APM Team,
Our fall outage season has quickly ramped up. This past week we had ~2300 craft working ~132K hours on ~150 jobs. Now is when we need to leverage the Safety & Quality Leadership Training we did this summer to empower our crews to work safely and with quality.
With that in mind, we asked John Collins, our Gas Ops Director, to share a brief message on his reflections from the Training.
It was great to spend time with our field leaders at the Safety & Quality Leadership Training; the energy and passion of our field leaders for the work they do and the teams they lead was obvious. One common theme that stood out to me from those conversations in the hallway and between trainings was the Power of Pairs or Peers (with a Boston accent it pretty much sounds the same anyway).
To continue to improve our Safety & Quality outcomes but also to help develop our talent, the following key elements were highlighted in our conversations:
Right Team Set-up
Buddy System
MENTORSHIP (Superintendents were even asking how they could help with more formal MENTORSHIP programs and also working with our labor partners to do this more at scale)
One key takeaway from the week that I took was the power of teams (when done right), even teams of two.
“Talking Through” the task before beginning work in the STA process helps draw a more complete picture because you have to vocalize all aspects, so the other person fully understands. When you think through a task yourself your brain naturally does a good job of filling in a lot of the blanks as a shortcut, which at times will cause us to overlook something. “Talking through” the task also invites others to look for other risks or think about those “what if” scenarios we wish had a 0% chance of happening.
The next level of teamwork I encourage you to promote with your teams is carrying the same “Talking Through” practice during the task itself. Have you ever listened to cockpit conversations between the pilot, co-pilot, and tower during a takeoff or landing? Have you ever watched an operation being performed? The one thing that stands out most to me is that those at the top of their field, who have done these procedures every day are very vocal about each step they are taking (even simple, small steps) and what they are seeing. Maybe even more impressive are those other teammates supporting (e.g. nurses), sharing their information, and even offering alternatives or observations of other things to be considering real time.
What you and your teams are facing are often less predictable and often can be more complex, so promoting and leading by example the habit of “Talking Through” a task will help you lead safer and higher quality jobs.
Our field leaders have proven they are leading their teams to excellent levels of performance and are even further improving in the past year, raising the bar again. This is leading to jobs performing better in all metrics, customer experience survey scores continuing to increase, and more jobs being won by customer request for APM. The energy and passion we saw in Houston a few weeks ago is a small snapshot of what you bring every day to lead our teams to top performance…. Thank You!
~ John