[00:00:00] :  This show is brought to you by safety warning. The following broadcast contains adult language, adult content, frank safety discussions and stories that might sound unbelievable. But believe me, every one of those stories is true. We didn't start the safety war, but we are going to fight to win it for our families, for our communities, for our workplaces and for our lives. So here we are on our 100th episode. I can't believe I'm saying that 100th episode celebration. We're going to talk today about one of my most controversial but also one of my most requested presentations here is called pushback and tactics faced by safety professionals. It's available on our website at safety words dot com in written form. It's one of the few things that I've written that I've actually copyrighted because of uh I know that this people would have liked this and I get so many requests for it. Where did this come from? This whole, It's like, it's real simple. I was working in, we'll call it politics. I'm not gonna get swampy here. And after a couple of years of working here in politics, I came across a publication called Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky. And what what what's the book about? Alinsky wrote the book to teach progressives to implement change in their community. When I first learned about the rules. I recognize many of them as the same tactics, regardless of the kind of organization you're in. Whether it's an educational environment, community, environment, political environment, hell, even person to person interactions this past weekend. I was coaching my son's Little League team, I'm not the head coach, I'm the assistant coach way down on the, on the chain here and one of the Children was having in there. Should I actually started talking about some of the things in here and whenever we come to a problem, especially at with one of the jobs I manage, I always refer back to these, I say to my co workers, my people are supervised, what have you, This really meets this situation Here and why you have to go and manage this a little bit differently. This this is all predicted. I don't offer too many solutions here, but I do try to identify the problem. So Saul Alinsky came up with these 13 rules in response to the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago where there was some rioting and everything else. And he said to the crowd, look, we can't go out here and start rioting here. We need to go and work for change within the system. So here in the 13 rules, number one Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have. How did this manifest itself recently on one of our projects, we had a person who started screaming and yelling, I'm not gonna mention the trade that they're not going to work safely and that they know the owner. Right? How many times have you heard that? I told the owner, I know the president, I know the foreman I know so and so I'm going to get back and you blah blah blah blah blah. And what does, what happens? Usually they don't have the power that they're saying that they have but they want you to think that they have the power. So what do you do I call about it every time you just I have to try to call people on this stuff. Number two never go outside the expertise of your people and number three whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy. So someone will try to come up to you and confuse you make you look dumb for lack of a better word, provide expertise and advice about what you know, tread carefully into areas you don't have expertise and you might be told that you are wrong unless your credibility goes down the drain. If you find yourself outside your expertise admit it, ask research, get an answer from someone qualified better yet. Ask the other person for their opinion. Getting other person's input, gets better solutions and perhaps gets them on your side. You don't say I don't know. And so you know what I have to verify that I think this is what it is. But let me double check and guess what because you have a thing called the internet you can easily go and look stuff up as you need to you can have things already done and on your phone okay this is what I need to do. Let's say that's an excavation for example as far as going outside the expertise of your enemy right? One strategy to undermine you is to find your strengths and weaknesses and then concentrate on what you don't know. You can also turn that around, go outside the other person's um uh. Mhm. Knowledge explain things make yourself into an expert. Again. I'm not saying we should go and do this stuff. I'm saying this is what because used against us and we need to be prepared for it. Make the other person live up to their own book of rules. This is really relevant to the safety professional. If you have a book of rules, a book of plans, standards, policies, procedures. You gotta go and live up to them. If the rules don't work kind of change the rules designed the work area differently what have you because what do they do? They go and I hate to say they but what reality is you don't live up to your rules. You're gonna have a problem managing someone ridicule is man's most potent weapon. This is bullion Bottom line That happened in Kindergarten through 12th grade and it happens in the workforce ridicule people ridicule you because there's very little if any defense against ridicule the only defense you can have is just don't take it seriously and let it roll off your back and as someone A K. A. My wife always says telling someone not to get upset doesn't prevent them from getting upset. But you have to control your own emotions here with this. Get the leadership team on board with safety and the group will follow the leadership and ridicule will cartel and someone is doing something illegally. Guess what You got to report it. HR You gotta concentrate on problem solving not emotional reactions. I know this is safety words and it has a similar name to another franchise out there. However, I'm gonna use the star trek reference. You need to become more like commander and then Captain Spock and then Ambassador Spock vs. Someone from a very emotional race. You have to let things go. People are trying to manipulate you. The easiest way for them to manipulate you is to manipulate your emotions. You cannot let them manipulate your emotions. Next one A good tactic they go together. A good tactic is when your people enjoy a tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag they complement each other. If a safety program everybody likes it, it's doing its job, It's preventing injuries, illnesses and everything else. It could be a training method, It could be safety luncheon. If that's working for your organization, I'm going to tell you probably you should stick with it. If it's not working for your organization, it feels stale, then guess what may need to change it, Hold