In this episode of the Longshore Insider Podcast, AEU Loss Control Manager Woody Collins shares why choosing the right people for safety roles is critical in the maritime industry. Learn what traits to look for, how to train effectively, and the real-world consequences of getting it wrong.
Transcript
Announcer:
Welcome to the Longshore Insider Podcast from the American Equity Underwriters. At AEU, we are passionate about helping waterfront employers protect their workers and their businesses. Join us as we explore practical strategies for improving workplace safety, effective claims management, and much more. So let's dive in. Welcome to the Longshore Insider Podcast.
Mike Jernigan:
Hello, and thank you for listening to the AEU Longshore Insider Podcast. I'm your host, Mike Jernigan. In this series, I'm speaking with AEU's very own loss control managers to learn how they help organizations across the maritime industry develop, maintain, and improve safety cultures.
I'm joined today by Woody Collins and we're going to be talking about how we get the right people in the right positions. Woody, how are you?
Woody Collins:
Doing well, Mike. Thank you.
Mike Jernigan:
So, Woody, tell me a little bit about yourself and how you got started on the road to becoming a loss control manager?
Woody Collins:
Mike, that journey started about 35 years ago, right out of high school. Started off in the shipyard industry as a fiberglass grinder. Learned how to be a welder, pipe fitter. I didn't say I was very good at them all, but I learned how to do most of those trades.
And when the opportunity arose to join a safety committee, I took that opportunity and really found a passion for safety and was afforded the opportunity, become a safety manager at one of the facilities within our parent company. And since then, I've been in safety going on nearly 18 years now and had the opportunity to come to work for AEU about 12 years ago.
Mike Jernigan:
So you've been in this field for a long time.
Woody Collins:
Yes, I have.
Mike Jernigan:
And you've seen a lot.
Woody Collins:
Over the years, I've seen more than I care to mention.
Mike Jernigan:
So when it comes to personnel and getting the right people in the right positions, what is it exactly that you're looking for when it comes to those key safety positions?
Woody Collins:
For years, we've always taken people and promoted them because they've been at the company for quite some time now, which I highly encourage. But at the end of the day, we don't always take into consideration do they have the skills necessary to be able to lead the proper team or the personnel? So I think over time we've grown to learn that we have to choose the right people for the right job based on their qualities, not just their longevity and seniority within the company.
Mike Jernigan:
Exactly. Because just because you are good at a task doesn't always make you a good supervisor, right?
Woody Collins:
Precisely. That's exactly right.
Mike Jernigan:
Right. And that's one of those things that we've talked about it before, and I think it's important to reiterate it. Because you can have someone who is a fantastic welder or ship fitter, just that was the example we've used before. But when you promote that person into a position of safety, they may not be well suited to be a supervisor.
Woody Collins:
You hit the nail right on the head. I mean, again, just because you're a welder every day and you do a great job at it, you do everything that is asked of you. You pass all of the welding criteria and all the tests and all the things that's required of it. So naturally the company wants to promote you and should want to promote you.
But when you leave on Friday as a welder and you show up Monday as a welding supervisor and you got 15 personalities to deal with, it's a whole different ballgame. And we're not necessarily equipped or ready to take on that task.
Mike Jernigan:
So speaking to that, have you ever seen the wrong person in the wrong position? And what does that look like?
Woody Collins:
Well, I could tell you, you're looking at one right here. I mean, when I first became a supervisor, I failed miserably at it. I'll be very candid with you. People want to be led, they don't want to be managed. And when you don't have the leadership's qualities that are desired to be a leader to lead your team, you tend to manage them the way you manage a process.
And in my early years, that's exactly what happened. And it took some time to learn that by looking at mentors. I looked at supervisors who were successful, who people liked, who people looked up to, and tried to mimic some of those qualities to help me become that better leader.
Mike Jernigan:
And you say the early years, and so you've been at it for a little bit, right? But do you feel that this is an issue that persists? Is this something that is currently an issue within the maritime industry?
Woody Collins:
It's very prevalent in the maritime industry. I see it everywhere as I go, where people are being promoted for all the wrong reasons. I see it oftentimes where we try to bring in people that don't necessarily have those skills. But the problem is now where everyone is having trouble finding people, so everyone is scrambling to try to fill the roles needed to get the jobs done successfully. And unfortunately, we struggle with that as an industry.
