The Power of Positive Reinforcement with Bill Sims Jr.

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Intro/Outro: Welcome to the Construction Disruption podcast, where we uncover the future of design, building, and remodeling.

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Todd Miller: I'm Todd Miller of Isaiah Industries, a manufacturer of specialty metal roofing and other building materials. Today my co-host is the illustrious Mr. Ryan Bell. Ryan, how are you doing today?

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Ryan Bell: Hey, Todd. I am doing okay. I got a question for you. Do you know what the worst part about Friday is?

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Todd Miller: The worst part about Friday maybe is days that aren't Friday unless it's Saturday or Sunday. No, I do not. What's the worst part about Friday?

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Ryan Bell: Well you're close. When you, it's when you realize it's only Thursday.

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Todd Miller: Man, that can happen sometimes. It's even worse when you realize it's only Wednesday.

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Ryan Bell: I have not had that happen to me before, but.

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Todd Miller: Well, good way to start things. So, shall we dive right into our show today? I'm excited about today's show.

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Ryan Bell: Yes, let's do it.

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Todd Miller: Okay. Well, safety and positive reinforcement are two terms that you don't regularly hear used together. But today our spotlighted guest is Bill Sims, Jr., president of The Bill Sims Company, and he uses those terms together all the time. In fact, he says they go together as well as green beans and ice cream. So you may be wondering what that's all about. I may be a little bit too, although I've had a sneak peek, so I have a pretty good idea. But let's go ahead and get right into our interview with Bill Sims, president of The Bill Sims Company and author of Green Beans and Ice Cream: The Remarkable Power of Positive Reinforcement. And I've got the book right here, you can see that. And right here in the book, it says, "This is a must-read if you're serious about achieving sustainable behavior change with your team." So I love that. So, Bill is a world-renowned author, consultant, patent holder and speaker, and one of his top keynotes is titled Beyond Zero: Why Zero Injuries is Not the Goal. Bill, welcome to Construction Disruption. This is a show where we work to uncover the future of design and building, and we're excited to have you today.

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Bill Sims Jr.: Hey guys, good to be with you, and happy Friday from Columbia, South Carolina. We are celebrating the fact that Hurricane Idalia has come and gone. And I dare you to come back Idalia. Just some humor there. Beautiful fall-like weather today in the early part of September. So glad to be with you all, and looking forward to our chat.

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Todd Miller: So, what did you get from Idalia there in Columbia? Just heavy rain and a little bit of wind?

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Bill Sims Jr.: Yeah, a little bit of wind. Nice rain, the grass is all watered and super green. So that means I got to cut it this weekend. But that's, that's life, you know, in the big city. So not, not much damage here. We're certainly very fortunate. And, you know, our hearts go out to the folks that have more sustained damage. I have a buddy that that told me, lifelong buddy and his name, get it, believe it or not, is Steve Irwin. And Steve said, yeah, I'm going to move down there to that curve, that elbow bend, Crystal River, Florida, because they haven't had a hurricane in over a hundred years. Just got moved down there, just had to evacuate for a hurricane. So there you go, Steve.

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Todd Miller: They may not invite Steve back, I don't know.

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Bill Sims Jr.: Could be, could be. I'm worried about him.

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Todd Miller: May be excommunicated. Well, so let's kind of delve into things. So safety and positive reinforcement going together like green beans and ice cream. Tell us what that's all about.

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Bill Sims Jr.: Absolutely happy to do that. Well, first off, I have to when I'm on a plane traveling to speak, usually the conversation goes with the person next to you. "Well, what do you do?" "What do you do?" And I always set it up for people, "Hey, I am the global subject matter expert for green beans and ice cream." And that takes just a minute for them.

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Todd Miller: Yeah.

