#58 - Kathy Seabrook - Put Safety on the P&L: How to Sell the Business Case for Safety to the C-Suite

I feel like my role right now is to educate as many people so we can get to the tipping point, that this is actually embraced by companies. They see the value of doing this because the rising tide raises all ships. And so this means people in organizations have better jobs. People in organizations are working at less risk. People in organizations are actually happy, have a sense of wellbeing. So therefore, their contribution is better. The communities benefit, the economics of the community, it's all interconnected, and the business actually creates value from areas that were non-traditional, and that's a good thing.

So, Cathy, it's so good to see you. I haven't seen you in a while. I feel like it's been such a long time since it was the People's Sustainability Forum last year when we last

Yes, hard to believe that's back in November. Time is flying.

Yeah, and a lot has changed since then. Yeah, it feels like the world has gone through quite a few—

Yeah, which is why, like, what we're talking about today really matters. I mean, this topic, thinking about people at work, keeping them safe and healthy, and talking about their well-being, is, um, is something we can't lose focus on.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I, I think we're going to be like hearing about how you've been doing, and we're going to catch up properly. But something that I want to ask here, Kathy, to just anchor this conversation is, like, what's the role of self-compassion, the heart, and trust in everything you do? You know, when you think about the space you work at, how would you contextualize the role of the heart, compassion, and trust?

Wow, that's a deep question. And I love this question because I never get asked this. So for me, this is all of those things, 3 things that you've described are why I do what I do. I think when people, and for as long as I can remember my career, people say, you know, well, tell me, do you like your job? And it's like, my answer is always, I love what I do. And I think because when I, for me, when you think about the heart, you think about compassion and think about trust. I couldn't do what I do, which is going through workplace. I'm a strategy gal. So I'll go in and help companies really figure out how do you integrate taking care of your people, people sustainability, into your organization, into the strategy, into how does it look like operationalizing. And at the end of the day, if you're not speaking from your heart, people won't trust you. And if I don't really feel a sense of, wanting to understand somebody else, and I think that's part of how the compassion kind of plays out. And I'm talking about me personally. I couldn't do what I do because I connect dots, for lack of a better way to say it. So I'll meet various people. I worked in the steel industry, for example, and I would go in for a week a month to 2 different divisions of this company. It's fairly large and frankly very profitable US steel company. And I would literally go in and do more organizational-type work, organizational development work. And in order to do that, you have to be able to make somebody feel comfortable and trust you and know that whatever they share with you, which is really important because what I try to do is mine out challenges specifically for the people side of the organization, safety, health, and their wellbeing. And it really helps everything. But if I don't create a space where there's trust between whoever that worker is, that teammate, as they called them, they're not going to be able to feel comfortable sharing and trusting that I'm not going to share their name, but I'm going to share whatever the issue is. And it could be contractors in the morning coming on site, and it's taking 2 hours to get there. It's like, how is that happening? Well, it turns out it was the safety and health. audit before they came on board. And that just can't be because the actual contractors need to get their work done. They also have to be vetted. So how can they work together, safety and the operational side, to be able to take and dislodge, if you will, that bottleneck in the morning? Because everybody was frustrated. And I went in and I talked to people throughout the organization, including the VP, the general managers, and everyone. So if people didn't know that I was there for the greater good, for everyone, they wouldn't have talked to me, and we wouldn't be able to move things forward and create improvements. So, for me, that's just an example of why I think those 3 things are important. And I'm not sure safety and health professionals really think of it that way, but I think that's at the core of what we do.

I love that. It's like we're all very busy trying to put on a show in a way to be in this corporate world and run these corporate roles. But what really moves people and creates a difference is this sense of compassion and opening our hearts. And the reason why I love starting this question, starting by asking this question, is I really feel that when I'm around you and when I talk to you and I see how you do that with other people, you just have the sense of really help, really making the person feel respected, appreciated, heard. So you have this like deep sense of compassion in how you operate. And I really feel like it's a superpower that we all need to— talk about more and learn from more and learn from.

