Sea Lioning
March 7, 2022
Today Jim discusses Sea Lioning, that is disingenuous arguments and questions that wastes your time. Visit us at www.safetywars.com for training and H&S oversight that is not boring please contact us.
Transcript is not perfect.
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. Welcome to Season two, Episode 1 of Safety Wars. I can't believe I'm saying this. We're gonna be coming up to 100 episodes of safety wars very shortly this month. I wanted to thank all of you for the support that we've received over the last year. We're working on some other projects here that you will find out about in due time. We got a lot of exciting things going on here at safety wars. Today we're gonna talk about sea lions. I used to get sea lions all the time until I came up with strategies to manage it. So what's the Lion ng to say jim you flipped. But it's something we all have had to deal with. That safety professionals, I suspect the term will be as popular as the other term with this last year called Gaslighting. It's a form of harassment that consists of pursuing people with persistent requests for evidence or repeated questions while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity. It may take the form of incessant bad faith, invitations to engage in debate. The term originated with the 2000 and 14 script meaning like a web comic comic strip of wonder, Mark by David and I'm gonna destroy this name Malki the whole thing. It's just another form of trolling. Like we have an internet troll. I'll give you two examples here. First example, you have a workforce there all trained, let's say it's in full protection, You have full protection training certificates, you have a 30 hour, maybe a 30 hour construction outreach training card. They've even gotten that fall protection confident person training and they've been designated by their employer as a fall protection confident person. You go out, I don't know either of them. And what do you find a whole bunch of stuff wrong? They start asking questions like, well, what's really wrong with my fall protection anchor? Well, you know, you kinda get attached to a suspended ceiling grid that won't hold £5,000. It's probably only gonna hold £50. No, it's gonna be like £5,000 or double the maximum intended load. This is all in the regulations and in the standards and everything else we have. And what kind of answer do you get back? Well, where does it say that now? They want you to go through the ocean regulations and all through subpart M and find where this is. And then it's well, what's wrong with my fault? Protection distance? I have a shock absorbing lanyard, right, I'm good look at me, I'm all protected. And then you say, well that's shock absorbing lanyard or what we call energy absorbing nowadays. You're supposed to have it for like 18.5 19.5 ft between the Anchorage point on the ground and you have it at about eight ft. In other words, it's never gonna deploy and you're gonna hit the ground when you fall. And they say, well, where does it say that? I was never told that all by training. That's a lie. Or they've gotten really group no training right? And they end up going through and they want you to go through all the manufacturers books and everything else to go and find that out for them and they know that what they're doing is wrong. They're not going to accept your answer or anything else. And you got the idea, they're just sending you a lot of things. Right? Here's another example example to sometimes you have to go through the whole process with these folks that are sea lion and you, it might be just the nature of the beast. What you have to do. I had to go through this with an abrasive blasting crew. There were industrial painters and the so called confident person wanted to do abrasive blasting with a half face respirator with a p 100 cartridge rather than a supplied air blast stood okay. This management was on the west coast in the middle of the country. It's five a.m. There, right? And we couldn't really call them at five a.m. Over this. I ended up having to shut that part of the job done. There was a lot of other stuff for them to do prep work but they couldn't do the abrasive lasting the general contractor that I worked at cleared me to go through this whole process with them, shut them down and everything else. So what do I do? I go through all of the calculations with the guy, the confident person respirator training villas and everything else took about an hour. He told me that no, these were his exact words. I don't know what you're talking about. Must be made up. I'm not into that all this book learning. He said, look, I was at a very large car company by the way. It's one of the you've all heard of and a couple of power plants I've worked with before by the way, jim polls like I've worked with before and they allowed me to work without supply there and since they all allowed it and there were multi billion dollar companies therefore jim you're automatically wrong. You don't know what you're talking about. What did I do. I gave him basically a one hour training session for free but I had time that day and I was managing the project and my man bob. My assistant was running the project at this point, I had just stopped by to try to manage this little part for him. When I finally got the management on the line a couple of hours later. Long story short, they agreed with me and the work proceeding. What's the point? He was sea lion e me to waste my time. He was