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Bill Sims Jr.: And I say, "The way I know I'm the global subject matter expert is that I made it up and therefore I'm the only guy who understands it." and so the idea behind the book and my keynote speech where they come together, is that we're really, really good telling our kids and our employees when they do something wrong. Maybe particularly in safety. We are super good at it in safety. Safety glasses on, get that hardhat on there, you hear me? But maybe where we need help as leaders is telling people what they did right for a change. And mom figured that out so that if you eat your green beans, you can have ice cream, right? Poor lady had no clue what she was unleashing on the world. You poor people, a motivational speaker, author, all that good stuff. When we focus on the positive in those around us and in ourselves, it it allows us to grow and blossom at a much faster rate of speed than if all we do is harp on the negative, either in our own psyche and or in those around us. So that's the premise, the baseline premise. It's backed up by 100 years of behavioral science research. So it's not something I just dreamed up one day. Where we apply that to safety is often, you know, if you think about safety, there are a lot of green beans and ice cream in safety. Doing things the safe way is inherently a struggle. It takes longer. It interferes with production. My foremen, my superintendent are all after me to get this job done on time. We're behind. We're behind. But now I've got to do all this fall protection. Got to hang these tools. So there's a whole lot of green beans you've got to eat? Before you get to the safety, which, in most workers minds may or may not ever occur. So how can we use positive reinforcement in the construction world on a job site to make a real difference in safety outcomes, productivity, all the above. And the answer is you can. We have been there, done that, got the T-shirt about a thousand times.

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Todd Miller: So I'm curious. I mean, you could have applied positive reinforcement and aspects of it to all kinds of performance-type things. Was there anything that caused you to zero in on safety in particular?

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Bill Sims Jr.: Just, you know, life is like a box of chocolates. I got, I fell into this world in the early eighties, working with initially the textile firms here in South Carolina before all our jobs got moved offshore. Don't get me started on that. That'll be a whole nother podcast. And you know what? What I observed in the early eighties is that the way that most safety directors went about reinforcing behavior was pretty much the same. Hey, guys, if you all can go a month without a single recordable injury on your team, you're going to get a Carhartt jacket, a t shirt, a what? A ball cap, whatever. And it occurred to me there had to be a better way. And so I began experimenting with different ways to positively reinforce safe behaviors like, hey, instead of lagging indicator stuff which causes people and injuries. Why don't we reinforce people for reporting a near miss or near hit event or an unsafe condition? Hey, you just spotted those that rebar over there. It needs to be capped. Good job. Here you go. Here's a safety book. I am, yes, for what it's worth, the federal trademark holder for the term safety books and was for over 30 years till I retired it. And there's another story. I used to be the federal trademark holder for a little term called Starbucks till this big coffee man. And we can't go into that one too deep. I hate to tell you that, but anyway. But what about telling people? Telling people what they did right. It makes a difference.

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Todd Miller: So you could have just made them by St. Arbucks. That's what I call them to get around the whole Starbucks thing. Interesting. So, well, so you mentioned it, since the early eighties, you've been helping companies improve performance, increase their bottom lines, be more safe. Can you tell us about some of the companies you've worked with or industries you've worked in and how you've helped them?

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Bill Sims Jr.: Sure, yeah. So worked extensively with construction, manufacturing, maritime shipping. I always said I want to create systems that help companies positively reinforce safe behaviors. And I have a patent in how you do that, and I want to build it to work in the construction industry because manufacturing's easy, stable workforce, relatively speaking. Construction is chaos. You know, this month we got 23 job sites next month, 38, the next month, 22. If I can make it work in construction, I can make it anywhere. So and one of the big behavioral consultants I'll leave him nameless because I don't like nastygram letters from attorneys, had stood up and said in the early eighties, "You can't run behavior-based safety in a construction environment. It's too chaotic." I'm like, "That's good. Tell me I can't do it. I'll go figure out a way to do it because I'm hard at it." And today, our biggest book of business in clients is construction. So, you know. But all sorts of industries, names that you would recognize: Ford, General Motors, Disney, DuPont, Boeing, these are all companies that we've touched in one or more ways. And so you know, I'd say early eighties. That's before we had this thing called the Internet. But we did have this thing called OSHA, which was a big deal. I helped a lot of companies move from lagging indicator reward reinforced systems that caused injury hiding to reinforcing safe behaviors on the spot. And that was a, I'm proud to say, a real game-changer because before I came along every safety director in Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina was basically rewarding people for lagging indicators, going a period time without an injury. And we all know if we're honest, that produces only one true change in behavior. Here it is: what gets reported?

