, or whether they were effective, I don’t know, because it’s a lot of people. You know, there’s a large potential talent pool there of people that would have brilliant skills that could then translate transfer into an engineering, a manufacturing, you know, a construction context. Yes, okay, it might still be majority male, which doesn’t help our other diversity, demographics and diversifying, but it could really help challenge the the persona that, and I might be stereotyping here, that we expect an engineer to have to be stoic, to be highly technical, to not be vulnerable, to not lead with empathy. You know, very numbers focused. You know that stereotype of a typical engineer, which I don’t really agree with, from the people that I’ve met, but I wonder if it, if it plays out in majority male teams, definitely when I’ve when I’ve delivered training or visited sites, and the composition of the group has been majority male, and so you’ve got like, masculine energy there, there, there is a there is, it is harder to break through that to get to what’s going on in here and in here, in the heart, it’s quite surface level leadership. Then, then, then deep, deep, you know, emotional leadership. So I think there must be some way for what we do on in safety leadership to pick up on some of that.
David Garner 28:56
I agree. I think of it like a nice, hard loaf of bread. We’ve got a crunchy crust, and then it softs inside. In my experience, those heavy industrial people, they really focus on putting an exterior that’s hard to the outside world, and they’re completely okay. But having lived and worked with them for over a decade. They had needs just like everyone else, and once you get to know them and gain their trust, then they’re willing to open up to you. I’ve been counselor to many, a person who came to me with problems and trying to work through it and just having that support and openness, that I was willing to listen and willing to help them and direct them to wherever they needed to be if I couldn’t give them the help that they needed, you first have to gain the trust, and I think part of that is being embedded with the team and seeing them. A very regular basis. If there’s a new EHS person out there, my biggest recommendation is go spend a week, a month, as much as you can get away with, working on the floor, side by side with the workers. It’ll teach you what the hazards are, but it’ll gain their trust, and they’ve never seen people who are responsible for safety, who are willing to go out and work side by side with them and see what they experience, and that will be a very quick way to get that buy in and get that trust.
Mark McBride-Wright 30:36
That’s great that’s great advice. That’s great advice. What? What could we be doing at a national level? Then, is there something, is there some sort of training program we could roll out to try and cultivate this mindset in the engineers of tomorrow, as well as the engineers of today or the EHS professionals of tomorrow? What? What? What can we do to sort of catalyze this, this change?
David Garner 31:16
I think part of it is as we switch from
David Garner 31:25
basically the name, blame, shame and retrain type to a learning culture, part of that comes with we treat people differently as we learn not only about the work that We’re doing, but more about the people. And so at least in my world, that would make the biggest difference. And so switching more to a focus on learning and the less on a focus on you messed up, we’re going to write you up, and then everything’s good.
Mark McBride-Wright 31:58
I wonder if there’s also something in this is where my chemical engineering brain comes in, I think, in terms of control loops, feeding forward and feeding back and making changes and waiting for the delay to see the outcome of the change that you made, etc. And and I do wonder, what, rather than just bringing people into the same context and not changing the culture of what we have today, we need to be doing that. But then what can we do for investment in the future, for the talent that’s coming in in next year, three years, five years, 10 years. And therefore that means turning and looking at our education system, the universities, the colleges you know, that are training our future, EHS professionals and engineering professionals. What tweaks do we need to make to the learning experience that they are going through in terms of what good, progressive, inclusive management and leadership looks like. I wonder if that’s even happening,
David Garner 33:05
at least when I went through school, that wasn’t part of the conversation, and I would love to see that be included in our education. And it’s the kind of thing that just being exposed to it, plants that seed, and it may take it 10 years, 20 years, to grow into a fully formed tree where you’re getting everything out of it that you’re wanting. But if you don’t plant those seeds today, you’ll never get to where you want to get in 10 or 20 years.
Mark McBride-Wright 33:41
Maybe there’s a moral imperative for us as industry leaders to be doing, to be sowing those seeds as part of our education engagement. We run some, you know, we, I mean, we’ve barely touched the surface of the scale of intervention that’s needed, you know, here in the UK anyway. But you know, I’m trying to bring in engineers here and there to give, like, guest speaking lectures at universities, you know. And industrialists get excited when they get to come back and talk about what they do, you know, and share share pictures of the site, and the students love it as well. Because what I often find with students is that their perception of what an engineer does or what a professional does is limited to the academics that they’re around every day. And usually academics have only ever worked in academia. They’ve never actually worked out in, you know, industry or stuff. So so it’s such a nice opportunity to have the individuals share a bit about themselves, and then we could take out a layer deeper to do, like mentoring, you know, group mentoring, or one to one mentor. Entering even and just really build that scaffold, scaffold that relationship, which then might help with attraction and retention. I think it’s I just think we operate a lot in mental silos, and don’t ever zoom out and think about the big the big picture
David Garner 35:23
again, even if it’s just academia versus industry, that diversity of just bringing more groups together makes us stronger, and I’ve had a lot of benefit from different mentors throughout my life, and that mentoring relationship and building that culture of just having someone that you can go to and ask, Hey, I’ve got this problem. How can I best address it? Really pays off in the long run,
Mark McBride-Wright 35:54
definitely is that support in your pocket. I WhatsApp is my go to for you know, if I’ve got an issue or need some help, I’ve got, you know, everyone who I trust implicitly in a particular field or domain, and I can message them at any point to get that answer. You know, get that, get that support. And you need, you need that for your for developing yourself and for your professional development and mental well being as well. You know, having that mentorship for people who’ve done it before is good. Do you know, actually, of any resources that where safety has embraced the AI revolution and any tools that can surface up lessons learned from historical past incidents.
David Garner 36:46
There’s a few out there, and the some of the most useful are ones that, instead of having a drop down box on your incident report that says that this was related to machine guarding, or it was whatever category it is, you just put in the narrative of what you found, and then they will come up with the categories after the fact and be able to go through that data. And so it doesn’t pigeonhole you into, Oh, you’ve only got these 10 options to categorize. What’s the root causes. Instead, you give the narrative and the story, and again, it’s about the context, instead of just the Okay, it was a pinch point injury, or it was a laceration.
