Found only on the Firehouse Limited Edition Tablet version, Dr. Richard B. Gasaway shares 10 tips to lead, influence, inspire and motivate. To create a well-rounded approach, he shares six best practices and four common pitfalls. If you would like advice on a specific topic, please e-mail us at: [email protected].
How to Improve Your Safety
1. Good – Know your job: To know your job means to be well educated, well trained and well practiced so that your performance becomes second nature – habit. This goes well beyond the initial training you received in the beginning. Learning how to do complex and demanding work is a never-ending process.
2. Good – Know your tools and equipment: The tools and equipment you use can, quite literally, save your life or kill you. An in-depth knowledge of the tools and equipment of your trade are critical to your safety. On the job training (i.e., learning how to use a tool during an emergency) is not the time and place to learn how the tools and equipment operate.
3. Good – Know your team members: We depend heavily on the skills and abilities of fellow team members. Knowing their capabilities and shortcomings can help keep you from being put into a compromising situation. It can also help you support the training needs of fellow team members.
4. Good – Know yourself: Each of us has special knowledge and gifts we bring to the work we do. But let’s be honest – we also have shortcomings and deficiencies in our knowledge and abilities. Acknowledging your shortcomings can help you create an action plan for improvement and seek the training you need to become your personal best.
5. Good – Know your enemy: The “enemy” is whatever you deal with at work that can hurt or kill you. Become a student of your trade and understand your enemy and how it has hurt and killed your comrades in the past – learn from the mistakes of others.
6. Good – Never stop learning: Our trade is always evolving and so we, too, must continually evolve. This entails adopting a mindset that we can never learn too much for a job that can kill us.
7. Bad – Become complacent: One of the surest paths to an injury or fatality is to travel down the road of complacency. Letting your guard down simply because you’ve never experienced a near-miss or a casualty is dangerous. The evil twin to complacency is false-confidence – believing you are better than you are simply because you have been lucky, not good.
8. Bad – Degrade and belittle those who follow safety best practices: If you want to take shortcuts and don’t care about the consequences, then became a critic of those who do the job safely. Make fun of them and criticize them when they do the job according to best practices. Make them feel stupid. Then maybe they’ll stop doing it their way and join up with you, doing it the unsafe way.
9. Bad – Take shortcuts: Invent “better” ways to do things that take less time. Don’t worry about the safe way to do it when there is a shorter and faster way to get the work done. The shortcut will allow you to get the work done sooner and will give you more downtime to pursue your personal interests. When taking shortcuts results in good outcomes (only because of luck), attribute the good outcome to your brilliance for finding a better way of doing things.
10. Ugly – Get caught up in your greatness: Once you have mastered your trade and have been able to perform your duties for some time without consequence, it’s time to sit back, relax and put your feet up. You’ve become so good at what you do that you don’t have to train anymore. You’ve earned 20 years of downtime.
Dr. Richard B. Gasaway served 30 years as a first responder in six public safety organizations and now teaches safety and leadership topics for first responders throughout the world. You can visit his speaker’s website at: www.RichGasaway.com. He also serves as the founding editor of Situational Awareness Matters! (www.SAMatters.com), an online resource for information to help improve first responder situational awareness and decision making under stress. You can e-mail Dr. Gasaway at: [email protected]; or get connected with him on Twitter: @RichGasaway.