Every so often, you come across an individual who leaves a lasting impact. John takes us through his remarkable journey, from leading Scot Forge to becoming the first forging company to be accepted into OSHA's Safety & Health Achievement Recognition Program (SHARP), to being named one of the 50 people who most influenced EHS in 2014-2015, to Scot Forge earning America's Safest Companies Award, twice, with his help, and why he decided to join SafeStart.
Host: Danny Smith
Guest: John McGillivray
Every so often, you come across an individual who leaves a lasting impact. John takes us through his remarkable journey, from leading Scot Forge to becoming the first forging company to be accepted into OSHA's Safety & Health Achievement Recognition Program (SHARP), to being named one of the 50 people who most influenced EHS in 2014-2015, to Scot Forge earning America's Safest Companies Award, twice, with his help, and why he decided to join SafeStart.
Host: Danny Smith
Guest: John McGillivray
Welcome back to Safe Talk with Safe Start. I'm Danny Smith, and recently at Safe Start we've experienced a tremendous amount of growth, and so with that, we have added to our family and continue to just want to meet the growing needs of demands on our consulting team. And so I'd like to introduce you today to one of our newest consultants, John McGillivray. John certainly is no stranger to the Safe Start process, so before we get into that, first of all, John, just welcome to the podcast.
John McGillivray:Hey, Danny, it's great to be here. I'm happy to be part of the SafeStart team.
Danny Smith:Now John has spent over 20 years in risk engineering and safety as the manager of safety and environmental affairs at Scott Forge before coming on board with us. He has been a speaker at national safety conferences and seminars and for seven years he was a guest instructor at the OSHA Training Institute, teaching OSHA's compliance officers safety management systems. It's also named as one of the 50 people who most influenced EHS in 2014 to 15 by EHS Today magazine. John led Scott Forge to be the first forging company to receive OSHA's safety and health achievement recognition program.
Danny Smith:You may know his SHARP that certification and his contributions in the strong culture at Scott Forge led them to be awarded as one of America's safest companies in both 2014 and 2019 by EHS Today magazine. To get that once is quite an honor, but twice certainly is huge, and John helped a tremendous amount in that effort. John also has a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from the University of Missouri Rolla and he is a retired Captain of the United States Army Engineers. So, John, you know a bit about how this works. We asked the same questions of each of our consultants and then it just gets everybody a bit more familiar with you and really interesting with your background, as with several of other our other consultants, you started as a client, so exactly, I guess, starting with, how did you end up coming aboard with Safe Start?
John McGillivray:Well, kind of a little bit of a long journey. I actually started looking at Safe Start back in 2008 and ultimately brought it into our company in about 2010. And the Safe Start principles just clicked with our people because we saw the state-to-error risk pattern just affecting us day in, day out and causing us problems. And so once we understood what the problem was, we got very intentional about using the process and our numbers dropped dramatically Whether you're talking injury numbers, equipment damage numbers, everything was happening less and less. And so then the light bulb kind of went off in 2015 for us and we started being real intentional about applying the principles to our quality program. We saw the same type of results Our quality errors dropped off the table.
John McGillivray:So for 10 and a half years before I retired, we just found new and creative ways to integrate these principles into our processes. And so once I retired, the folks at Safe Start asked me to join the company and work with our client companies to help integrate these principles into everyday life within these organizations and just make it part of their fabric, part of their DNA on how they operate on a daily basis. So that's what I'm really here to do is help companies not only implement the process, but sustain it over the long term.
Danny Smith:What do you think is really unique about Safe Start? What do you just really love about the process?
John McGillivray:Honestly, Danny, I think it's really the simplicity of the process.
John McGillivray:It really makes sense to people.
John McGillivray:Once you get them to understand that four simple states affecting us every day causes so many of the problems that we get ourselves into, a lot of people just start gravitating towards the process And we really think that the techniques that we teach, the four critical error reduction techniques, are really easy to grasp, but you got to be really intentional about using them in real time.
John McGillivray:So once people figure out what's getting them into trouble, they wanna find a natural solution and I think Safe Start offers a pretty simple solution that people can use, both inside the four walls of wherever they work, outside, at home, on the road, wherever, because no one really likes getting hurt, no one likes making mistakes that causes them to feel pain and suffering or just extra time and money, whatever the case may be. And once they get that down, they really start changing the way they think about what they do. And you can see it on an individual level and then ultimately as an organization and it creates that team effort, because we all know that it's a safety, is a team sport. We gotta get through our days and you look out for me, I look out for you, and together we make it happen, and so that's really what I love about Safe Start.