Mark McBride-Wright 37:32
And are, is there? Is there software being developed that pulls together learnings from national accidents, you know, Deep Water
David Garner 37:44
Horizon aware of yet, right? Hopefully we’ll get there. But right now, those are usually implemented by, at best, large companies, and pulls data from all of their incidents,
Mark McBride-Wright 37:56
right, right? Yeah, right. That that’s what, that was my next point, or is it? Is it more within the confines of this site or this refinery or this manufacturing plant, we’re gonna pull off our, you know, major accident hazard reports, and our kosher OSHA submissions and whatever we’ve got, you know, and then we’ve got it all, all input, some sort of, I mean, not withstanding liability and legal and all that kind of can of worms, you know. But you almost want something where, with the intention of creating good and avoiding loss of life in the future, all of that data from every plant in the United States and globally is just pulled into one big system that can then surface up things that have happened in different places and what happened and how it was dealt with, and what not to do. You know, lessons that were learned from the action that was taken,
David Garner 39:01
unfortunately because of legal liability, a lot of companies are really reluctant to share incident data. There was a big story that was in the papers, and there was a nurse at Vanderbilt University who pulled the wrong medicine and administered it to a patient, and the patient ended up dying as a result. And when you go back and look at it, the system was set up to cause failure, and she just happened to be the unlucky one who happened to be the poster child, and in that case, she ended up getting prosecuted and convicted and sent to jail as a result. But other medical institutions had the exact same systems and exact same problems and the exact same risk of patients getting injured and. And they weren’t willing to share that this was a problem and talk about it among different medical institutions, because of the fear of getting sued for, oh, you messed up. And that’s happening with all the different industries, and some industry organizations they have where they get together. And in safety, a lot of us treat it as R and D means rip off and duplicate. If you’ve got a problem and we can learn from it, we’re going to rip off your solution and we’re going to duplicate it. We’ll change it enough to make it our own. But there’s nothing that I keep as proprietary and safety. It’s about how can I help people go home the way they came in? So the the
Mark McBride-Wright 40:46
best halfway house, I guess, that we can do, is to be sharing within our community lessons learned. Do a deep dive into how we executed that broader five, why approach by reframing questions and seeing a different outcome. And like sharing it, sharing it out there to tell I went to, I went to safety on the edge in Berkeley, California. It was the first conference, first time the conference was ran, and it was absolutely brilliant. You know, there was a fantastic keynote from Kim Green, who’s the chief executive at Southern power company, I think, one of the utilities down in the southern, one of the southern states. And I learned so much from it. You know, I learned so much I’ve been applying, like some of what she said to client work that I’ve been doing, and she because she presented a great case study and where they thought they were recording the right incidents, the right data, they were seeing a trend line go down, but Actually they were creating a culture where people just weren’t reporting, and so they then set about changing how reporting was done. Obviously, data started to go up, but it meant that the the fatality rate, I think, started to go down, because they were actually seeing recordable incidents going up, but they were then able to implement mechanisms that would prevent serious fatality or fatality or serious injury happening. So, so then you know that that went down, which isn’t something that a board always wants to see. You know, changing. I’ve had to
David Garner 42:43
fight against that at every site I’ve been at, because one of my first goals is to increase near miss reporting. And one site that was at went from three the year that I arrived to 38 the next year, to 69 the next year, and some of the managers were hair on fire. Oh, my God, we’re so bad. I’m like, No, we’re just hearing about it now. And these incidents were all happening before. We just didn’t know about it. And now we have the knowledge we’ve learned from them, we have a chance to get better. And it’s not that we’re less safe because we’re having more incidents. They’re almost all near misses. The number of property damages and injuries have gone down. The number of near misses that we get the opportunity with nothing bad happening to learn from has gone up. Yeah, and the more that you can do those and we’ve had some near misses where in slightly different circumstances, they could be fatal incidents. And those are such a valuable opportunity that you have to learn from those, and you have to prevent those from happening in the future. Because we, none of us, want it to be a fatal incident.
Mark McBride-Wright 43:57
So if a client is having you know three to four and every three or four days is having somewhere on its sites an accident, you know, something that is serious enough that it gets reported, and they have an ambition to break the plateau. You know, their safety performance is sort of plateauing that that tends to show that actually something serious is bubbling away. If this these rates aren’t on a downward progression, it’s a bit counterintuitive to come in and say to them, Well, look, you’re the rates might even be going up, but I guess it’s whether or not they’re overlaying that data with Yeah, near miss data, isn’t it? Yeah. So the the accident
David Garner 44:46
near misses aren’t quite a leading indicator, but it gets back into that conversation about having leading into indicators versus lagging indicators. Pause with those, if all your. Doing is measuring the number of incidents. It’s not really giving you any data about where your safety is headed. It’s where your safety’s been. Yeah, if there’s a fear of reporting, and there’s so many things that can lead into a fear of reporting, it certainly drives down the number of things that get reported, but it’s only the things that they can’t hide. It’s either an injury or a property damage that get reported. And I often see that with companies, they have more injuries and property damages as they have near misses. And to me, at an absolute minimum, you should have more near misses than the other two combined, right? It should probably be more double that, because near misses are happening all day, every day, and the way that I define a near miss is anything that gives you that pucker factor, Damn, that was close. I have to look out for that in the future. Well, if I need to look out for in the future, so does everyone else.
Mark McBride-Wright 45:58
Yeah, great. I love that and keeping it simple, you know, defining it in that way, communicating it on posters, and advocating that people submit a hazard observation card or something when they get that experience, that’s how you drive up your near miss report, and isn’t it, or whatever company I was talking about with
David Garner 46:25
increasing the Near Miss reporting, we also were working on hazard observations. And through that time, we went from a couple dozen hazard observations a month to hundreds of hazard observations a month, and in those we probably got dozens of things that could have been entered as a incident. And instead of oops, sorry about that, instead of treating those as a incident, at punishing the workers. We made it so that if the worker noticed something and entered it and made sure their supervisor was aware of it, that we considered it a peer to peer observation, and there was no blame, there was no punishment, and instead, we still would do a learning about it, and we would still try to make it as as much improvement from it as possible. But we ended up getting, like I said, hundreds over the course of the year of hazard observations that could have been incidents. And so we got even more opportunity to learn, and we still have the increase near miss reporting. And so again, that feedback loop of the more you earn and fix, the more that you learn and fix, and the team buys in more and you get more opportunities, and it helps to reinforce the system.
Mark McBride-Wright 47:59
Love it. It’s actually not that complicated, is it? It’s really not complicated. It’s just people’s egos and personalities and unwillingness to participate that get in the way. Okay, thinking about your legacy, then you know, and what you’re working in, what where do you see the shift in change happening in the future, and what role are you playing in helping shape that?
