It may sound counterintuitive, but sometimes, the best thing you can do to protect workers is take more risks.
“There's really no need to play it safe while focusing on safety,” explains Mike Jones, owner and president of Discover Leadership Training. “I'll tell you why. If I'm playing it safe, then I'm looking in the rearview mirror at all of the things that have gone wrong and all of the things that could potentially go wrong.
“Generally [speaking,] focusing on that stuff means that it goes wrong because whatever we're focusing on is generally what expands for us, because our energy and our actions follow our thoughts.”
Instead, Jones says safety professionals ought to focus on their specific problem areas and what changes they can take to address them—even if it means ignoring conventional wisdom or what others’ have done.
In other words, Jones advises looking at workplace safety challenges with a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset. It’s a subtle shift, but one that allows safety professionals to think about next practices instead of best practices.
“If we now shift our mindset from focusing on what we don't want to focusing on what we do want, it could be a whole different matrix for how we approach safety in the workplace,” Jones says. “There are a whole lot of best practices out there…and I'm saying to them that somebody else's best practice may not be your best practice.
“They don't have your environment. They don't have your team members. They're not dealing with the same components, whether we're talking about the human component or other components that you're dealing with.”
But the one thing that you have 100% control of is yourself and how you choose to spend your time and attention.
It’s a lesson Jones has learned over his career, which includes service in the U.S. Coast Guard and the Houston Police Department in addition to being a commercial pilot, TV host, pilot and now a consultant.
“One of the greatest gifts that…[we] have is the gift of choice,” Jones says. “We can choose positive, or we can choose negative. I mean, stuff's going to happen, especially in the realm of safety. If we approach it from a negative perspective, very likely all we're going to get from it is whatever the negative was that occurred. If we find a way to focus on a positive focus on what we want, we likely can transform and reframe that into something different than what we may be experiencing today.”
Jones will be sharing these and other lessons learned in what’s sure to be a rousing closing keynote at Safety Leadership Conference 2025, being held from October 20-22 in Pheonix, Arizona. More information, including registration, can be found at http://www.safetyleadershipconference.com.
Listen to Jones’ full conversation with Managing Editor Nicole Stempak below.
About the Author
Nicole Stempak
Nicole Stempak is managing editor of EHS Today and conference content manager of the Safety Leadership Conference.