Mike Jernigan:
And that struggle is something that we have heard about from a lot of our members and even those outside of our membership who are in the maritime industry. It's hard to get people in these positions for a whole host of reasons that we can't get into really. We don't have enough time today to talk about that.
Woody Collins:
Sure.
Mike Jernigan:
But one of the things that I think is important to talk about is let's say you're working with a pool of team members. And you know that you have a safety position to fill and it's up to you to decide who you're going to choose. What are the unique traits and characteristics that you are looking for? Or that a company or an organization should look for out of those people who would fill those positions?
Woody Collins:
That's a great question because overall, when you're looking at some of those traits, you want someone that's ambitious. You want someone that's self-motivated, someone that wants to learn, someone that excited about coming to work every day at that particular job.
But this doesn't apply just to safety positions. This applies to all roles within the company. And a few examples I'll give you is a fire watch. A lot of times in the shipyard industry, we need fire watchers to go out and make sure we protect the assets we're trying to build or work on or repair. And numerous times, Will Turner, I'll hear supervisors say, "Well, just go get the guy that's over there sweeping because he doesn't know how to do anything else."
So we want to take the guy that just got hired on that has very little skills and give him one of the most important roles within the company, and that's protecting the vessels that we're trying to build or repair from catching on fire. When that to me should be elevated to someone who understands fire prevention, how to protect the vessel from fires before the fires ever even start. How do we clear out the area so we don't even have the potential for a fire?
Another one is a competent person. Too many times I've heard companies say, "We need to hire competent people. Anybody interested in making overtime?" "Oh, I want to make overtime." So they train them to become a competent person simply because they want overtime, but they don't understand the importance of being a competent person.
If we haphazardly check these tanks and don't do it according to procedure and policy, we have the potential to have a serious incident and possibly even kill someone. But yet we've just given it to someone who wants to make overtime. I see it across the industry in all positions.
So going back to your original question, some of those traits we're looking for are, again, self-motivators, self-starters. Someone who actually enjoys the job, someone who takes it personal. Someone who's actually interested in being their brother's keeper. Someone who is looking to make sure that their co-worker goes home safe, the way their family send them to work in the morning. People are genuinely concerned about other people.
Mike Jernigan:
That's the most important aspect I think, of what we do because it is true that if a supervisor or safety personnel doesn't do their job, then someone doesn't make it home safely at the end of the day.
So let's say that you found who you believe would be the right candidate to fulfill a role that's needed. Is there a way that you then go back and check their track record? To ensure that say they maybe just aren't putting on a face to get the job but have been consistent throughout the years?
Woody Collins:
Absolutely. I mean, when it comes to stuff like that, it goes back to actually interviewing the employee. But actually interviewing their co-workers, interviewing their past supervisors to understand what kind of employee that is. And if they're within, sometimes you have these smaller companies that the one actually doing the hiring and the promoting already knows what that background looks like.
But again, it's going back to what I initially said, some of the things you're looking for, you should know that. And if you don't, you should be asking those questions to people that we have worked with. It's one thing for me to say it as an individual, but having other people say that about the one you're trying to promote carries a lot of weight. So do your proper investigation and background check, if you will.
Mike Jernigan:
Once you've done all those checks and you feel confident that you've got the right person, what does it look like to put them in that role? And then provide them with the training and everything else that they need and the support to effectively do that job?
Woody Collins:
Great question because it happens all the time. It's like we initially hire them. We're excited about it, we get them excited about it. We train them to do the role, and we just kind of like, "Here you go, take off and run with it." And we just hope they do a good job.
That's where you got to have some sort of coaching and mentoring process in place. You got to have the ability to have periodic check-ins with them, how things are going. But also going and walk the job with them, ensuring, especially when it comes to a competent person. I've seen so many competent people check tanks in the morning at 4:00 o'clock when there's maybe one or two other people in the yard, if you're lucky.
And if you've got a 20-foot deep tank, you should be checking it at certain intervals and certain levels. You should be doing a visual inspection way in the back of the tank. But when I see 10 bolts in a facility and you got one competent person checking 10 bolts in two hours, that tells me they're not doing an accurate job.