David Garner 48:39
I kind of feel like I’m a little too young to be thinking about my legacy, but it’s one of those where I can’t measure all the incidents and injuries that haven’t happened because of all the good things that we put into place, but I hope I leave a legacy of kind of like an orchard, where you plant it today and you see the best results long time in the future, and I leave a legacy of people who go Home uninjured as a result, I enjoy gardening and growing fruit trees and other perennial fruits, and so there’s a lot of effort that goes into planting things today, and I’m not a patient person, but it teaches you to be patient. And a lot of times you have to plant those seeds on work sites, and it may take it years to grow into what you know that it can be, yeah, you have to have that patience and keep feeding it and keep watering it, because nothing about safety ever becomes second nature. You constantly have to reinforce it. You constantly have to have your leaders talking. About it. And if you have a great culture, and then you have a change in leadership, a leader that’s not leading about safety can ruin a great culture in less than a year. Yeah, you can go from excellence to terrible results in no time and leadership matters, and talking about safety matters, and so I hope my legacy is more spending time developing leaders so that they can continue to feed and water those safety ideas that I’m building, because when you become a leader, you don’t get a training that says, hey, I’m now going from working on the floor to leading people. A lot of times it’s just, oh, you’re the best worker and you’ve got the right attitude. We think you can be a leader. Okay? And then there’s no training on how to deal with people. There’s no training on additional safety responsibilities. There’s no training on additional HR responsibilities. There’s so many new things, and we expect the leaders to just kind of learn on the fly, but if we create some structure around that and give them the tools to be able to deal with diversity, equity and inclusion and safety and all the other issues that are going to come, because some people may be young and not have a lot of life experiences when they take on that leadership role, but then you’ve got a 50 year old veteran who’s coming to you and talking about their spouse left them this morning. And how do you build those tools and those people to know how to react and how to respond and to get the most out of it? And if you can do that, then you get more from your leaders, but then your leaders can help to feed back into that system and strengthen that system. Oh,
Mark McBride-Wright 52:03
David, you’ve done a perfect tee up there for me. Do a little plug for the training that I’ve built out of my book The Safe leader, where safe stands for share, act, feel, empower, and it’s absolutely about bringing together that inclusive leadership qualities, doing that introspection on what you yourself as a leader, have got to share with others that makes you vulnerable, that challenges that stoic stereotype and therefore mentally opens you up and makes you more accessible to others, and then gifts you the experience of acquiring learned experience about others, what others are going through, and then all of a sudden, your frame of reference just what your aperture on the world just widens way beyond what you’ve experienced personally and professionally. And then it makes you a better leader. But you need to keep doing it. So that’s why it’s a cycle, share act, feel, empower. Okay. We’re rolling that training out now to like different clients here in the in the UK, and I’m creating a version of it that we can then introduce to universities to embed as part of the curriculum. So and to your point about planting seeds for the future, if we can get some of the students and apprentices Thinking in this way, it means they then bring it into their leadership roles in the future. Quick Fire questions. You know, we haven’t even touched on Connecticut and like the safety culture in the state and the manufacturing can we just talk about that for like, a minute? Just, you know, because, because we met, I didn’t realize Connecticut had such a strong manufacturing base and a really strong woman in manufacturing sort of community. So can you just tell us a bit about Connecticut and engineering and and all that, because I was on that bus for two and a bit hours coming up to Hartford to the event. But I’m so glad I did, because I met some brilliant people.
David Garner 54:15
Yeah, we actually have a huge manufacturing base here in Connecticut, and it goes back a long ways. In colonial times, it was a huge brass manufacturing location, and through time, the brass often went into ships and into weapons and things like that. And through time, Connecticut’s retained a lot of that history, so there’s still a lot of aerospace and national defense that happens here, we’ve got electric boat that builds submarines here, we’ve got Sikorsky, we’ve got Collins aerospace and lots of support industries around it, but we’ve also got lots of highly engineered like high end optics and mean. We work with customers that do everything from just making metals to making finished components for consumers to electronics. And it kind of runs the gamut in Connecticut from someone that’s making textiles or buttons to someone who’s making lasers that will be used to do atmospheric monitoring from space. So the state of Connecticut really has a ton of industry, and even for me, I’m often surprised when I go in and see the diversity. I know that you’re a big fan of tea, and we’ve got Bigelow tea that’s based here in Connecticut, and they’re one of the largest producers in America. Cool.
Mark McBride-Wright 55:53
I’m not a fan of American tea, I must admit.
David Garner 55:58
Well, we all have our biases.
Mark McBride-Wright 56:01
It has been nice getting my Yorkshire brew back home and in the UK actually looks like tea when I squeeze it and make it. I jest. I jest. Okay, quick fire questions, what is the most underrated safety risk in today’s workplaces?
David Garner 56:21
Five years ago, I probably would have said alternative energy control. And you mentioned in the opening about the lockout tagout variants that we had when I was at New Course deal that was the first one in the nation that OSHA had ever released. And as a result of us gaining that and proving that our alternative method was safer than lockout tagout, several other companies started applying for variances, and OSHA decided that instead of rewriting or giving all these variances, they would rewrite the rule, and so they’re in the progress of doing that now to include alternative energy control into the regulations instead of tons of variances. So now, the other big issue that I’m seeing is a really basic one, and probably it won’t surprise you very much coming from a chemical engineering background, but it’s chemicals. Lots of the companies we’re working with use chemicals that are relatively safe when they’re used the appropriate way, but in wrong combination can create very bad outcomes. And so prior, in my experience, to the last year and a half, I probably would not say chemicals being one of those big ones, but yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 57:49
what’s a myth about compliance? You’d like to bust?
David Garner 57:53
That compliance is all that you need, that if you’re compliant with all the rules, then you’ll have a safe work side, I’ve seen companies that are would achieve a safety award that had fatalities because they’re following the compliance, but they’re not doing the stuff to build the culture so that people live that and go above and beyond.
Mark McBride-Wright 58:19
What’s one book or resource you recommend for aspiring safety leaders,
David Garner 58:24
pre accident investigation by Todd Conklin. It was a book that I found early on in my safety career, and was a big part of me being able to learn to put people first and start trying to fix systems instead of trying to fix people.
Mark McBride-Wright 58:44
What’s a leadership lesson that you learned the hard way?
David Garner 58:51
I would say probably just because we talk together and we come to a solution that we need to implement to fix something, doesn’t mean that we leave that conversation with the same understanding of what we need to do, and so being clear on making sure we’re in the same understanding, because we both bring your own biases into the conversation, we just have to make sure We’re on the same page.
Mark McBride-Wright 59:21
What’s your favorite PPE or safety tool? You can’t live without
David Garner 59:26
a really comfortable pair of steel toed boots. If your feet are hurting, everything’s liable to end up hurting. But if you get a good pair of boots and invest where it matters, then that’s where I
Mark McBride-Wright 59:43
how do you how do you unwind after a big day at work?
David Garner 59:52
It’s either going to be going for a walk with my dogs or doing some kind of woodworking, whether. Be building furniture, doing home repairs, carving a spoon, something like that. Nice.
Mark McBride-Wright 1:00:10
And finally, what’s one word that describes your approach to safety, leadership?
David Garner 1:00:18
Context, brilliant. Context of the people, the systems, the incidents, then you can never fully get the most out of the biggest improvements that are
Mark McBride-Wright 1:00:31
possible. Absolutely, absolutely. David, I could talk for hours. I’ve really, really enjoyed the chat we’ve had today. If people want to get in touch with you, find out more about your services that you offer the company you work at. How do they do that?
David Garner 1:00:49
You can go to Walden environmental engineering.com for my company. If you want to reach out to me personally, then I’m on LinkedIn under my name David Garner and
Mark McBride-Wright 1:01:05
find me perfect, perfect. Well, we’ll put those links in the in the show notes as well. And yeah, thank you so
David Garner 1:01:12
much. Thank you for having me. Thanks. Bye.
E041: Growing a Safety Orchard
Podcast Description
Read the Transcript
Mark McBride-Wright 0:00
Hello. Welcome to the next episode of the safe leader podcast. I am your host, Mark McBride-Wright, and today I am joined by David Gardner, who is a certified safety professional, a certified Hazardous Materials Manager and a safety management practitioner. He is the Environment Health and Safety Director at Walden Environmental Engineering, bringing over a decade of hands on experience in environmental health and safety leadership across manufacturing, architecture, military and nutrition sectors known for building strong safety cultures from the ground up. David previously served as EHS manager at glanbria Nutritionals, where he reduced recordable injuries by two thirds within two years and developed foundational programs at a site with no previous safety infrastructure. His work at Nucor Steel included building a safety culture that went 37 months without a recordable injury, and leading corporate audits across a dozen sites in nine states. David was instrumental in managing the first ever OSHA approved lockout tagout variants, a landmark achievement in industrial safety. His diverse background includes roles in architecture, the National Guard, agriculture and fish farming, giving him unique hazard awareness and cross disciplinary insight. David is a certified Hazardous Materials Manager, OSHA trainer and ISO 14,001 auditor with deep regulatory experience, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Transportation, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and local permitting agencies. Today, he uses that breadth to provide full spectrum EHS consulting and compliance support to businesses and governments. David, welcome. Glad to be here. Thanks for Thanks for joining the the podcast so you and I met when I was living stateside a few a few months ago, and we we connected on this shared passion of safety. Absolutely.
