Chapter 17Measuring Safety Performance
To manage safety performance effectively, every leader needs accurate information to be able to judge and evaluate performance, determine the future direction of performance, and reveal to the leader what's really going on. How the leader uses that information determines its function. A useful leading indicator will reliably predict a future change in the trend of performance, explaining both its desirability and difficulty. When followers know certain information will be used by their leaders to judge performance, they will be naturally inclined to manage the information to produce the result the leader wants. Every leader must understand that type of information cannot be relied upon to reveal reality; other methods must be found to meet that vital need.
As to how to go about improving the measurement process to produce better information on which to manage, the scope of that effort depends on the level of the leader: a front line leader needs only information concerning their crew, whereas the executive's scope is the larger organization. In either case, it's best to start with what already exists; scouring the organization for information and metrics will likely produce a long list of information routinely collected and metrics that have been created. For an executive, all that information can be evaluated and understood by applying the technique of the Balanced Scorecard. For the front line leader, the practical approach is creating ...