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Todd Miller: Yeah.

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Bill Sims Jr.: The underlying at-risk behaviors are still there. And so I began working with Fluor construction early eighties, early nineties in developing and pioneering, well how can we move away from the lagging indicator stuff and start reinforcing on the spot what these guys are doing right every day? Hey, you had your fall protection or you intervened to keep a buddy safe. You stopped the job over a safety concern. How do we do that? And so that was kind of, I guess, my laboratory, if you will, building more than a thousand of these reward recognition incentive systems. Although I don't like the word incentives, I prefer different words. And we had great success, not all the time. You know, I've seen it fail too. The people could screw up anything, myself included. But more often than not you know, it was learning that what really motivates people is not the T-shirt, not the ball cap. That's actually statistically one of the worst motivators out there. It's something very different, it's positive reinforcement. What is that? And my life has been devoted to studying that one thing and trying to master it and understand it and help others to understand it with greater clarity and precision.

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Todd Miller: That's good stuff. And so you've reminded me, and I don't know why you reminded me of this, but I did forget to tell our audience that we do have challenge words this episode, and that is that each of us have a word that we've been challenged to work into the conversation. At the end we'll tell whether we were successful out there or not. So, Bill, you've alluded to it a couple of times already, how you know, the ball cap and the Carhartt. I mean, so years ago there was a ad commercial. What would you do for a Klondike bar? Okay. And so I always thought, gosh, if I give people Klondike bars, my productivity will go up. And that really didn't work. We all got fatter. But kind of curious, you know, tell us a little bit more about, you know, what those purpose, what those ideas are out there that a lot of companies try and really they don't work. And you've touched on some good stuff already about you know, you can cause people to hide injuries with lagging indicator reporting and things like that. But I would love to hear a little bit more about why that ball cap doesn't work.