David Garner 2:22
We had a great event where we partnered with the boulder group, and we’re learning about how to implement both communication and safety together and how they go hand in hand.
Mark McBride-Wright 2:35
It was a great event. It was a great event that and we can come on to that in a moment, but I like to start off and grounding ourselves in in the podcast with understanding the motivations about the person in front of us, person in front of me, and thinking about the learning arc that you’ve been on, what you’ve experienced to get to where you’re at now, what influences you’ve had that led you to pursue a career in safety. So if we can just get in a little mental time capsule and go back and meet the young David, tell us about him. Are you are you doing now what he thought he would be doing in the future?
David Garner 3:22
The young David, probably not so going back in my arc, my first job was when I was five years old. Wow, that was working on a chicken farm, and I had my first industrial accident at seven years old, and still have a damaged fingernail as a result of it, but basically went from a culture where safety didn’t exist, and growing up did lots of hazardous work as a child and a teenager, and there was kind of no history of safety there. And slowly, as I grew through my life and experienced more things and was exposed to more companies and more places, grew from not even knowing anything about safety to now being able to lead it. Fantastic.
Mark McBride-Wright 4:18
And so what? What was your moment? Then that made you think, yeah, there’s something in this discipline, like, did you come into it by chance? Or were you working in a high hazardous sector? Because you’ve got a really, probably the most, one of the broadest backgrounds I’ve met of a person in quite a long time in terms of all the the sectors that you’ve covered. So, you know, was your military? You mentioned the military there, you know was, were you serving in the military early on, and this is when you discovered safety within that context. And tell us a bit about how you how you discovered it.
David Garner 4:59
The military was probably one of the first places where I worked and actually had safety training that was a dedicated part of it and but because it was my first introduction to safety, I was able to follow it, but it really didn’t, kind of become a core of who I was at that time, okay, and probably the first time that I worked somewhere that safety became super important and was voluntary, was when I was working at architecture firm in Alaska, and they had a safety committee. It was the first time I’d worked somewhere where the safety committee It was first time that we had done evacuation drills and earthquake drills and things like that. And so that’s a probably a big tip into doing all the other things that led me into the safety career.
Mark McBride-Wright 5:56
And how have you found then across? Can you take us on that journey, then across those different contexts that you’ve worked in, and how safety has been present in each of those different industries, you’ve got, architecture, agriculture, the military, fishing, I think was mentioned in One in the introduction, yeah, fish farming. Fish farming.
David Garner 6:21
So as I said, I’ve been working since I was a child, and I’ve been paying taxes since I was 11 years old. Every year since then, I’ve paid taxes, and so a lot of those were weekend or summer jobs where I was doing tree work, or I worked for a seed and feed store for one summer, and they had large fish farming operation both, but they were selling fish to other farmers to stock their ponds, but also they were growing them for sale and basically very little safety and lots of accidents. I didn’t recognize them at the time as accidents, lots of near misses, and I still bear a few scars from my time working there. And as I got into high school, I saw that I really enjoyed construction, and I really didn’t want to be one of the 40 year old people with broken bodies that I saw working all around me. Okay? And like, what am I good at? What do I enjoy? And that’s why I decided that I wanted to go into architecture. But also I came from a fairly poor background, and so I saw the National Guard as a way to be able to serve the country, but also be able to help fund my education. And so seven days after my 17th birthday, I joined the National Guard on a delayed entry program, and was able to finish out my senior year of high school and then go off to military training when I left high school, or left high school, I left university, had an architecture degree and went and worked in architecture for several years, and through the Oh 809, market crash, architecture jobs kept getting scarcer and scarcer, and by 2011 I wasn’t able to find any more work In the architecture field, and ended up getting hired by new core steel at one of their metal buildings plants doing drafting work for the erection drawings and the shop drawings for metal buildings. I was at their office location, and their plant was nine hours away, and I got involved in the safety committee through the office location, but it’s a little bit more limited in what you can do there. And then about a year into my employment with them, they decided they need to get better communications between the office and the plant, and opened up the opportunity to move with the company and moved to the plant location, and they wanted to set up engineers and detailers there, and basically said, if you go you’ll have more opportunity for professional growth. And in that, I ended up getting involved with the safe committee at the plant location, and within a year, I was leading the safe committee there, and the position became available for the safety coordinator at that position, and we were in the middle of our worst year and a decade and at. And I took on the role, and really didn’t have a background in safety. I knew how to read and interpret codes and rules based on my history with architecture, yeah, and I knew how to relate to people. But as far as formal safety training, I didn’t have any, and the company had six recordable injuries in the first nine months of the year, and in that fourth quarter we had six more. So it was a real trial by fire, and through gaining the buy in with the team, we were able to turn that around. And the next year we had four. The next year we had two, and it was a very rapid improvement.
Mark McBride-Wright 10:52
So how did you take it, then, from the place where it was, where you were having 12 I guess in that 12 months, from what you said, and then to, you know, having, then none within 37 months. How did you? How did you the 37
David Garner 11:18
months was actually at another location. I question. It was mostly about two things. It was about getting employee engagement and giving them the opportunity to do the things that they were passionate about that contributed to safety. And it was about getting better incident reporting and getting better, corrective actions out of our incidents.
Mark McBride-Wright 11:46
Okay, okay, and was there a culture previously of blame, or, or, you know, like a lack of trust, or, because sometimes you hear that, that you know things are happening, but people aren’t reporting, and so there’s a whole sort of mystery set of events that are or things are occurring that you’re just not seeing because they’re not getting reported. Did you have to have a phase of trust building between leadership and shop floor workers? Was Was that in the mix,
David Garner 12:22
absolutely, we had the traditional model of name, blame, shame and retrain and you would doubt who touched it last. They were the one who got blamed. They had to stand up in front of the group and tell everybody how they messed up, and then you would punish them and retrain them, and then nothing would change. And it was not uncommon to come out onto the floor and see a handrail that had been dented by a crane load or a forklift, but nothing got reported, and so we had to build more trust in the team, and part of that was showing them when they did report issues, we were actually addressing the root causes and not addressing trying to fix the people instead of fixing the system. And part of that was we got the safety committee involved in reviewing the incidents with the supervisors and the people that were there. So once a month, we had a meeting and we reviewed the incidents, but it was led by the safety committee, and they were trying to determine, is this an effective solution to this problem, or are we just punishing people and not fixing the system?
Mark McBride-Wright 13:33
Do you find something Well, do you find something to when you do that root cause analysis that you don’t actually get to the root of the problem.