Danny Smith:Yeah, it's evident just having been with you after your former employer, Scott Forge, back when we were actually launching Safe Start Now. Your team was a part of one of the pilots that we did there and thanks so much for helping with that. You and the whole team there Even before you retired. That was just huge to help us as we were moving forward with the Safe Start Now process. It was just evident that the whole team there had embraced the concepts and, as you said, it applied them in so many different areas not just safety but also quality and you could see that evidence throughout the organization, from top to bottom. What do you think is one of the most important parts of your life that's been impacted by Safe Start?
John McGillivray:You know I've done a lot of dumb stuff in my life and it's put me in very avoidable situations where I've gotten hurt, basically made brain fart, mistakes that have cost me a lot of time and money, broken stuff or said things in the heat of the moment because I just didn't think things through.
John McGillivray:And Safe Start personally when you talk about my life personally has really helped me reduce the frequency of those type of events in my life and, I think, equally important, both my wife and I worked for Scott Forge and we got very intentional about teaching safety to our children. We have seven children together and you know they have been so good about calling me out when I'm at home doing something around the house where I haven't thought it through and they've been able to recognize hey dad, you're not paying attention, your mind's not on task, whatever the case may be, and when you find a tool that not only can help you in the workplace setting but you can use it at home and then generationally teach it to your children, you have absolutely struck gold. And I believe that you know Safe Start has just been a tremendous tool to help me personally and certainly help my coworkers and my family members as well.
Danny Smith:Yeah, I'm sure you saw a lot there at Scott Forge when you were there, but you've also had the opportunity to now work through the past year or so with a number of our clients now that you've retired and moved over to the Safe Start team, what's one of the most exciting things that you've seen, either at Scott Forge or now with clients, since you've been out on your Safe Start journey, if you will?
John McGillivray:That's a great question, because when I think back to my days at Scott Forge, I mean just seeing the change in that mentality and the attitude of our team, the confidence level, because when I first started there we were hurting a lot of people and going a couple of weeks without somebody getting hurt was pretty rare. Going a month was pretty unheard of. Going 100 days without somebody getting hurt had never been done in the history of our organization. And so once we got Safe Start really starting to be ingrained in our team, those milestones started falling time and time and time again and we ultimately got to the milestone that senior management when I first started said couldn't be done.
John McGillivray:We went with an entire facility more than a year without somebody getting hurt And we've done that multiple times since that point. And what was cool was, even if we did have a set, somebody did get hurt. It wasn't just the safety guy saying hey guys, great job getting to here, let's do it better next time, it was the entire team talking that way. And as cool as that was when people would come up to me, like on a Monday morning when I walked into work and they said hey, John, I'm so pissed at you And I'd be like what did I do? I just walked into the plant And they said I was about to do something at home this past weekend And I thought about all this Safe Start stuff and I can't get it out of my head And I had to do it this way or that way And it took me longer but I got through it and it came out absolutely great.
John McGillivray:But I'm telling you I just can't stop thinking about this stuff now. I've never taken all the fun out of my world And we could laugh about that kind of stuff, but I've seen that with my team, I've seen that with some of our clients that are a little bit further down the road, where there are people are talking about the fact that we just don't do things the way we used to do. The whole terminology, that's the way we've always done it around here. They're looking at things with a fresh set of eyes and it's really changing how they do things in the future and that's so critical for continuous improvement. So you know, when I think about my journey and the journey of my team and the journey of our clients, it's just seeing that change in our people over the course of months to, you know, maybe a year. It's a whole new organization and that's ultimately what we're after.
Danny Smith:That's just amazing and thanks so much for joining us today. Just this quick visit together. I really appreciate you joining us on the podcast here And it was great to welcome you aboard. Looks like I had the opportunity to work with you back prior to you coming on board with us and just really excited having you here with us now. If you would let everybody know how they can get in touch with you.
John McGillivray:Yeah, it's really simple. It's john at safestart. com. Again, my whole role in the organization is really to help with that sustainability. After that book closes on your last training session, how do you make this last not only for months, but for years to come and really fundamentally change the way your organization thinks about safety? Please get ahold of me or any one of my coworkers and we would love to work with you guys again, john at safestart. com.
Danny Smith:All right. So john at safestart. com, be sure to reach out to John. You can get through to him there or you can reach out to him through one of your client managers. And to everybody, thanks for joining us today. Really great to have you spend some time with us today, just getting to know John a bit more. Some of you probably heard his name, maybe seen him at some of our conferences and things of that nature. But on behalf of John and the entire team here at SafeTalk with SafeS tart, I'm Danny Smith. Until next time, thanks for joining us.