looking to wear me down or I was looking for a mistake in what I was saying or some kind of inconsistency, then he would have questioned that too. They were on a time crunch to get the job done. These are construction jobs, they have to get them done. However, I would not let them proceed without working safely obviously because I was in charge of safety there and his experience, If there's a time Crunch vs safety, safety always loses 100% of the time. That was his experience. And you have to understand however, with this particular client, this wasn't gonna fly and they had me working. They're not gonna fly. So what do you do if you recognize something like this happening? You have to be nonconfrontational because that's part of the strategy to to piss you off enough to get you to lose control and then they're in charge of the situation, not you. It doesn't creates more attention and everything else. So how do we manage this in a non confrontational way? There are many different ways I came up to with a couple of them. What do you do? You're trying to put it back on them rather tell them, rather than telling them what to do? You have to ask them a question. You then risk becoming a sea lion yourself on this. But you need to question with a purpose to be like an attorney here, we might call this also a learning team. Learning why they're doing something. Use the Socratic method meaning question things. And you learn by questioning for example, why are you doing it this way? Do you have industrial hygiene results that prove that you're what you're doing is right? If you have questions, right? So you're asking these questions, don't be afraid of the answers, especially the ones that you don't like. If you're asking questions, you might get an answer you may not like, but that shouldn't stop you from answering the questions. You could be direct. Sometimes you have to be right. But you kind of realize when you're direct and you say this is site policy. The decision is made well above our pay grade or something like that or we are being paid to do it this way. You got to realize sometimes that doesn't work and you're going to undermine yourself. This is like saying because I told you so and that doesn't help with your own leadership stuff. You got to be a leader on that site and we're going to talk about that this season of safety wards. Also one of my family members does this all the time. Well me and the other family members laugh over this too right. They ask a question that he has an answer to then if you don't use the same exact words and his answer, that one that he got from somebody else, then you're automatically wrong. So how do we manage this situation and I coach family members on this? Yeah, I see. What you have to do is, well, what do you think? Well, wow, I never thought about it that way. What do you think? How did you come to us? This kind of approach works out much better than confronting the person? But sometimes you have to ask, hey, are you looking for an answer or you or do you already have an answer and you're looking for an argument? Usually, you know, you don't want to do that when they start an argument, it may do something else like that. But what's my point? You have to have the answers and questions ahead of time. You have to have a script in your head ahead of time. So with his family member, Right, of the time, he already has the answer. He's just looking for an argument. Now you go to the workplace, do you want to be confrontational? No, you want to be working with the person, but you want to have a backbone, whatever you do, make sure you're not a wise guy with any of this. If that happens, it gets turned around on you and now you're the victim, you're the oppressor and they're the victim and believe me, that will get come back to haunt you. If you put them in a situation where they are the victims, you have to realize sometimes people and once a rarity are actually interested in a genuine discussion. If that's the case, you have to have an opportunity to see it as an opportunity to build bridges, make positive changes and maybe you'll make a friend if you treat someone with respect and they'll be on your side, at least that work. But I caution you. Don't let it become a free training session because that runs into a whole bunch of other problems gonna get free training. Like you kind of make money. You know, we're in this to make money, correct. My wife and I went on our second honeymoon, which was about three weeks after our first honeymoon, we went to Alaska on our second honeymoon. First honeymoon was a cruise to Brooklyn via Puerto rico. But anyway, we went out of day cruise and we started to smell this horrible thing. We went up to the Colgate glacier outside of Anchorage, Beautiful decor. It was a horrible smell captain. What's that horrible smell? And he says to me, those are the sea lions. Do you smell them from miles away? There's a big colony over the steller sea lions. So let's finish with this right, You probably won't be able to smell the proverbial sea lion in your life from that far away. But you need to be able to spot them early on and develop a strategy to manage them in your ongoing safety war for safety wars. This is Jim proposal. 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, 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 councilor or someone on the dark left 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 awards 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.