David Garner 13:44
Well, you said root cause, and almost never is there just one root cause. And that was definitely one of the issues. The mentality at the time was follow the five whys and yes, why five times, and you get to the root cause. But often that maybe gets you one of the multiple causes. But you have to understand what happened in the incident, in context of what was happening, what the employee was thinking. And until you get to the point where you would make the same or maybe not, you make the same decision, but you understand how they chose to make that decision, you really don’t understand what was happening and the full scope of what’s going on. And when you investigate in that level of detail, by the time you get to the time where the incident happened, you already know that it was going to happen and why it was going to happen and what was contributing to it,
Mark McBride-Wright 14:40
yeah, yeah, yeah. So it’s, it’s, there’s almost like an expanded layer or approach needed when you’re doing that sort of investigation to then think about the context, the communication, the culture. Or the and I guess this is where, where we met. You know, the session on communication and behavior fits so nicely into like safety culture and the sort of things that are perceived currently as the fringes of safety culture, because we think we just need to look at the core technical things that went wrong. But actually, there’s so much more in those shadows, isn’t there that? Do you think we’re doing that enough like are our tools and processes and methods and approaches and mindset within the safety community. Are we? Are we bringing process safety leadership, safety leadership into that way, like, are we? Are we? Are we? Are we putting light on challenging the norms of the past, like doing a five wise investigation and then being surprised that it happens again. You know, are we training people up in alternative ways, complementary ways? I
David Garner 16:11
think that we’re making progress, but we’ve still got a long ways to go to get it to be the industry standard. I work in a lot of different facilities now as a consultant, and I still see companies using the traditional five whys and still blaming employees and not fixing the system. And so we’ve still got a lot long ways to go to be able to transition to really treating safety as part of the system and fixing the systems. Because most often, yes, the employee made what looks like a choice, but when you look at it in the context of the system that they were operating in, they were making the choice that the system decided that they could make. Yeah, a lot of our decisions are controlled by the systems that we’re working within.
Mark McBride-Wright 17:01
Yeah, so the five wise is obviously really popular because it’s, it’s been done lots of times, and it’s by virtue of scale and frequency. It’s become a standard, you know, or a common approach. Are there? What alternative tools, mechanisms, strategies, are you using to complement that like, or is it case by case? It’s it’s more nuanced, like, do we even have anything yet that helps do a really good, broader root cause analysis that unearths these other contexts,
David Garner 17:43
I try to meet people and companies where they’re at, and some are ready for different levels of it. And so if you’re just always done the five whys, I might suggest that instead of asking, Why did you stick your hand in that machine, change the question to, can you tell me the story of how you ended up sticking your hand into the machine and just that small switch changes it from being an aggressive you messed up. What did you do wrong? To, I want to understand the context. And can you help me understand it little further down the road, we can change it from a five whys to a wishbone diagram, so that you got lots of different things that are feeding into it. But the best way that I’ve seen to change it is to one change the language from incident investigation to a permission to a learning team, and so it’s an event. It’s not an incident, and it the entire goal of the learning is just that learning, it’s not to blame and punish, is to learn as much as we can from that event, and with that, you’re trying to get the employees who were involved as part of it, you’re trying to get leadership as part of you’re trying to get engineering as part of it, you’re getting everybody who this is either designing the system, operating the system, or affected by the system, as a conversation. And you start at the beginning of the day and work all the way through all the issues that you found, and in normal work, the employees are doing so many things where they’re having to manage the risk throughout the day, the procedure as written can almost never be followed the way it’s written, because depending on the wear on the equipment, or the type of part that You’re running, or 100 other variables. They’re having to make changes and make decisions that they’re keeping the equipment running, but you never know that, because it just looks like they’re doing their job, and if you don’t dig in, but then you uncover challenges about, oh, this tool doesn’t work well. The software is frustrating. I’m running out of this, and I have to leave my station to go chase down someone in shipping to bring me more boxes to put things in. Yeah, yeah. Traditional investigation that starts five minutes before something happens. You’re never going to capture all of that, and by expanding the scope of what you’re learning about, you have so many more opportunities to learn and get better, and get so much more buy in, because people see when something happens, instead of getting smacked, they get their life gets easier, their production gets easier, their frustrations start going away, and it helps with production. It helps with quality. It helps with safety and learning. Teams have been so successful that all those departments and more have stolen it as an idea for them to solve problems that they have.
Mark McBride-Wright 20:55
Yeah, I love it. I love it. I think that’s really good. And it’s essentially then shifting to that just culture idea where, and I love that. I think it’s so powerful that
David Garner 21:10
re
Mark McBride-Wright 21:12
rebranding safety internally to be an advisory support function than an accusatory police type function doesn’t mean
David Garner 21:27
in my past, I’ve always treated my role as to be a support. I’m a resource for the team, the supervisors, the ones who day to day, have to enforce the safety and make sure everybody’s following the rules. If I’m walking around I’m seeing someone not wearing their PPE, I’m going to absolutely tell them, hey, you need to put your safety glasses on, or whatever it is. But my job isn’t to write them up for not wearing those safety glasses. My job is to be a resource to help them solve problems
Mark McBride-Wright 21:56
the where then this is interesting. So you know, my work’s all about trying to expand then into the what someone’s thinking the brain like they’re physically present. But are they mentally absent? Are they fully showing up? Are they preoccupied with other things in their mind? How are individuals connecting? What are the inter relationships like between the workers on the plan or the designers in the office and the support functions, etc, what’s the dominant culture and the subculture, and where are their tension points? And you know, this is where, well, this is where diversity, equity, inclusion, like creating an inclusive culture for everyone, irrespective of your background and origin, etc, really comes into play, because I question whether or not we have inclusive cultures in some of these environments where we have a majority white male workforce. You know, construction manufacturing has the highest has a very high suicide rate in the United States, as well as here in the United Kingdom. So how can you give us your thoughts on on those comments I’ve just made with regard to the culture of you know, the the the sectors within which you’re now working? Do you think there’s an opportunity for safety to pick up some of the fallout of culture programs, perhaps, or have we missed a trick up until now, like not really making safety also encompass with the same scrutiny, psychological safety as physical safety.
David Garner 23:40
I think physical safety and psychological safety really go hand in hand, because you have to have a comfort level where when something’s going wrong, that you can go to one of your leaders and talk about it and know that they’re not going to yell at you because you brought them news that they didn’t want to hear that their concern is for you as a person and how they can help you be the best you you can be. And really, that’s kind of been my whole mindset when it comes to safety. Is people first, even above meeting compliance, it’s what takes care of the people first, and so if you do that, then you’re going to end up being fairly compliant, but it also allows you that freedom to see what the people need. And in my mind and in my experience, having diverse backgrounds and diverse people makes for a stronger organization. And we learn more. We know more, the more people that we include in that and you mentioned the suicide rate, I do a lot of work in the aerospace industry, and the aerospace industry actually has a suicide rate that’s over three times as high as just standard manufacturing. And it’s one of the highest in the country, and something that, unfortunately we hear about all too often,
Mark McBride-Wright 25:13
and our businesses doing anything about it,
David Garner 25:17
some are, I think that, I know that you’ve got a group in the UK that is trying to do more about it among engineers, and I think something like that could definitely help here. But individual organizations, it depends on where their culture is at. Some like I said, have addressed it, but most have not.