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Bill Sims Jr.: Yeah, I'm going to give you that, but I'm going to take a little opportunity here to be the first guy to use my challenge word. Get ready, bro. Here it comes. So I want to just share a absolutely true story. This comes from Jerry Howell, a great safety leader. Jerry is retired by now, I'm sure, if he's still with us. And Jerry had about 2000 employees in northeastern Alabama up near Gadsden, and it was a poultry processing plant. If you've ever been in a chicken-killing plant, it is an unusual situation. I've been into some interesting places and I can tell a lot of stories. And after the tour of the chicken-killing plant, Jerry and I talked a little bit about his strategy for managing safe behavior. And he said, well, he says the plant manager here made me do something I didn't want to do, but he thought it worked. We did safety bingo. If you've never done safety bingo, I think it's pretty, I hope it's dead by now. But it was blowing and going back in the eighties and nineties, every employee got a little card with bingo numbers just like the bingo game. And every day without a reported injury, no reportables, no lost times we could pull a random number, post it up. Today it's 33, tomorrow it's 52 and the employees are in theory, taking their bingo cards and blacking out the numbers. And if they can get five in a row blacked out in one direction, they win whatever's in the jackpot. Oh, yeah. And we start with a cash jackpot of $500, and we bump it up $10 a day. So the jackpot goes up, up, up. The longer we, we don't report injury. So you see the pressure to not report. Nobody wants to blow it for the team. And when somebody gets those five in a row, boom, they win what's in the jackpot? And there are multiple variations of that. I have disliked that system from the first time I heard about it, and preached against it. And Jerry said, Bill, he said, "Yeah, I hate safety bingo." He said, here's why. He said, "After we drew our number, he says, and we gave out the $500 cash. We immediately had six injuries reported that were being hidden until we hit the jackpot. So there's the domino effect of lagging indicator incentives as you take them away." And he said, "I came over to the bingo station, and there was a young lady that had worked for us, single mom, 21, two kids, and she's crying, she's weeping. And I said, 'What's wrong?' She says, 'I've played this stupid game for six months and I've never, ever won anything. I am done with it.' And she rips up her bingo card. He says, 'I'll tell you what. I appreciate your your interest in safety. Here's 100 bucks off my out of my wallet'". Right or wrong, we could spend some time debating whether he should or shouldn't have done that. But. Oh, and let me just say, you know, he looked at her and he said, "Mademoiselle, I appreciate your commitment to safety." There you go. There's my challenge word. I was waiting for it. She was French. They had that in Alabama, right? Listen, there are those French Canadians. So be careful when you go down there right now. You know what? What we learned from that is multiple lessons about positive reinforcement. What does and doesn't work. Number one, games of chance typically do not work. Lotteries do not work for multiple reasons. I know I've tried them all and I've seen them fail and succeed. And if you're writing this down, you come back and ask me later if you care about knowing why and you want to dig deeper. You know that the the dynamics of positive reinforcement to be most effective, it must be positive, not negative. It must be immediate within 10 seconds of the behavior or less, like training a horse. And it must be certain. We have to administer it every single time. So many companies fail that that test in multiple ways with what they do. But you asked me about t-shirts and ball caps. So the Incentive Federation did a white paper study of major companies. These are 500 employees, 1000 employees. And they asked two very simple questions. And this is in my book. If they get my book, crass commercial plug for book, go to greenbook.com. Get it there, not Amazon, you'll get a better deal. They asked large companies two questions. What incentive tools do you use? Number one. Number two. Do you think they're effective? Yes or no? So do you use it? Does it work? Right now, my only beef with this study is that they failed to include positive reinforcement as one of the tools. They just didn't put it in, and they should have. I did a later study that validates why positive reinforcement wins, and that's yet a longer discussion. But here's what they found. They looked at about six types of award gifts that companies might use. It could be logoed swag, company swag, gifts, which people widely believed to be. People love that stuff. They eat it up. And what are you smoking, dude? I don't know. But I got the facts as say, you know, and and then they looked at employee of the month programs, you know, where you get a little certificate hey you're employee of the month, Todd and Ryan. And they looked at that and they looked at cash and they looked at gift cards and they looked at physical gifts without a logo: Yeti coolers, Apple Watches. And they asked those two questions. And when they crunched the data, here's what they found. Number one was gift cards. About 55% of companies found them to be effective. And about 52% use them. So high level of effectiveness. Here's how many of us use them, and here's how many think it works. When they went to cash, similar results. When they went to physical gift items where people get a choice from a selection, Yeti cooler, Apple Watch, fishing pole, whatever. Similar high results. So the three strongest contenders were gift cards, number one. Cash, number two. Cash is king, according to a lot of people, it actually isn't. But we can get into that deeper if you want to. And then physical, tangible gifts. Now, those are the three high scores. The number one lowest score in the research was company logoed gifts. Woo hoo! And not only and less than 10% of the people thought that a logoed gift motivated real behavior change. These are the same people that say, "People love that stuff." And not only did 14% use it, I'm sorry, excuse me, 14% thought they were affected. That's the number I'm looking for. You said stuff with the logo is effective, but 96% used it.

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Todd Miller: Used it.

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Bill Sims Jr.: And I'm like, "Hello. Why is the thing that works the least, the thing we use the most?" So it statistically does not work. And I can tell you I have solved after much, much pondering, I finally cracked the code. Why is it that managers believe, man, people love that logo stuff. They eat it up. I think I know why, but you tell me. I've prattled on a bit here. Are you all awake over there? Come on, guys.

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Todd Miller: I don't know why people think it works. I mean, I guess one of the reasons is you give that stuff away, thinking, "Hey, I'll get some advertising benefit out of it, if nothing else." Whether it really means anything to the team member or not, I don't know. It's interesting.