Well, thank you. I never thought about it, but it's a superpower. I have to remember that.

Appreciate you, Kathy. And, you know, just to take us back a little bit, you know, and you've gone through so much and, you know, you are here now and you've learned so much throughout your journey. What are some of the stories, even if it's one story that comes to mind that really shaped shaped you and shaped your journey through all this?

I have to say, and you'll be surprised at this, 'cause there's several things that were very important to get me where I am today, to really be in the space of impact valuation and accounting and really, really, really true business integration. It all really started, I think the biggest event was, so when I went off to university, I was supposed to be in education. So I was supposed to teach Children that were, I don't know, like 4 years old to, I don't know, maybe 12. And I got there and you had to take sort of, to be well-rounded, you had to take humanities courses and you had to take, you know, all kinds of liberal arts. You had to take sciences and whatever. And I basically took a chemistry class, absolutely loved it. It explained why things worked in the world. You know, when you basically have a spoon and you've got that water or tea on the end of the spoon and why doesn't that water just fall right off? Oh, that's surface tension. And that just captured me. It was like chemistry explains why the world works. And that just helped me understand that I'm a process gal. And that grounding, and I am a scientist, I'm very curious, very, you know, the scientific method, I'm all about that, right? Putting a premise out there, knowing it may or may not be right, and in the discovery process, learning that you course correct. Right. And in that, you come up with possible answers and that continual improvement happens because you get more data, more information, you know, your world. And then that creates something better, greater towards the future. Now, I would've never known that when I decided that I was going to change to be— have my major, my BSc in chemistry. And who would've ever thought? I went back to my teachers when I was younger and said, you're never gonna believe this, but I'm a chemist. They were my chemistry teachers, right? They're like, we think it's awesome. But no, I'm such a people person. And you said this earlier, I mean, I really am. And so it's a really nice connection. So I would say that, and it surprises me when I say this, but I think that was the glue that stuck with me. It's like that basic core skillset that I hadn't honed. I didn't even know I had. And it was really helpful. really, really hard because I still graduated in the US for 4 years. I still graduated when I needed to. So I had to do a lot of test-taking and things like that to exempt myself out of a lot of— so it was really hard. But there you go. I'm here today.

It's like these little decisions, they're big decisions, but these little things impact your life completely. You know, like you could have been on a completely different path. If you didn't get into chemistry.

One other thing that just occurred to me as I said this. So here I am, whatever, 17, 18 years old. And I remember, I don't know how I got to see this, but your professors do evaluations. And there was this one professor, he was not my happiest professor. His evaluation was that I really didn't have leadership skills. And I remember when I got— I probably was like 25. And I remember rereading that and just thinking, wow, was he ever wrong. But I think I had to break out of that. And I didn't even realize that. And so I think the leadership part, me having a voice, me really speaking out. And I always say when people say, well, how did you get to where you are? I always say, I just said yes. I said yes to really hard things like ISO standards. Yes to being president of the American Society of Safety Professionals and chair of the board, or yes to chairing the Center for Safety and Health Sustainability back in the day. And yes to working with Malk Staves from L'Oréal. And he and I both— I was chair of the board and he was on the board for that center, which focused on people's sustainability. You can't have America's— sorry, it was the Global 100. And they still do this annually, most sustainable companies. And one of them had 42 fatalities in a year. And so we can share that story later on. But it was the decision to say yes, the decision to be a speaker and to educate. So that whole education loop kind of came back, only it's for adults and companies. So leadership, I think that's the other thing that I really learned. not to believe what other people think about me, but to just say yes and go for it.

And honestly, it's like, in hindsight, maybe what he said did give you the fuel to prove him wrong.

I don't think it happened that way. But that certainly could be how people would react to that. I, at first, to be honest, I was like, oh, okay. And then I was like, well, wait a minute, I'm only 25. And I've done this, this, this. That's not true.

So it kind of hit your confidence at the time, but you were able to reestablish it through seeing your own skills and connecting deeper with yourself.