Mark McBride-Wright 25:43
I find really interesting about the US in particular, because, you know, putting aside for a moment all the executive orders and that that came out in February and have affected you know what businesses are confident to do or not? Do you know, the US are world leading when it comes to supporting veterans, for example, when they leave veteran life and move into city life, civilian life. And I believe that this group of people as well also have a high rate of loss of life or mental ill health, things that from what they’ve been through in the military as they then transition out of that life, like being supported and nurtured and cared for. You know, it’s a strong part of American culture, like looking after those who’ve served and and like even when it comes to, well, affirmative action and diversity law and what have you, I think you know, you can still legitimately have programs that support veterans, You know, into into the workforce, and what have you so it just, I wonder if there’s stuff that can be learned from that, if those mechanisms are still being effective, or whether they were effective, I don’t know, because it’s a lot of people. You know, there’s a large potential talent pool there of people that would have brilliant skills that could then translate transfer into an engineering, a manufacturing, you know, a construction context. Yes, okay, it might still be majority male, which doesn’t help our other diversity, demographics and diversifying, but it could really help challenge the the persona that, and I might be stereotyping here, that we expect an engineer to have to be stoic, to be highly technical, to not be vulnerable, to not lead with empathy. You know, very numbers focused. You know that stereotype of a typical engineer, which I don’t really agree with, from the people that I’ve met, but I wonder if it, if it plays out in majority male teams, definitely when I’ve when I’ve delivered training or visited sites, and the composition of the group has been majority male, and so you’ve got like, masculine energy there, there, there is a there is, it is harder to break through that to get to what’s going on in here and in here, in the heart, it’s quite surface level leadership. Then, then, then deep, deep, you know, emotional leadership. So I think there must be some way for what we do on in safety leadership to pick up on some of that.
David Garner 28:56
I agree. I think of it like a nice, hard loaf of bread. We’ve got a crunchy crust, and then it softs inside. In my experience, those heavy industrial people, they really focus on putting an exterior that’s hard to the outside world, and they’re completely okay. But having lived and worked with them for over a decade. They had needs just like everyone else, and once you get to know them and gain their trust, then they’re willing to open up to you. I’ve been counselor to many, a person who came to me with problems and trying to work through it and just having that support and openness, that I was willing to listen and willing to help them and direct them to wherever they needed to be if I couldn’t give them the help that they needed, you first have to gain the trust, and I think part of that is being embedded with the team and seeing them. A very regular basis. If there’s a new EHS person out there, my biggest recommendation is go spend a week, a month, as much as you can get away with, working on the floor, side by side with the workers. It’ll teach you what the hazards are, but it’ll gain their trust, and they’ve never seen people who are responsible for safety, who are willing to go out and work side by side with them and see what they experience, and that will be a very quick way to get that buy in and get that trust.
Mark McBride-Wright 30:36
That’s great that’s great advice. That’s great advice. What? What could we be doing at a national level? Then, is there something, is there some sort of training program we could roll out to try and cultivate this mindset in the engineers of tomorrow, as well as the engineers of today or the EHS professionals of tomorrow? What? What? What can we do to sort of catalyze this, this change?
David Garner 31:16
I think part of it is as we switch from
David Garner 31:25
basically the name, blame, shame and retrain type to a learning culture, part of that comes with we treat people differently as we learn not only about the work that We’re doing, but more about the people. And so at least in my world, that would make the biggest difference. And so switching more to a focus on learning and the less on a focus on you messed up, we’re going to write you up, and then everything’s good.
Mark McBride-Wright 31:58
I wonder if there’s also something in this is where my chemical engineering brain comes in, I think, in terms of control loops, feeding forward and feeding back and making changes and waiting for the delay to see the outcome of the change that you made, etc. And and I do wonder, what, rather than just bringing people into the same context and not changing the culture of what we have today, we need to be doing that. But then what can we do for investment in the future, for the talent that’s coming in in next year, three years, five years, 10 years. And therefore that means turning and looking at our education system, the universities, the colleges you know, that are training our future, EHS professionals and engineering professionals. What tweaks do we need to make to the learning experience that they are going through in terms of what good, progressive, inclusive management and leadership looks like. I wonder if that’s even happening,
David Garner 33:05
at least when I went through school, that wasn’t part of the conversation, and I would love to see that be included in our education. And it’s the kind of thing that just being exposed to it, plants that seed, and it may take it 10 years, 20 years, to grow into a fully formed tree where you’re getting everything out of it that you’re wanting. But if you don’t plant those seeds today, you’ll never get to where you want to get in 10 or 20 years.
Mark McBride-Wright 33:41
Maybe there’s a moral imperative for us as industry leaders to be doing, to be sowing those seeds as part of our education engagement. We run some, you know, we, I mean, we’ve barely touched the surface of the scale of intervention that’s needed, you know, here in the UK anyway. But you know, I’m trying to bring in engineers here and there to give, like, guest speaking lectures at universities, you know. And industrialists get excited when they get to come back and talk about what they do, you know, and share share pictures of the site, and the students love it as well. Because what I often find with students is that their perception of what an engineer does or what a professional does is limited to the academics that they’re around every day. And usually academics have only ever worked in academia. They’ve never actually worked out in, you know, industry or stuff. So so it’s such a nice opportunity to have the individuals share a bit about themselves, and then we could take out a layer deeper to do, like mentoring, you know, group mentoring, or one to one mentor. Entering even and just really build that scaffold, scaffold that relationship, which then might help with attraction and retention. I think it’s I just think we operate a lot in mental silos, and don’t ever zoom out and think about the big the big picture
David Garner 35:23
again, even if it’s just academia versus industry, that diversity of just bringing more groups together makes us stronger, and I’ve had a lot of benefit from different mentors throughout my life, and that mentoring relationship and building that culture of just having someone that you can go to and ask, Hey, I’ve got this problem. How can I best address it? Really pays off in the long run,
Mark McBride-Wright 35:54
definitely is that support in your pocket. I WhatsApp is my go to for you know, if I’ve got an issue or need some help, I’ve got, you know, everyone who I trust implicitly in a particular field or domain, and I can message them at any point to get that answer. You know, get that, get that support. And you need, you need that for your for developing yourself and for your professional development and mental well being as well. You know, having that mentorship for people who’ve done it before is good. Do you know, actually, of any resources that where safety has embraced the AI revolution and any tools that can surface up lessons learned from historical past incidents.
David Garner 36:46
There’s a few out there, and the some of the most useful are ones that, instead of having a drop down box on your incident report that says that this was related to machine guarding, or it was whatever category it is, you just put in the narrative of what you found, and then they will come up with the categories after the fact and be able to go through that data. And so it doesn’t pigeonhole you into, Oh, you’ve only got these 10 options to categorize. What’s the root causes. Instead, you give the narrative and the story, and again, it’s about the context, instead of just the Okay, it was a pinch point injury, or it was a laceration.