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. Welcome to Season two, Episode 1 of Safety Wars. I can't believe I'm saying this. We're gonna be coming up to 100 episodes of safety wars very shortly this month. I wanted to thank all of you for the support that we've received over the last year. We're working on some other projects here that you will find out about in due time. We got a lot of exciting things going on here at safety wars. Today we're gonna talk about sea lions. I used to get sea lions all the time until I came up with strategies to manage it. So what's the Lion ng to say jim you flipped. But it's something we all have had to deal with. That safety professionals, I suspect the term will be as popular as the other term with this last year called Gaslighting. It's a form of harassment that consists of pursuing people with persistent requests for evidence or repeated questions while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity. It may take the form of incessant bad faith, invitations to engage in debate. The term originated with the 2000 and 14 script meaning like a web comic comic strip of wonder, Mark by David and I'm gonna destroy this name Malki the whole thing. It's just another form of trolling. Like we have an internet troll. I'll give you two examples here. First example, you have a workforce there all trained, let's say it's in full protection, You have full protection training certificates, you have a 30 hour, maybe a 30 hour construction outreach training card. They've even gotten that fall protection confident person training and they've been designated by their employer as a fall protection confident person. You go out, I don't know either of them. And what do you find a whole bunch of stuff wrong? They start asking questions like, well, what's really wrong with my fall protection anchor? Well, you know, you kinda get attached to a suspended ceiling grid that won't hold £5,000. It's probably only gonna hold £50. No, it's gonna be like £5,000 or double the maximum intended load. This is all in the regulations and in the standards and everything else we have. And what kind of answer do you get back? Well, where does it say that now? They want you to go through the ocean regulations and all through subpart M and find where this is. And then it's well, what's wrong with my fault? Protection distance? I have a shock absorbing lanyard, right, I'm good look at me, I'm all protected. And then you say, well that's shock absorbing lanyard or what we call energy absorbing nowadays. You're supposed to have it for like 18.5 19.5 ft between the Anchorage point on the ground and you have it at about eight ft. In other words, it's never gonna deploy and you're gonna hit the ground when you fall. And they say, well, where does it say that? I was never told that all by training. That's a lie. Or they've gotten really group no training right? And they end up going through and they want you to go through all the manufacturers books and everything else to go and find that out for them and they know that what they're doing is wrong. They're not going to accept your answer or anything else. And you got the idea, they're just sending you a lot of things. Right? Here's another example example to sometimes you have to go through the whole process with these folks that are sea lion and you, it might be just the nature of the beast. What you have to do. I had to go through this with an abrasive blasting crew. There were industrial painters and the so called confident person wanted to do abrasive blasting with a half face respirator with a p 100 cartridge rather than a supplied air blast stood okay. This management was on the west coast in the middle of the country. It's five a.m. There, right? And we couldn't really call them at five a.m. Over this. I ended up having to shut that part of the job done. There was a lot of other stuff for them to do prep work but they couldn't do the abrasive lasting the general contractor that I worked at cleared me to go through this whole process with them, shut them down and everything else. So what do I do? I go through all of the calculations with the guy, the confident person respirator training villas and everything else took about an hour. He told me that no, these were his exact words. I don't know what you're talking about. Must be made up. I'm not into that all this book learning. He said, look, I was at a very large car company by the way. It's one of the you've all heard of and a couple of power plants I've worked with before by the way, jim polls like I've worked with before and they allowed me to work without supply there and since they all allowed it and there were multi billion dollar companies therefore jim you're automatically wrong. You don't know what you're talking about. What did I do. I gave him basically a one hour training session for free but I had time that day and I was managing the project and my man bob. My assistant was running the project at this point, I had just stopped by to try to manage this little part for him. When I finally got the management on the line a couple of hours later. Long story short, they agreed with me and the work proceeding. What's the point? He was sea lion e me to waste my time. He was looking to wear me down or I was looking for a mistake in what I was saying or some kind of inconsistency, then he would have