I also have a very feminine leadership style, and most people that work with me— I mean, I think you've experienced that, not that you and I've been in that kind of scenario, but just meeting one another. I'm very collaborative, and I think that when I say feminine, I don't mean that somebody's female or they're male or non-binary, I don't mean it in terms of that. I just mean it in terms of your skill sets and what is considered— might be biased, but it's considered like, for me, I have so much male leadership skills too. I mean, I'm a results-oriented gal, those kinds of things. But I also am very collaborative. So I am really OK not to be right. And so in that scenario, the leadership, it's listening to other people, but it's also kind of putting it through my own brain and process to say, is that really valid? Is it not? And then in projects that I've done, leading boards and things like that, it's I never do it alone and I never say I, I always say we. It's a we thing because it's amazing how the we just— it's exciting.

It's like saying we is one part of it, but really allowing people to feel like it's collaborative. It's its own skill, like massive skill. I love how you categorize it between Masculine and feminine. It's like there's so much masculinity right now that it's all about actually bringing in vulnerability, openness.

Balance, yes.

Okay, and I'm gonna just go back a step again. So that move into chemistry gave you a nudge. That's like a big piece of your journey that comes to mind when you think of this question. Is there another one while you're operating within your career and space that really taught you a lot or helped shape who you are today?

Yeah. So there's so many different things. But the other big thing that really challenged me, and it kind of goes back to that steel company. So I was asked to join a team, a consulting team. And it was for an organizational development consultancy. my good friend, Tom Reeves, was CEO. And he's— we've known each other forever because we worked on ANSI. It's the American National Standards Institute, their management system standard. And he really brought an incredible real-world perspective to the whole standard committee. And he and I got to know each other. And so he asked me to be involved with— in this transformation of this steel company, to be involved in integrated management systems. So I think I've shared with you in the past that I've been US delegation to ISO 45001. And I started back in 2002 with the American standard that we have, which is ANSI Z10, or Zed 10, as you would say. And that was all about really, really integrating safety and health into a business. It's a governance structure. And so, one of the things that I brought to that consulting group was how do you integrate asset management, so maintenance? How do you integrate quality, safety, health, environment, IT, right? IT security. How do you use one governance process in order to integrate all of those risks to the business? And so, that's what I was brought in to do. And what I learned, what I gained, I mean, they should be— I should be paying them because— I'm serious, my colleague, and that was what I described about going in and being able to see the through line and what the issues were at that, literally the week that I was there on site at that particular company. But what I learned, and I learned this from Tom, is he looked at me, he said, you know, have you ever done any education for coaching? Or have you done anything in terms of organizational development, transformational change? And I looked at him, I went, No, not really. And he looked at me and goes, you're a natural. I said, really? And this is a lot of conversations and a lot of very hard work in that steel industry. And he helped me see these natural talents apparently that I didn't know. And it's what you experienced. It's about people asking questions and being, you know, how you opened up this whole conversation about just, I don't know, just how— You get people to open up and talk and also express their needs so you can help them ask good questions so they can come to their own answers. And then the whole organizational development, transformational change, it was like, oh, actually I've been doing that my whole life and haven't really thought about that. Because every company I go in, you'd have to do that. So you'd have to reach in and figure out what makes them tick. I mean, where are the company values? What is it that— is it just financial? Do they Did the CEO actually have a fatality when they were coming up the ranks and they had to go talk to the family? And everybody's got a story and they just need someone to listen to it to help bring it out from who they are. So that's another thing I'm really understanding, and thanks to Tom, that my organizational development and transformational change skills have been something I've been doing. I didn't even know it.

And you're a natural. It's like your zone of genius. And he was able to help you see that. Yeah, it's so cool how when you thought of these 2 memories, you quickly remembered the people that helped influence your trajectory. It's all about the people and how they make you feel in hindsight.