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Ryan Bell: My guess was going to be that it was the easiest. It's the easiest incentive that may be on hand already for you.

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Bill Sims Jr.: So you're, you know, those are excellent shots at it. And again, my book the chapter Not Another Ball Cap has all this in it and breaks it down really nicely, very quickly. So here's what we know from the research. In 100 years of research, the number one driver of employee safety engagement, performance improvement, quality productivity is not a t-shirt, a ball cap, a pizza party, nor is it a bigger 4011k plan or even working from home. It's none of those things. The single biggest driver of employee morale, engagement, mental health is when my boss looks me in the eye and sincerely says, Bill, here's what you did for safety. You reported that near hit. You capped the rebar and here's why that matters. You let one of your coworkers go home safe tonight. That need for positive feedback and positive reinforcement is the number one driver in any research study you look at. Paychecks are only number eight, right? Never have gotten higher than eight in thirty years. And so what actually happens is something fascinating. It's what we call in behavioral science, accidental pairing. Accidental pairing is when you begin to believe that something is caused by something different than what really caused it, it's accidental pairing. And so when I first stumbled across this accidental pairing idea, I thought, "Hey, that's cool." And then I understood where it was happening. When you go to a construction site and you get a box of t-shirts that come in or a box of ball caps that come in and you're the safety guy, you ain't got time to hand out a thousand ball caps. You might do some, but you know what you're going to do? You're going to get all your foremen in the room in the safety trailer. "Hi, Joe. Here's your 52 ball caps, your 52 Carhartt jackets, your 52 shirts." And Mr. Supervisor Foreman, if he's worth his salt, is going to go out there on that project. He's going to hand them out. Those guys probably smile, shake their hand and say, "Thank you." And it is that, my friends, that they value. They could care less about the ball cap. It is the personal interaction with their boss. And maybe, just maybe, I'll give you one. There is something we call trophy value that can have value. So if I'm working in a big project, a nuclear plant, and we have our topping out ceremony and they make a commemorative shirt about that, that's got trophy value. Yeah, that has some value. But 12 years of research for my construction plant, 96% of the workers would rather have an Apple Watch or a Yeti cooler than something with a company logo. There you go.

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Todd Miller: So if I save a guy by saying, "Hey, you're standing next to a rattlesnake." It's better to come and thank me for it than give me a T-shirt.

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Bill Sims Jr.: Ding, ding, ding.

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Todd Miller: Okay, I got it. I'm getting it down. Okay, so, I'm curious, are you seeing any generational differences? I mean, you know, we talk a lot about that in business anymore. Are you seeing that, you know, younger generations are responding better to different things or or just differently to different things?

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Bill Sims Jr.: You know, absolutely. I do. I had a wonderful privilege of having my oldest daughter, Daphne Sims, who is a CPA, fully-functional adult, non-chemically dependent. And I'm proud to be part of that equation along with her mother. And she co-presented with me and we do a session on called Boomers, that's me, versus Millennials: Bridging the Great Divide. And that's a huge honor to be on stage with my daughter. And there are a lot of differences in the generations, boomers versus millennials. And now we have the zillennials, Gen Z, that are coming on board, and they're even different from the millennials, right? So a lot of differences in what motivates them and what matters. But what we know is that the younger generations, they were raised for the most part. Let's just take millennials because it's easier there. So most millennials, well, let's go back a minute. My dad's generation, the World War Two generation, Dad's 94, drives to work every day in our family-owned business, in his three-piece suit with his cane and his Lincoln Continental. Keeps me and my brother and sister from scrapping. And Dad's generation, The World War Two generation was the best. Whenever you could beat them, kick them, scream at him, cuss them, they'd come back to work because they knew what the depression was. They remember breadlines. Well, thankfully, they're all chasing golf balls or doing something better than that now. But the boomers inherited a lot of that work ethic and lack of work life balance from their World War Two parents. And then we move to their kids, which are the millennials. So oftentimes we forget that boomers, by and large, created the millennials, right? Gen X is in the middle there, the middle child and the way millennials got raised was pretty much this. They were home all day long playing Nintendo while mom and dad boomers were out working an eight, nine-hour-a-day job. And millennials have been quoted saying, I watched mom and dad drag in at 9:00 every single day of my life. I will never do that to my kids. I will work to live as a millennial because boomers lived to work. So that being raised by Nintendo, you know, when you play Nintendo. Ding, ding, ding, you are reinforced your behavior 200 times a minute. That means that the millennials are the first generation that grew up force fed positive reinforcement and feedback. Zillenials even more so. And so this is the generation that demands positive reinforcement. Whereas boomers were like, suck it up, buttercup. You know, you need the job to keep showing up. So I'm excited about the fact that our new generations are going to require a whole lot more feedback interaction reinforcers than previous ones were ever given. I hope they get it because clearly if they don't, they're going to quiet quit and work two jobs from home. We'll never know. A lot of dynamics there.