Mark McBride-Wright 37:32
And are, is there? Is there software being developed that pulls together learnings from national accidents, you know, Deep Water
David Garner 37:44
Horizon aware of yet, right? Hopefully we’ll get there. But right now, those are usually implemented by, at best, large companies, and pulls data from all of their incidents,
Mark McBride-Wright 37:56
right, right? Yeah, right. That that’s what, that was my next point, or is it? Is it more within the confines of this site or this refinery or this manufacturing plant, we’re gonna pull off our, you know, major accident hazard reports, and our kosher OSHA submissions and whatever we’ve got, you know, and then we’ve got it all, all input, some sort of, I mean, not withstanding liability and legal and all that kind of can of worms, you know. But you almost want something where, with the intention of creating good and avoiding loss of life in the future, all of that data from every plant in the United States and globally is just pulled into one big system that can then surface up things that have happened in different places and what happened and how it was dealt with, and what not to do. You know, lessons that were learned from the action that was taken,
David Garner 39:01
unfortunately because of legal liability, a lot of companies are really reluctant to share incident data. There was a big story that was in the papers, and there was a nurse at Vanderbilt University who pulled the wrong medicine and administered it to a patient, and the patient ended up dying as a result. And when you go back and look at it, the system was set up to cause failure, and she just happened to be the unlucky one who happened to be the poster child, and in that case, she ended up getting prosecuted and convicted and sent to jail as a result. But other medical institutions had the exact same systems and exact same problems and the exact same risk of patients getting injured and. And they weren’t willing to share that this was a problem and talk about it among different medical institutions, because of the fear of getting sued for, oh, you messed up. And that’s happening with all the different industries, and some industry organizations they have where they get together. And in safety, a lot of us treat it as R and D means rip off and duplicate. If you’ve got a problem and we can learn from it, we’re going to rip off your solution and we’re going to duplicate it. We’ll change it enough to make it our own. But there’s nothing that I keep as proprietary and safety. It’s about how can I help people go home the way they came in? So the the
Mark McBride-Wright 40:46
best halfway house, I guess, that we can do, is to be sharing within our community lessons learned. Do a deep dive into how we executed that broader five, why approach by reframing questions and seeing a different outcome. And like sharing it, sharing it out there to tell I went to, I went to safety on the edge in Berkeley, California. It was the first conference, first time the conference was ran, and it was absolutely brilliant. You know, there was a fantastic keynote from Kim Green, who’s the chief executive at Southern power company, I think, one of the utilities down in the southern, one of the southern states. And I learned so much from it. You know, I learned so much I’ve been applying, like some of what she said to client work that I’ve been doing, and she because she presented a great case study and where they thought they were recording the right incidents, the right data, they were seeing a trend line go down, but Actually they were creating a culture where people just weren’t reporting, and so they then set about changing how reporting was done. Obviously, data started to go up, but it meant that the the fatality rate, I think, started to go down, because they were actually seeing recordable incidents going up, but they were then able to implement mechanisms that would prevent serious fatality or fatality or serious injury happening. So, so then you know that that went down, which isn’t something that a board always wants to see. You know, changing. I’ve had to
David Garner 42:43
fight against that at every site I’ve been at, because one of my first goals is to increase near miss reporting. And one site that was at went from three the year that I arrived to 38 the next year, to 69 the next year, and some of the managers were hair on fire. Oh, my God, we’re so bad. I’m like, No, we’re just hearing about it now. And these incidents were all happening before. We just didn’t know about it. And now we have the knowledge we’ve learned from them, we have a chance to get better. And it’s not that we’re less safe because we’re having more incidents. They’re almost all near misses. The number of property damages and injuries have gone down. The number of near misses that we get the opportunity with nothing bad happening to learn from has gone up. Yeah, and the more that you can do those and we’ve had some near misses where in slightly different circumstances, they could be fatal incidents. And those are such a valuable opportunity that you have to learn from those, and you have to prevent those from happening in the future. Because we, none of us, want it to be a fatal incident.
Mark McBride-Wright 43:57
So if a client is having you know three to four and every three or four days is having somewhere on its sites an accident, you know, something that is serious enough that it gets reported, and they have an ambition to break the plateau. You know, their safety performance is sort of plateauing that that tends to show that actually something serious is bubbling away. If this these rates aren’t on a downward progression, it’s a bit counterintuitive to come in and say to them, Well, look, you’re the rates might even be going up, but I guess it’s whether or not they’re overlaying that data with Yeah, near miss data, isn’t it? Yeah. So the the accident
David Garner 44:46
near misses aren’t quite a leading indicator, but it gets back into that conversation about having leading into indicators versus lagging indicators. Pause with those, if all your. Doing is measuring the number of incidents. It’s not really giving you any data about where your safety is headed. It’s where your safety’s been. Yeah, if there’s a fear of reporting, and there’s so many things that can lead into a fear of reporting, it certainly drives down the number of things that get reported, but it’s only the things that they can’t hide. It’s either an injury or a property damage that get reported. And I often see that with companies, they have more injuries and property damages as they have near misses. And to me, at an absolute minimum, you should have more near misses than the other two combined, right? It should probably be more double that, because near misses are happening all day, every day, and the way that I define a near miss is anything that gives you that pucker factor, Damn, that was close. I have to look out for that in the future. Well, if I need to look out for in the future, so does everyone else.
Mark McBride-Wright 45:58
Yeah, great. I love that and keeping it simple, you know, defining it in that way, communicating it on posters, and advocating that people submit a hazard observation card or something when they get that experience, that’s how you drive up your near miss report, and isn’t it, or whatever company I was talking about with
David Garner 46:25
increasing the Near Miss reporting, we also were working on hazard observations. And through that time, we went from a couple dozen hazard observations a month to hundreds of hazard observations a month, and in those we probably got dozens of things that could have been entered as a incident. And instead of oops, sorry about that, instead of treating those as a incident, at punishing the workers. We made it so that if the worker noticed something and entered it and made sure their supervisor was aware of it, that we considered it a peer to peer observation, and there was no blame, there was no punishment, and instead, we still would do a learning about it, and we would still try to make it as as much improvement from it as possible. But we ended up getting, like I said, hundreds over the course of the year of hazard observations that could have been incidents. And so we got even more opportunity to learn, and we still have the increase near miss reporting. And so again, that feedback loop of the more you earn and fix, the more that you learn and fix, and the team buys in more and you get more opportunities, and it helps to reinforce the system.
Mark McBride-Wright 47:59
Love it. It’s actually not that complicated, is it? It’s really not complicated. It’s just people’s egos and personalities and unwillingness to participate that get in the way. Okay, thinking about your legacy, then you know, and what you’re working in, what where do you see the shift in change happening in the future, and what role are you playing in helping shape that?