I agree with that. I mean, I haven't thought about that for a while. But when you asked that question, that's the first thing that came. Those were the first 2 things. And I would not have thought about chemistry. I would have thought about, oh, yeah, let's talk about this task force with the ASSP, American Society of Safety Professionals, where we linked people and sustainability. It's like, yeah, that's really cool. But I don't think our group would have ever known that because we had some pretty impressive people on that task force. They asked me to chair this, the board did. And in that task force, we had the head of safety and health environmental for General Mills, all the Cheerios and things that we eat, and Bausch and Lomb, so eyes. And then we had an organization that in their coalition, in their networks, probably all of the multinational companies in the United States. So yeah, but we could have never facilitated out that endpoint had we not worked together.

Amazing. Thanks for taking us through these 2 big milestones. And something that I learned from you last time I saw you, but I didn't dig deeper into it and it's been on my mind ever since, it's this value accounting concept, within safety and sustainability. You know, many people who listen to this are already familiar with a lot of what happens within the world of safety and sustainability and health, et cetera. But I think this area sounds super, super interesting, and it's probably something that many people think about indirectly but don't understand or have direction and ways to approach it within their organizations. And I know Maybe you can start off by explaining what that concept means, and then we can— I have a few things that I would like to explore further as well.

Yeah, this is a question that I wish everybody asked me, and my hope is, my dream is that this will be the questions that everybody will be asking, and eventually not asking because it's going to be embedded into companies. So this idea of And there's different words to it, but it's really about impact. And so when you think of sustainability, it's what is the company's impact on people, on the environment, in communities, the economy, the governance within an organization. But it's also the impacts that the environment, people, workers, communities, regulatory government agencies, standards, international standards, for example, have on the company. So it's that idea of the externalities impacting the viability, the sustainability, the economic viability of a company, and the company, its impacts on these externalities. The first is internalities. How does it impact a company internally? And so, the whole words of double materiality and all these things that just frankly, make a lot of people's eyes glaze over. This cuts through that. This is actually looking at business and truly talking the language of business relative to capitalism. And capitalism is about how do you create value by the people's contributions in your organization, by the natural resources that are coming in that are needed to— it could be water, for example, if you happen to be Heineken or Pepsi-Cola or Coca-Cola, and you need it in processing, whether it's for your product or in the process itself. I'm thinking nuclear industry, you've got to have a lot of water. So the idea is, what if you are in an area where it's water-stressed area? So how can you continue to be viable as a company? How can you continue to manufacture your products, deliver on your services, and assure you have those natural resources in order to do that? Otherwise, you got to close down. So the idea here on actually thinking about impact valuation is how do those things— how does the environment, people, and communities in your workforce— how do they create value? Financial, but then there's also just the value of understanding you can't run your business, which technically does take you to finances at the end of the day, right?

Always goes back to financial for management anyway. Yeah.

The only thing now in our current way, especially if you're publicly traded, but even if you're not and you're looking to, you know, have capital investments, you need to borrow, the investors, they're not going, they wanna know this information 'cause it's a risk. So we're now, us in terms of safety and health professionals and environmental, 'cause we tend to do EHS, we now have a way to start thinking through this process of impact valuation. So what's the impact the company has? externally, and what does the external people and the natural environment, communities, et cetera, economy have on the company? So when we do— and we don't have time to go through this— but when you do this, you start to actually map out who your stakeholders are. So who are your customers, right? Who are the investors? Other stakeholders might be your insurers. Other non-traditional stakeholders to the workforce. And the workforce means, are they healthy? Are they safe? And do they have a sense of well-being? So otherwise, they're not going to be effective. They're not going to be able to create the innovation for the next new thing. It might be AI or whatever it happens to be, right? Or a physical product. Efficiencies. Discretionary energy, and I always like to talk about discretionary energy because I saw that in the steel industry, but I've seen this in many industry sectors that I've worked in where if somebody loves their job, they give 150%.

