Brian Fielkow & Associates – Safety Is the Accelerant: Brian Fielkow on Why Safe Companies Grow Faster
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Whose responsibility is safety? When Brian Fielkow put that question to the trucking company he had recently bought, half the room or more named the safety manager. Changing that answer turned into the work.
His route into the field was not a straight line, and he says it could not have been scripted at the start. As a business lawyer in Milwaukee he spent his days inside other people’s companies and started noticing what separated the well run ones from the rest. That led him to join a client, a family recycling business three generations deep, which he helped grow before it was acquired by Waste Management. A stint inside that much larger organization followed, then the decision to buy a trucking operation of his own and expand it into freight brokerage and logistics. Running that business is what convinced him safety is neither a department nor a compliance exercise. Three books later, the newest being Making Safety Happen, he is still making the argument.
In this episode of The Safety Spotlight, Brian argues that a separate safety culture does not exist. There is company culture, and safety lives inside it. He also pushes back on the notion that safety slows production, since companies with the fewest incidents get to spend their time on the work rather than on the cleanup. Results like that, he says, trace back to the quality of the leadership. He is careful not to present it as a finished picture. Even a well run business can have a bad day, and he describes every organization he has led or advised, his own included, as still in progress.