And as supervisors, as management within the company, we got to make sure he understands that he has a responsibility to do it right. And if he doesn't, then we got to coach him to do it right. Or if he's not doing it right and chooses not to because he doesn't like it, that's okay too. But we have to make sure we get the right person that takes it personal and wants to do the job correctly to ensure all of our employees are protected.
Mike Jernigan:
You mentioned earlier it's okay that someone not be great at that job if they fulfill that role. Can you give me maybe sort of an example of how an organization might be able to handle that? If they do find that the wrong person is in the role, how can they sort of mitigate and manage that situation?
Woody Collins:
Great question. So in a situation like this, you have to do the investigation first. Does the employee actually understand his role? He might've went through a competent person class that took a day and a half, but did he actually comprehend everything that was taught? And if not, then you have the opportunity to coach that employee to make sure he understands the role that's required of him, the actual procedure.
And once he understands that, you might realize, hey, this guy just didn't know. We coached him up. And if you did that and he actually does a great job, you just earned a lot of credibility with that employee because you coached him to do the right job the right way. And if you can do that, then you get some influence over their employee.
And if that's not the case, you might realize that the guy did understand his role, he just chose not to do it the right way. That's a whole other different ball game. So that's when you got to have these commitment meetings, if you will. Tell me why you didn't do it, understand. And it's because, well, nothing happened yesterday. We've been checking this tank for the last two weeks. Nothing happened. So I just figured it was okay. I didn't have to go through all the procedures. I can go through the motions.
And that happens often. So that gives you the opportunity to have that commitment meeting, say, "No, just because it was great yesterday doesn't mean things haven't changed overnight." And I'll give you a great example. Years ago I was working a shipyard and I was testing a vessel. We had 12 vessels being built at one time and nobody had worked since Friday. This was a Sunday night. I was checking it for us to go to work on Monday morning.
So I'm checking the tank and all of a sudden my meter starts going off. I thought the meter was wrong, something was wrong with my meter. I went and get a second meter, came back and checked. That meter went off as well. Someone had left the torch holes in a tank that busted over the weekend, that filled up actual the tank with gases and my meter actually set it off.
But if I'd have just done a walk-by and not truly tested that tank, someone could have easily came to work the next morning, entered that space, and who knows what would've happened. So you have to take those jobs seriously. You cannot take shortcuts.
So again, understanding things like that. You have the opportunity to have the commitment meeting, retrain them, and if they choose, "You know what? This is too much for me and I don't want to do that," that's okay. Go find the right person.
Mike Jernigan:
Right now, we know that there are people in these positions who shouldn't be.
Woody Collins:
Absolutely.
Mike Jernigan:
And that needs to be handled.
Woody Collins:
Yes.
Mike Jernigan:
So when you have to have these tough conversations, how do you stress the importance of this to upper management? How do you get that buy-in from them to say, "Hey, listen, this is a situation that could lead to a really bad outcome." What would you say to that upper management, that executive team, about the importance of making sure that they are diligent and getting the right people in the right places?
Woody Collins:
Well, it basically starts with a mindset. And that's reiterating to management the things that we're already talking about. But also that you can't just expect someone to go out and do the job because you gave it to them and hope that they succeed.
You have to set them up for success. Whether that's additional training, whether that's providing them with a mentor. Visiting other shipyards, partnering with other shipyards. Yeah, we may be competitors, but if they have a great safety program next door and they can help me and my safety guy get off the ground to help our get safety, why wouldn't you tap into that resource?
AEU has facilitated numerous meetings such as that with member shipyards, members helping members, which is something we promote as a company. And we've done that numerous times and we found a lot of success with it. But basically it's getting them to understand they have to set these guys up for success by giving them the tools that they need.
And if they don't, then the company has to make a decision. I either need to give them the tools we need, or I got to go find somebody who already has the tools. One or the other. And that's where companies I think struggle. Too many times they just want to pick the guy that's in-house that doesn't understand, but they don't.
Because a lot of times management doesn't understand the tools that the guys need, so they expect them to go out and find it on their own. Not everybody's capable of that. So you have to pair them up with a mentor who can help them through those situations, or you got to go find someone who has those qualifications already. That's my message to management.