It's like a very different person, like the person who's motivated and loves their job versus a person who feels underappreciated or doesn't feel fulfilled. It's like the same person, Just feels like a completely different person sometimes just after one conversation that has to do with appreciating them. And it's very real and tangible. What you're saying is, understand, correct me if I'm wrong, what I'm understanding is being able to materialize that for the CFO, for example, to be able to understand the cost impact and the revenue impact of these things will just make it much easier for people to do a great job in empowering the people, keeping them safe, and making sure the business is operating in a way that's empowering versus— these things are currently not. So is that a right assumption that these things are currently not on the balance sheet or not on the—

Not in the P&L, no. And that's what the impact— that is what we're trying to change. So changing the conversation, changing the math in terms of expanding out these nontraditional value that is created in an organization on the P&L, on the balance sheet. And the example of discretionary energy is you can measure that in terms of productivity. You can measure that in terms of product loss. So if a production line goes down and, you know, hey, it's 5 o'clock and I'm off, it's the next shift that needs to come in. A person that really, really loves their job, And I've seen it. They stay on through the next shift until that's back on. Now, you can measure that. You can measure that in terms of how many widgets, whatever it is, that you would have lost the manufacture of during that downtime. So a direct monetization. The other is retention rates. So if people, in terms of well-being, if people don't like their job, they're going to find another job, right? So you can look at your retention rates and you can monetize those. HR, they're your best friend when it comes to doing this, and they can tell you exactly how much it costs to hire somebody new, to onboard them, and the actual process of hiring. One company in the book that I co-authored, Connecting the Dots on Environmental Health, Safety, and Sustainability, Dave Stengus, who's Chief Sustainability Officer for Apollo now, but he started the programs at Intel and Campbell Soup. And he talks, and it's in the book, so I can publicly say this. He talks about getting his stakeholders, his internal stakeholders together in the company when he first got the job as Chief Sustainability Officer. And he said, give me an idea. You know, how can we get our heads and hands around financially retention and retention rates?

Intention is like one of the simplest,

yeah. Yeah, that is. And so, the HR director basically raised their hand and said, oh, that's easy for an admin person to actually go through the hiring process, to hire them, onboard.

Insane. Onboarding is like months, yeah.

Yeah, but they said it was $6,000 for— so they actually came out, and this was the HR department, came out with that, that's how much it would cost.

I would've thought much more than that. That sounds really low.

admin. We're talking entry-level person entry. So they don't bring a whole lot of skill sets. And so that was his question. So, okay, if we can do that for entry-level people, can we do this for various levels? And the HR director said, yeah, we've never really done that before, but yeah. So there you go, right on the P&L, right? Right on the balance sheet. That's a liability.

Yeah, I love it. Honestly, it's like something that great CEOs and great founders, I think, understand and think about. And it sits within culture fundamentally, right? When people are happy, are enjoying their job, love their work, it comes from a lot of— you need to put in a lot of work for that to happen. It doesn't just happen on its own. And I think this perspective around how do you actually contextualize it and make it clearer across the org and add monetary value to it is so powerful and exciting. And if we think a few levels deeper here, Kathi, of how would that, for example, look like in the world of safety or people and sustainability beyond retention? So, if I'm a CFO, I'm trying to make a decision to allocate spend for some safety topic. It seems like the hardest thing for safety teams. It's always they feel like their budgets are just being cut. And when you're performing well, the assumption of the organization is that this is not needed anymore because we don't really have incidents and fatalities. It's like this never-ending cycle of frustration for the community. How would that look like for the CFO?

