Safety Walk Safety Talk

How Small Changes in What You Think, Say, and Do Shape Your Safety Culture

By: David Allan Galloway

Narrated by: Ben Tyler

Length: 6 hrs and 11 mins

Publisher's summary

Do you want to make a difference? There are many ways someone in a leadership role can have a positive impact on the lives of their employees. Perhaps there is no leadership responsibility more profound than creating a sustainable, injury-free workplace. Every person who goes to work expects to return home in the same condition. When someone is hurt, the adverse effects of their injury ripple through the employee’s family and friends.

Achieving an injury-free environment is one of the most difficult problems many leaders face. Over 35 years in manufacturing, I observed quite a few leadership actions that significantly contributed to less risk-taking, greater hazard awareness, and genuine collaborative efforts among employees and supervisors. Leaders who understood, embraced, and implemented these strategies saw a dramatic reduction in incidents and injuries at their facilities. Organizations with the best safety performances simply do a lot of small things collectively and strategically well. This audiobook is a collection of leadership concepts, thoughts, words, and actions that (when strategically implemented) can move your organization toward a better safety future.

The first section takes a look at some fundamental concepts. It includes a discussion on compliance versus commitment, how to develop a safety strategy, why people make mistakes and take risks, and an overview of a Just Culture. The core of the audiobook reviews some key research findings in social psychology, sociology, and neuroscience. I share personal experiences of highly effective leadership. And I recount other situations that exemplify the wrong approach. In each case, I discuss how you can leverage these concepts in a practical way to improve your safety leadership skills.

Topics include: how our thoughts can drive our behaviors when it comes to safety, how the words we use can be influential on personal decision-making, how social influence and leadership actions can drive safety performance, and how to facilitate the right personal safety conversation. At the end of each section, there is a segment called the "Safety Leader’s Toolbox"; It contains over 70 practical tools and tips for being a more effective safety leader! Listeners are encouraged to consult the "Safety Leader’s Toolbox" for small changes in what you think, say, and do to shape your safety culture.

Spoiler alert! One essential leadership skill is knowing why, how, and what to talk about when it comes to safety. Where do you begin? Start with a "Why" of caring. If you start with caring as your personal motive, you won’t have to do everything perfectly. Your employees will want to do the right things for the right reasons. You can listen to this audiobook in order, or go to a specific section.

©2019 David Allan Galloway (P)2019 David Allan Galloway

minor improvements large effect

this book add some great tools to the safety managers tool kit easy to listen to with a lot of great ideas.

Safety Leadership Bible

David Galloway provides production and manufacturing leaders with a roadmap to reshape their safety landscape. All at once transformative, practical, and thoughtful, Safety WALK, Safety TALK brings everything you need together to start the culture shift toward thinking about people first. Backed by solid research, the book focuses on the why's.

Why do accidents happen? Why do people, managers and employees both, behave the way they do? Why is caring is more important than compliance?

After taking each question (and more) in easily digestible bits, Galloway lays out the how's of making the transition from a stone-age culture focused only on production to stepping into a culture that seeks to understand and care for people above all else.

Adeptly narrated by Ben Tyler, Safety WALK, Safety TALK also serves as a case-study in organizational leadership in general. Diving deep into social psychology, thought traps like conformity, and the benefits of servant leadership, anyone who wants to learn how to connect with their employees and coworkers in more productive and meaningful ways would be wise to spend some time with the text as well. If you replaced "safety" with "organizational" culture in the title, the book wouldn't miss a beat. Masterful performance.

Very Informative

I enjoyed the audible so much, I purchased the paperback to add to my toolbox.

Practical Safety

This book provides extremely practical tools that can transform a safety culture and produce real results in an industrial environment. Each chapter equips you as an individual, whether in a position of leadership or not, to influence the people around you to make better decisions regarding safety. A must "listen" for anyone that is concerned for the safety and wellbeing of themselves and others.

Ben Tyler does an excellent job as narrator and will pull you into the story so that you feel like you are there on the operating floor!

amazing book for anyone involved in safety

this was amazing and eye opening... learned so much and restored my faith in safety

Real life safety learnings

The narrator did a great job of changing dialogue to keep interest. You felt you could relate to the characters and processes.