Mike Jernigan:
Right. And we sort of talked about this earlier. You can have the hard skills all day long, but when you move into those supervisory roles where you have to speak to team members and get buy-in and sell these initiatives, you got to have those soft skills.
Woody Collins:
That's right. Which we're very fortunate. We have Joe White with AEU Lead, who's put together the micro learning series that does a great job of helping these supervisors attain some of those skills. Even those in-person workshops that I think numerous members within AEU has already benefited from it, have taken it. And we see more and more taking advantage of those opportunities every day.
Mike Jernigan:
Exactly. And I would encourage anyone, any of our members who haven't been to an AEU Lead Supervisor Skills Workshop, head over to our website, AMEquity.com, go to the events page, check it out. If you see one, sign up. It's a really great experience. And also you can catch Joe White at a lot of our national forums like that.
So you can be introduced to the AEU Lead program to see exactly what it is that it provides, because it's a great resource to help people understand how to interact with people and how to be engaging and impactful. Because like we said earlier, you can do a specific task very well. But some of these soft skills, we say they're soft because they're not as tangible. They're much harder to gauge. They're much harder to obtain.
And so I think that it's important that people understand that this isn't quite the same as getting good at a job that you can do repeatedly every day. Those soft skills need to be honed over time and they evolve.
Woody Collins:
That's correct. And a lot of those skills, like you said, it's not tangible. You got to go out and earn them. Some of them won't just give you respect. You got to go out and earn that. In order to do that, you got to establish some credibility. You got to earn some respect. All these different skills.
Some of them may give you a little bit of respect just because of your title, but that's not enough to get you where you need to be. You got to go out and earn that. Like I said, alluding to what you said as well, Joe has some great material out there that can help these guys do that, because getting the job done is easy. It's leading the people that's hard.
Mike Jernigan:
Exactly. So I want to close with this question. You are a safety expert and loss control manager. You've got decades of experience in this industry. And so the last question that I want to ask you today, is what is one thing about safety that you wish more people understood?
Woody Collins:
Safety can be a profit center if you look at it the right way. Too many times I see companies looking at safety as overhead costs. Looking at safety as a pain in my side, if you will. Whereas if you get safety involved in the job planning ahead of time, they can not only look at it from a production standpoint, but also look at it to help you support the things you need, such as scaffolding the right safety equipment that's needed.
That way once you start the job, they're not coming in behind you and shutting it down because you set it up wrong. If you have those conversations ahead of time, you can eliminate all of that fuss and things like that. Use safety as an advantage. Get them part of the planning process.
And when you start looking at the lagging indicators, you realize that incidents cost money. And when you look at that and you realize where you need to focus at to help improve your safety program, you can start driving down on those incident costs, which in turns will drive down your insurance premium hopefully, and help save the company money. Safety can be a cost center and a profit center if you look at it and utilize it the correct way.
Mike Jernigan:
Right. And one incident, if you're really looking at bottom line, one safety incident can really take its toll.
Woody Collins:
It could.
Mike Jernigan:
And as I've said before, that's the least of what a safety incident does because the most important impact is the person or the people. But again, to those who might be more worried about their bottom line and they think that safety is some kind of speed bump or an impediment, listen, one incident is going to cost you a lot, a lot more than you might think.
Woody Collins:
And the tangible thing that's easy is the money out side of it. What's hard to measure is when someone gets hurt, what does it do for morale? You can't put a price tag on that. What does it do for your company culture? You can't put a price tag on those things. So when those are all the indirect costs, that's really hard to measure and gage.
So when we talking about having incidents, like I said, we can measure the actual cost of that claim. It's the indirect cost, and those are the things that you can really impact that's hard to measure. But again, if you do the right thing for the right reasons when no one's watching, safety saves money.
Mike Jernigan:
I think that is great advice, and that is a perfect place to end our discussion today. I thank you for your expertise, Woody. It has been great talking with you today.
Woody Collins:
Thank you, Mike. I appreciate it, man.
Mike Jernigan:
Absolutely. And also, thanks to our listeners for joining us on the Longshore Insider Podcast. You can watch this episode and more on the American Equity Underwriters YouTube page. Also, be sure to subscribe to the Longshore Insider Podcast on your favorite podcast platform and check out even more content on our website AMEquity.com. Until next time, stay safe and take care.