It's like the CEO would say, okay, tick mark. No, no, no, no. I guess you plan on never changing your operations and having new risks, then you might be able to tick that box. That's not happening. So, what that would look like, and I'll just say to you, and I love everybody who's listening to this podcast. I mean, I am a safety and health and environmental professional, but the reality is we are our own worst enemies. We keep saying we got to talk the language of business. And so, we use the term risk and we use other, but we don't get the business. Now, that's not all of us, but that's a majority. I mean, even people at higher levels, I mean, we're still talking about the 4-to-1 ratio of direct and indirect costs. And that just doesn't get us where we need to go. We need to actually be able to show and demonstrate. And I'll give you an example of an ergonomic. And we have this, we have some, I can send this to you, but our— our People Sustainability Group, we're trying to educate, right? So we published a document on the true value of safety and health. And also the National Safety Council in the US has done some really great research and work in this area. So, and examples, ergonomics and ergonomic intervention. So who, like, how does that change in an organization? Because most Most business leaders will just roll their heads. They'll go, okay, I don't even know what ergonomics is. So by talking about the value of people, the worker, and how does that change if they've got an ergonomic intervention like a fork truck or an automated line versus having to lift 100 pounds up continuously over time and end up being disabled basically, or perhaps a short short-term, but it could be long-term. And you lose the value of that person, their contribution, their knowledge, skills, abilities, that kind of thing. So thinking about the conversation that has to change is we start talking about retention is something, and your leaders and your boards of directors absolutely listen to that, and your investors, because they're looking at the whole person, right? And their safety, health, and well-being is part of being a whole person. We in safety and health keep trying to silo us out. And that is our Achilles heel. When we start thinking about the business and the finances and include the value of safety, health, and wellbeing of our workers, their contribution, not the value of their life, but their contribution in the business conversations, it does exactly what you said. It influences business decisions. So you got to put it on the P&L, right? So if you look at that ergonomic intervention, that from a safety and health perspective, you know, and wellbeing, you don't have back injuries, you actually like your job. How does that impact the rest of this? Well, their families are impacted. Somebody can actually hold their child, their baby, or their 2-year-old or 5-year-old, probably 2-year-old. And, you know, just have a quality of life, which gives them a true sense of wellbeing. That impacts the family, that impacts the finances of the family, that impacts the ability for those children to eat well because they actually have money to buy groceries, their health, their education. So we have a future workforce in mind. Don't forget reputational risk for the company. There are so many examples out there where companies have gone in and done really good things for community, and that community loves them. They get tax breaks. People want to work for them. Additional businesses grow, so the community economics get better. So it's just, you know, the whole economic process for everyone gets better. And the ergonomic thing, your customers, all of a sudden they're not getting breakage of the product. They're getting the product to the actual customer even in quicker time. So there's a lot of value that your customer gets. That's brand loyalty. And so, you can measure all, all of these things can be measured. Those things can then go on your balance sheet. So, right now, we are not even at a tipping point. There's companies who have publicly published an impact profit and loss statement, companies like Natura. And Natura, so I'm really talking here, but this is so important. You can tell I love what I do.

No, it's so important. Yeah, please.

So, Natura, it's a Brazilian-based company. And Many people go, oh yeah, that's Brazil. But you'll know Natura. Everybody in the audience here are going to know Natura because of Avon products and Body Shop. Those are two of many of their product lines. So they are global and they, and you can get the last time they published one was in '21 and they're getting ready to do another one. But these are some examples. Vardis Pharmaceuticals, they've done this. And right now because of a lot of the geopolitics, a lot of these things are not being externally published, but companies are really looking to how they create value, safety, health being one of the ways, and wellbeing for their company. And they're using it internally for good business decisions. And they're sharing it with their investors. So it's not public, but they'll share it with conversations with their investors and insurers. So a lot of information there, but that's where we all need to get to, business integration. That is true business integration and talking the language of business operationally, strategically, financially.

So fascinating. So if I were, I'm gonna try to recontextualize it.

Okay.

To simplify it for myself. So typically an organization would focus on the actual incidents. I love the ergonomics example. It's like, oh, we have a few ergonomic situations. Let's try to like reduce them. And what you are talking about here is kind of changing the mindset to an empowerment mindset. When you take care of the people, like don't wait for the incident to, don't just reduce the risk. But when you take care of the people and they're empowered, not only are they very different in how they operate in terms of quality, focus, care, voicing their concerns, being part of the organization, they're all the, also the impact it would have on their, on their families and the performance of the product is, has so much value. And that value can be contextualized and can be measured and can be created. So it's like a very different, it's like a big shift in Hey, let's stop bad things from happening to let's really focus on the people. It brings us back to what you're saying around the compassionate, caring approach within organizations fundamentally has a big impact on the P&L, and people want to work with them. People want to be part of that, want to be part of these groups versus the energy is very different where a leader just hears about an incident. They're like, well, can we reduce these? Can we do anything to try to reduce it? It's like a set of different processes. Which is very exciting. And of course, the first question that comes to mind as I try to recontextualize that, unless you want to change something in how I described it, would be, why are there so many barriers for organizations to wake up to this? What are the blockers?