your workforce, find out what's going on. Number eight. Keep the pressure on. This is one of the things is when you're coming in with a multi vectoring attack of sorts of sorts where people keep adding the pressure on to you and it's often coordinated. They come up with you for 3456 different urgent needs in one day. It's happened to me. None of them are urgent but they're trying to keep the pressure on to keep you may be in the office so you don't see what's going on in the field. It could be uh, they're trying to distract you. It could be any number of things but keep the pressure. I've learned to prioritize. The other thing is this, if someone finds a weak spot in you, they're going to focus on it. So what you try to do is manage your weak spots, whatever those are. I tried to grow a thicker skin. However, if the illegal, if the activity is illegal, you gotta document it and bring in third parties like HR Yeah, that sounds like we went over this before, but the threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself. That's not the same as number one where power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have but it's related. Someone makes you a threat. Somebody gives you an or else often you have to say okay or else what and take the or else often when people use that, it's just a tactic, it's baloney that they're giving its groove. No right there along those lines. The major premise for a taxes we're on number 10 is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. What does that mean? There's a system that a lot of work force is used to harass you. A lot of companies used to harass you in that workforce and they develop tactics and they're always the same tactics again and again and again and again. What are those tactics? I have several of them listed, but I'm only going to go through a couple of call you on days off to ask questions that can be left until your return on the same day. People coordinate and come to you with all their problems. Usually not a coincidence. Sometimes it is unusually not change paperwork, lose favor work and then blame you or someone else. That's why you always scan everything in. Then there's very little chance of absolutely losing paperwork, steal resources. It could be something as simple as dry erase markers for a presentation to taking critical equipment or destroying critical equipment. General sabotage. Mm hmm. It takes many forms favoritism. If a company wants undermined their safety program. Once you get to get to their safety, professional favoritism will do it. What's my solution continue at your job and be professional. One result of these taxes is to get a reaction out of you. Then the perpetrators play the victim card. That's a very common tactic of sociopaths and psychopaths depending on what the current term is and how you want to describe play the victim. Then all of a sudden you're on the defense. He victimized me happens. You're gonna be very careful of them. But you need to document these situations, secure your own resources, documents and equipment. Call people out professionally in a professional manner and it has to be documented when they try these tactics and get caught. It happens all right. And you have to work toward positive solutions, get your emotion out of this, leave your emotion at the door as fast as you can with this. If you number 11, if you push a negative hard enough and deep enough it will break through to its counter side. How do I interpret this? Make a negative into a positive. I had a hostile site leader complained to me during a meeting about one of the other contractors told me that I should be arguing on his team's behalf. And I knew that if I did as he asked, I would likely be thrown off the project. That was his main goal was to get me thrown off the project. And of course he's gonna confront you in front of about 75-00 of his coworkers. I told him, I said, look, job your ideas have merit and you know, you're a very articulate and very convincing opinion changer. I said, you have, you're so articulate your phenomenal. And I said, and you deserve that position that you're in here. And I said, I tell you what, you're such a good debater and arguer and everything else. And proponent of what you believe, I say, we take you up and you can make that argument and I'll stand right behind you all the way he knew that if he did that, he would be thrown off the project. And now he was left with a decision when he did not follow through, it made him look bad to his team and 80 other people, 100 other people, however you were there and what do you think happened? Never confronted me in front of so many people again, I kept a cool head, which is what he did not want. And I turned the whole situation into my favor with that the price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative, offer a solution to things. Just don't say something is wrong, turn it into a positive if you have an alternative plan, you look like a blowhard or malcontent and by the way this is what's going to happen, they they may go and attack you and then you're like, okay, well you're attacking me, it's a pretty good attack and they're going to win. They're gonna win these battles, you're gonna lose them. That's the way it is. Say, okay, what's the way your proposed to handle them. Ask a question, That's a question of them. Again, this is not getting emotional, this is you going and managing these people. Managing those people that attack you. Number 13. Pick the target, freeze it. Personalize it and polarize it. This takes many forms from willing to just making people look bad. How does this manifest itself? There's a couple of my ideas being excluded from meetings or not being invited to meetings. Those backdoor discussions, closed door discussions that you're excluded from. Those are dangerous not having the correct equipment. So for example, let's fall protection weeks. So we'll talk about fall protection like please employer, the site manager is not giving out the correct fall protection equipment. You need a sternal D ring piece of equipment they're giving you equipment would just the dorsal D ring for example, not breaking equipment when you need it. Unreasonable schedules rushing into accident investigation. That's a big one. You never rush an accident investigation you may say, well, hey this is a draft issue. This is the first report. We could do all that other stuff but don't rush it. Not having the resources, time or personnel to do the job. That's a common ones. Self explanatory. Here's another one. No budget, no skill for work for you what your exact responsibilities are, how to manage things colluding with others. Were simply bullying you overloading you with work distracting you from your duties, team members that we work on projects, you know nothing about and they're not telling you that happens in a lot of organizations, very