questioned that too. They were on a time crunch to get the job done. These are construction jobs, they have to get them done. However, I would not let them proceed without working safely obviously because I was in charge of safety there and his experience, If there's a time Crunch vs safety, safety always loses 100% of the time. That was his experience. And you have to understand however, with this particular client, this wasn't gonna fly and they had me working. They're not gonna fly. So what do you do if you recognize something like this happening? You have to be nonconfrontational because that's part of the strategy to to piss you off enough to get you to lose control and then they're in charge of the situation, not you. It doesn't creates more attention and everything else. So how do we manage this in a non confrontational way? There are many different ways I came up to with a couple of them. What do you do? You're trying to put it back on them rather tell them, rather than telling them what to do? You have to ask them a question. You then risk becoming a sea lion yourself on this. But you need to question with a purpose to be like an attorney here, we might call this also a learning team. Learning why they're doing something. Use the Socratic method meaning question things. And you learn by questioning for example, why are you doing it this way? Do you have industrial hygiene results that prove that you're what you're doing is right? If you have questions, right? So you're asking these questions, don't be afraid of the answers, especially the ones that you don't like. If you're asking questions, you might get an answer you may not like, but that shouldn't stop you from answering the questions. You could be direct. Sometimes you have to be right. But you kind of realize when you're direct and you say this is site policy. The decision is made well above our pay grade or something like that or we are being paid to do it this way. You got to realize sometimes that doesn't work and you're going to undermine yourself. This is like saying because I told you so and that doesn't help with your own leadership stuff. You got to be a leader on that site and we're going to talk about that this season of safety wards. Also one of my family members does this all the time. Well me and the other family members laugh over this too right. They ask a question that he has an answer to then if you don't use the same exact words and his answer, that one that he got from somebody else, then you're automatically wrong. So how do we manage this situation and I coach family members on this? Yeah, I see. What you have to do is, well, what do you think? Well, wow, I never thought about it that way. What do you think? How did you come to us? This kind of approach works out much better than confronting the person? But sometimes you have to ask, hey, are you looking for an answer or you or do you already have an answer and you're looking for an argument? Usually, you know, you don't want to do that when they start an argument, it may do something else like that. But what's my point? You have to have the answers and questions ahead of time. You have to have a script in your head ahead of time. So with his family member, Right, of the time, he already has the answer. He's just looking for an argument. Now you go to the workplace, do you want to be confrontational? No, you want to be working with the person, but you want to have a backbone, whatever you do, make sure you're not a wise guy with any of this. If that happens, it gets turned around on you and now you're the victim, you're the oppressor and they're the victim and believe me, that will get come back to haunt you. If you put them in a situation where they are the victims, you have to realize sometimes people and once a rarity are actually interested in a genuine discussion. If that's the case, you have to have an opportunity to see it as an opportunity to build bridges, make positive changes and maybe you'll make a friend if you treat someone with respect and they'll be on your side, at least that work. But I caution you. Don't let it become a free training session because that runs into a whole bunch of other problems gonna get free training. Like you kind of make money. You know, we're in this to make money, correct. My wife and I went on our second honeymoon, which was about three weeks after our first honeymoon, we went to Alaska on our second honeymoon. First honeymoon was a cruise to Brooklyn via Puerto rico. But anyway, we went out of day cruise and we started to smell this horrible thing. We went up to the Colgate glacier outside of Anchorage, Beautiful decor. It was a horrible smell captain. What's that horrible smell? And he says to me, those are the sea lions. Do you smell them from miles away? There's a big colony over the steller sea lions. So let's finish with this right, You probably won't be able to smell the proverbial sea lion in your life from that far away. But you need to be able to spot them early on and develop a strategy to manage them in your ongoing safety war for safety wars. This is Jim proposal. 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, 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 councilor or someone on the dark left 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 awards 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.