What gets managed, right? What gets measured gets managed. I mean, bottom line, that's it. So what do we measure? Well, it's all about the OSH metrics. So no matter where you are in the world, it's always going to go down to, you know, what is your recordable incidents? I mean, we even did this, used recordable incidents, which told me when we were developing the OSH standard for the Global Reporting Initiative, GRI, which is the fundamental standards for sustainability. And we, a lot of innovation happened in that standard, but we used the term recordable. And at the end of the day, it's not about whether something's recordable because every company is going to manage those numbers. That's just kind of what happens, right? So you're going to try to manage it down so you don't have as many recordables or your incident rates don't look as bad. Or even, I mean, before I started working globally, I had no idea when someone said, well, fatalities aren't the same around the world. I was like, actually, it was the GRI workgroup that I learned this from. I'm like, a fatality, someone dies. A fatality is a fatality. You're gone. started explaining that in different regulations, in different jurisdictions, that you have to tie the fatality, the person actually dying, to the number of days, for example, from exposure to whatever it is or incident that had happened. And if it's within a certain amount, then it's considered a work-related fatality. If it's over, it's not. Even if it is a work-related fatality, I mean, it's clear it doesn't have to be counted. And there's just all these nuances that I'm like, okay, who knew? But it's about metrics and it's about comparability. And this is what sustainability and the whole ESG construct kind of all started from, is to be able to compare and benchmark companies against companies. And ESG was just really all about the investors. They wanted to have comparable data to be able to say, okay, we're going to invest in company 1 versus company 2. So I feel like I'm a little off tangent, but you can just see how it's just all interconnected. And we can't forget that when we're thinking about— and I loved what you just said about— just, I jotted a note down about the focus that we have now is on risk because businesses run on risk. Your business, you're a CEO, you run on risk. You have to have a balance sheet. You have to determine what your spend— when and where your spend is going because you've got a future and you've got a strategy. But in fact, how you've reframed it, I loved. It's how I interpret it is it's a focus on risk versus a focus on the people. And the people are the decision makers, and the people and the decision makers will determine the acceptability or the level of risk. And it's in that order, not the reverse order, because you take the people out and you take everything you said, you know? Caring and everything else.

Yeah. And honestly, like every time, personally as a CEO, every time I over-indexed on metrics and over-indexed on process, on an execution, the business does not move. Like we start facing quite a few issues within the business. Of course, like we were moving forward, but like things are much harder. But when I over-index on people, culture, care, and I make sure that I'm spending more time talking to the team, appreciating them, things fundamentally change. And I think every CEO kind of has to learn this through experience and having more context and data to contextualize it. Obviously as a CEO, you have a, like in a business that's running on like a tech business that's scaling fast, you're always thinking revenue, annual recurring revenue, customer growth, NRR. So being able to understand that These fundamentals are extremely important and maybe more important than anything else when you're in that direction and save us a lot of pain as we go through this journey.

See? And I'm learning. I mean, you speak the language of business, right? And everyone out here that is going to be listening to this, if they listen to what you just said, that's the language of business. And I love how you use the term contextualize because that's what it's about. It really truly is. I talk about business integration, but I think in order to do that, you have to contextualize for the CEO, the board of directors, your operational leaders, and the people working closest to the hazards. It's all of this. And I think safety and health professionals do this pretty well. I have to give us a lot of credit when it comes to working operationally and working with the people that are closest to the hazards. But when you contextualize, you just help somebody really understand their role and their responsibility within the grand scheme and the big why, as well as the what and the how. And when we do that, I think, to your point, I think that we really do change things. But that's the whole thing. That's a whole lot of words around this impact valuation. It's really value creation and how can you capture that so it impacts decision-making in the organization at all levels.

Love it. So, one last question here. I want to try to drive as much value as we can to, you know, a safety professional who's listening to this. And they're like, you know, I've tried all these different things, and I try to translate things into the language of leadership, and I keep hitting the wall. What advice would you have for that person?