large organizations that you've heard of surprising you with information. Blindsiding all that stuff goes into this because it's to play on your emotions on here. There's really not a lot that you could do To counter out. Act a lot of the stuff that I mentioned, those 13 items except documented, reported to human resources. And if things get bad enough move to another company and I know people get upset when I say that, well, you know, we have this going on that going on blah, blah, blah, blah blah, guess what? Sooner or later there's gonna be a problem are error rates are such that eventually you're going to have this catastrophic situation and who are they going to blame? Where do the fingers get pointed? If there is a safety issue, I doubt it's going to be the manager because I tell you what, the manager is going to do things in the back office, so to speak. That's just been my experience. It takes a very mature company. Do not play the blame game, especially when we have liability insurance issues and other things. So what you need to do is make sure you document things, make sure you communicate with your human resources, whoever the other appropriate people are. And if you're going to be held liable for something, especially if you're from a state and I'm not going to mention I'm new york, uh, where you're the confident person and you're not allowed to make decisions, guess what And maybe turned around where all of a sudden you're 100% personally liable for something because you didn't do your job even either criminally or financially can't have it. Um, The other thing is this company is not giving you your resources. You're a union employee. Uh, there's a chance that if you put a another union, quote, unquote brother in danger, the union will probably have something to say to you, including bring you up on charges at the union hall. That's not something you want to really deal with. I've seen it happen a couple of times over the years. So that's something you need to be confident enough. So what's the whole thing where there are a lot of toxic work environments out there for whatever reason. I've been in a lot of them, but I'm not unique. I'm not looking for sympathy here or anything like that, but you need to develop strategies. You need to develop backbone. You need to get away from emotion war and letting emotion rule the roost here. You have to apply logic. You have to apply good decision making ability. You have to be non biased. You have to maybe look in the mirror and find out what you, what you could have done to prevent the situation self reflection reflection. I'm not saying they'll be feeling, you've got to be feeling with people's people get hurt. It sucks. Your first question should be how are you? Someone gets hurt. We recently had a person where I had to do an investigation where they got a very serious burn. The first question that I had to the person was not adversarial. First question was how you doing, how you feeling along those lines? Why? Because they're human beings, you gotta treat people with empathy, makes them feel good and it's a real shitty thing to go and start the blame game with people. And the other thing, let me finish with this. You can't it's never ending sometimes. Really I get it. The blame game, pain for pain. Don't do something against someone because they did something against you. Pain for pain does not move the ball forward. Pain for pain is usually going to make you look bad, not the other person. If you're dealing with people who their only avenue of getting a response from them and getting into the changes the issue. Pain don't do it. I tell you because if you're making other people suffer and you have a conscience, that's a very difficult thing to get off your conscience, especially if it's something way overblown and it really impacts their career. Revenge in any form is bleeding. Don't try to get revenge as the chinese saying goes, if you're out on a mission of revenge, stick to grapes, it's not worth your time. Energy effort for salt concentrate on positive people with potential. Don't always waste your time on these negative people. Get away from toxic people, toxic work environments. A positive safety culture is very difficult to achieve. As it is. I mean culture working against your people working against you, makes it all the more difficult, especially when you are contributing to the overall negativity of your working environment. Hopefully the rules will give you the information that you need to recognize these situations yourself so you can fix them so you could avoid them. So if you can laugh them off a little bit, changing a safety culture does not happen overnight. It takes a long time. So that's what we're here for managing people in situations effectively save lives. Isn't that why we are safety professionals to save lives? Thank you For 100 episodes. This is my gift to you this discussion here. This discussion that we've had just now often is used as a gateway to other people having discussions and that's what you need to have our discussions. How easy recognizing these tactics and I'm gonna caution you don't use these tactics against anyone because it's gonna ruin you. You will, if you have a copy, you won't have a problem. You won't have a problem with this and these things in the long term, have a greater likelihood of hurting you rather than help for safety wars. This is jim proposal? Are you tired of hiring safety consultants and safety professionals that don't have any passion for what they're doing? How about those who have never worked in the field or done the dirty work? Is their resistance to taking safety training because the training is boring, irrelevant and an engaging. Are your employees playing a team college student or someone on the dark web to take the online safety training for that look, no further safety words can come to your facility. Where do most of the training you need through an online platform at times convenient for you. For more information. Call me Jim proposal. Your safety words host at 8456944170. Or you can email me at jim at safety words dot com. Remember if you've heard this transmission, you are the solution to unsafe workplaces. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast. Are those of the host and its guests and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the company. Examples of analysis discussed within this podcast are only examples. It should not be utilized in the real world as the only solution available as they are based only on very limited and dated. Open source information, assumptions made within this analysis are not reflective of the position of the company. No part of this podcast may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means mechanical, electronic recording or otherwise without prior written permission of the creator of the podcast, J. Allen.