David Garner 48:39
I kind of feel like I’m a little too young to be thinking about my legacy, but it’s one of those where I can’t measure all the incidents and injuries that haven’t happened because of all the good things that we put into place, but I hope I leave a legacy of kind of like an orchard, where you plant it today and you see the best results long time in the future, and I leave a legacy of people who go Home uninjured as a result, I enjoy gardening and growing fruit trees and other perennial fruits, and so there’s a lot of effort that goes into planting things today, and I’m not a patient person, but it teaches you to be patient. And a lot of times you have to plant those seeds on work sites, and it may take it years to grow into what you know that it can be, yeah, you have to have that patience and keep feeding it and keep watering it, because nothing about safety ever becomes second nature. You constantly have to reinforce it. You constantly have to have your leaders talking. About it. And if you have a great culture, and then you have a change in leadership, a leader that’s not leading about safety can ruin a great culture in less than a year. Yeah, you can go from excellence to terrible results in no time and leadership matters, and talking about safety matters, and so I hope my legacy is more spending time developing leaders so that they can continue to feed and water those safety ideas that I’m building, because when you become a leader, you don’t get a training that says, hey, I’m now going from working on the floor to leading people. A lot of times it’s just, oh, you’re the best worker and you’ve got the right attitude. We think you can be a leader. Okay? And then there’s no training on how to deal with people. There’s no training on additional safety responsibilities. There’s no training on additional HR responsibilities. There’s so many new things, and we expect the leaders to just kind of learn on the fly, but if we create some structure around that and give them the tools to be able to deal with diversity, equity and inclusion and safety and all the other issues that are going to come, because some people may be young and not have a lot of life experiences when they take on that leadership role, but then you’ve got a 50 year old veteran who’s coming to you and talking about their spouse left them this morning. And how do you build those tools and those people to know how to react and how to respond and to get the most out of it? And if you can do that, then you get more from your leaders, but then your leaders can help to feed back into that system and strengthen that system. Oh,
Mark McBride-Wright 52:03
David, you’ve done a perfect tee up there for me. Do a little plug for the training that I’ve built out of my book The Safe leader, where safe stands for share, act, feel, empower, and it’s absolutely about bringing together that inclusive leadership qualities, doing that introspection on what you yourself as a leader, have got to share with others that makes you vulnerable, that challenges that stoic stereotype and therefore mentally opens you up and makes you more accessible to others, and then gifts you the experience of acquiring learned experience about others, what others are going through, and then all of a sudden, your frame of reference just what your aperture on the world just widens way beyond what you’ve experienced personally and professionally. And then it makes you a better leader. But you need to keep doing it. So that’s why it’s a cycle, share act, feel, empower. Okay. We’re rolling that training out now to like different clients here in the in the UK, and I’m creating a version of it that we can then introduce to universities to embed as part of the curriculum. So and to your point about planting seeds for the future, if we can get some of the students and apprentices Thinking in this way, it means they then bring it into their leadership roles in the future. Quick Fire questions. You know, we haven’t even touched on Connecticut and like the safety culture in the state and the manufacturing can we just talk about that for like, a minute? Just, you know, because, because we met, I didn’t realize Connecticut had such a strong manufacturing base and a really strong woman in manufacturing sort of community. So can you just tell us a bit about Connecticut and engineering and and all that, because I was on that bus for two and a bit hours coming up to Hartford to the event. But I’m so glad I did, because I met some brilliant people.
David Garner 54:15
Yeah, we actually have a huge manufacturing base here in Connecticut, and it goes back a long ways. In colonial times, it was a huge brass manufacturing location, and through time, the brass often went into ships and into weapons and things like that. And through time, Connecticut’s retained a lot of that history, so there’s still a lot of aerospace and national defense that happens here, we’ve got electric boat that builds submarines here, we’ve got Sikorsky, we’ve got Collins aerospace and lots of support industries around it, but we’ve also got lots of highly engineered like high end optics and mean. We work with customers that do everything from just making metals to making finished components for consumers to electronics. And it kind of runs the gamut in Connecticut from someone that’s making textiles or buttons to someone who’s making lasers that will be used to do atmospheric monitoring from space. So the state of Connecticut really has a ton of industry, and even for me, I’m often surprised when I go in and see the diversity. I know that you’re a big fan of tea, and we’ve got Bigelow tea that’s based here in Connecticut, and they’re one of the largest producers in America. Cool.
Mark McBride-Wright 55:53
I’m not a fan of American tea, I must admit.
David Garner 55:58
Well, we all have our biases.
Mark McBride-Wright 56:01
It has been nice getting my Yorkshire brew back home and in the UK actually looks like tea when I squeeze it and make it. I jest. I jest. Okay, quick fire questions, what is the most underrated safety risk in today’s workplaces?
David Garner 56:21
Five years ago, I probably would have said alternative energy control. And you mentioned in the opening about the lockout tagout variants that we had when I was at New Course deal that was the first one in the nation that OSHA had ever released. And as a result of us gaining that and proving that our alternative method was safer than lockout tagout, several other companies started applying for variances, and OSHA decided that instead of rewriting or giving all these variances, they would rewrite the rule, and so they’re in the progress of doing that now to include alternative energy control into the regulations instead of tons of variances. So now, the other big issue that I’m seeing is a really basic one, and probably it won’t surprise you very much coming from a chemical engineering background, but it’s chemicals. Lots of the companies we’re working with use chemicals that are relatively safe when they’re used the appropriate way, but in wrong combination can create very bad outcomes. And so prior, in my experience, to the last year and a half, I probably would not say chemicals being one of those big ones, but yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 57:49
what’s a myth about compliance? You’d like to bust?
David Garner 57:53
That compliance is all that you need, that if you’re compliant with all the rules, then you’ll have a safe work side, I’ve seen companies that are would achieve a safety award that had fatalities because they’re following the compliance, but they’re not doing the stuff to build the culture so that people live that and go above and beyond.
Mark McBride-Wright 58:19
What’s one book or resource you recommend for aspiring safety leaders,
David Garner 58:24
pre accident investigation by Todd Conklin. It was a book that I found early on in my safety career, and was a big part of me being able to learn to put people first and start trying to fix systems instead of trying to fix people.
Mark McBride-Wright 58:44
What’s a leadership lesson that you learned the hard way?
David Garner 58:51
I would say probably just because we talk together and we come to a solution that we need to implement to fix something, doesn’t mean that we leave that conversation with the same understanding of what we need to do, and so being clear on making sure we’re in the same understanding, because we both bring your own biases into the conversation, we just have to make sure We’re on the same page.
Mark McBride-Wright 59:21
What’s your favorite PPE or safety tool? You can’t live without
David Garner 59:26
a really comfortable pair of steel toed boots. If your feet are hurting, everything’s liable to end up hurting. But if you get a good pair of boots and invest where it matters, then that’s where I
Mark McBride-Wright 59:43
how do you how do you unwind after a big day at work?
David Garner 59:52
It’s either going to be going for a walk with my dogs or doing some kind of woodworking, whether. Be building furniture, doing home repairs, carving a spoon, something like that. Nice.
Mark McBride-Wright 1:00:10
And finally, what’s one word that describes your approach to safety, leadership?
David Garner 1:00:18
Context, brilliant. Context of the people, the systems, the incidents, then you can never fully get the most out of the biggest improvements that are
Mark McBride-Wright 1:00:31
possible. Absolutely, absolutely. David, I could talk for hours. I’ve really, really enjoyed the chat we’ve had today. If people want to get in touch with you, find out more about your services that you offer the company you work at. How do they do that?
David Garner 1:00:49
You can go to Walden environmental engineering.com for my company. If you want to reach out to me personally, then I’m on LinkedIn under my name David Garner and
Mark McBride-Wright 1:01:05
find me perfect, perfect. Well, we’ll put those links in the in the show notes as well. And yeah, thank you so
David Garner 1:01:12
much. Thank you for having me. Thanks. Bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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