My question for the person is, Who have you involved in the process? That is the biggest sticking point. You know what? I've experienced it at all levels in the hierarchy of being in our profession. So, somebody who's the VP of global operations to somebody that is just entry-level. So, I speak to everybody when I say this. Everything we do, we need to include all the stakeholders to this. So, the workshops I conduct, I'm getting ready to do this workshop at Safety on the Edge in Baltimore next week. I'm doing it with Andreza. Hernandez, who is the global EHS director for Siemens. She and I are coming together. And one of the things in this workshop that we're doing is we're really trying to help the people in the room understand that you got to include not what you consider your traditional stakeholders, like your operational leaders, but you need to bring the HR people. You need to bring corporate communications. You need to bring investor relations to sit around the table. And work through these impact valuations, 2 things happen. One, you get far greater data, much more information, and the outputs are nothing that you would've ever imagined, right? Both of those things. The second piece you get is you get ownership and you get adoption. So you get people that are actually engaged. This is my OD, right? Transformational change hat on, right? You get them because they co-created it with you.

It becomes a group initiative, not something that you're trying to drive on your own.

Nothing. And they will do it all for you. Trust me, this works. I've seen it, I've done it, it works. We just feel like we have to have the answers. And we don't, we have to have the expertise. And we're great facilitators. But we have to be able to give up some of that power.

I'll just complement that with something you mentioned earlier, which is like feminine energy versus masculine energy. It's like the masculine side of this is, Go, go, go. I know what needs to be done. Just throw it out. Why aren't people approving it? And then taking a step back and really giving people the time to like learn from them and have it be a group thing, not something that you're driving, is a powerful thing that many of us need to learn to do more often. The more senior you are, the more probably the ego kicks in and you're like, I should be able to crack this. But the collaborative approach is always so powerful.

Yeah, yeah, it's for all of us. I mean, you know, I get stumped up too. Everybody does. There's a lot of expectations. I mean, you've got investors, you've got, you know, you have a lot of stress. Sorry, I don't mean to say that, stress you out. But you've just a lot of expectations, right? Same. I mean, I'm a CEO of my consultancy. And there's a lot of expectations on that, you know, whether it's my, you know, supply chain, whether it's for me, whether it's my reputation. whether it's my clients, right, the customers that I actually work with. I mean, so we're all guilty of that. And I do believe that we all have both the feminine and the masculine energy in us. We wouldn't be leaders if we didn't have the masculine energy, results-oriented.

Absolutely. Love it. Kathy, I always enjoy talking to you. I'm so happy you joined. This topic is so important. I am going to get in touch with you to go a bit deeper because I, I like, I want to do a bit of work here, as well and see how we can apply some of that stuff within our work and product. But yeah, if there's anything you want to wrap this up with, the floor is yours.

I really appreciate it. First of all, thank you for inviting me to speak because I feel like my role right now is to educate as many people so we can get to the tipping point, that this is actually embraced by companies. They see the value of doing this because the rising tide raises all ships. And so this means people in organizations have better jobs. People in organizations are working at less risk. People in organizations are actually happy, have a sense of well-being.

Psychologically safe.

Psychologically, absolutely. So therefore, their contribution is better. The communities benefit, the economics of the community, it's all interconnected. And the business actually creates value from areas that were non-traditional. And that's Good thing. And by the way, investors do look at human capital. They look at people. The metrics are changing. They're getting better than they used to be. But health and safety has always been at the core of human capital metrics for anyone in the financial world. So, we're already in there. So, thank you. Thank you for this opportunity.

Thank you so much, Kathi. I'll keep learning more and I'll keep sharing more as well. So, yeah, thanks for opening my eyes to all this.

Alrighty.

I appreciate you.

I feel like my role right now is to educate as many people so we can get to the tipping point, that this is actually embraced by companies. They see the value of doing this because the rising tide raises all ships. And so, this means people in organizations have better jobs, people in organizations are working at less risk.