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Todd Miller: So I'm curious when you go in to help a client or work with a company. [I'm] kind of curious what that looks like. I mean, do you just come in and pontificate and move on or do you help them develop and implement systems for improvement? You know, when you go into a company, do you find sometimes there's low-hanging fruit that they can immediately make some changes, or is it always more of a long game? Just kind of tell us a little bit what that looks like as you work with your clients.

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Bill Sims Jr.: Sure. You know, I always say and for those that are interested in learning more, I'm going to say the best go-to spot for me is beyondzeroinjuries.com. Just spell it out beyondzeroinjuries.com. You can see it out there. You can learn about the book, learn about what I do. But I always say I do three things basically. First thing is the book and the keynote. Green Beans and Ice Cream. and the keynote might be any one of a number of different titles. What makes a great leader great. And you know, I always say that first rock is to help a leadership team in either a virtual keynote or an in-person come to an awakening that there is this thing called positive reinforcement. We probably need to be a little bit better at it and more purposeful. And maybe we want to explore this further. And for those companies that hear that message and they say, "Yeah, I want to know more." Then it could make sense to develop into some sort of ongoing training for leaders in this in this field. My nickname for that is SEAL. So I create SEAL leaders, safety, engagement, and servant leadership, right? SEAL. And the idea behind SEAL is, how do you go from good to great as a leader at home with your kids and your spouse and at work? What separates good leader from great? What made Paul O'Neill at Alcoa great? George Washington. President Zelensky in the Ukraine. Fantastic lab case study of great leadership. And so how do you do that and what does that look like? And that's a huge part of that. You really have got to teach your leaders how to do this because here's how your supervisors became supervisors and your project managers became project manager. They were the guy who could dig the ditch the hardest, the fastest of anybody else. And someday some one day somebody taps him on the shoulder and says, "Hey, tomorrow, you're a supervisor." Did we give him any training? Nope. And soft skills training. Soft skills are the tough skills, right? That's the number one. Ditch digging, I could teach you that, right? You either got it or you don't. But this soft skills stuff is what we're not teaching. It's safety leadership we're not teaching. So that's really the void we feel now. You know, how many times have you been to a conference or a workshop and you loved it. Score five out of five with attendees. But you went back Monday morning and you went right back to what, your email boxes overloaded. Workshops by themselves do not change behavior. Consequences change behavior. And so that's where we work with companies to develop tools to measure the following four things. And I would argue that measuring the following four things is more important than measuring how quickly you're building a building or how many yards of concrete you got poured. Here you go, the four critical things companies are not measuring, but should be. Number one, measuring your risk culture, which is different from your safety culture. All these safety perceptions surveys, agree-disagree, there pencil whip jokes, right. That have very limited measurement because they're telling you what you want to hear. What we need to be doing is measuring what they do when we're not watching. That's a measure of risk culture, and we have a unique tool that does that. I partner with Dr. Corrie Pitzer on it. Number two, we have to be able to measure safety leadership behaviors from the C-suite to the front line in the trenches. And number three, we need to be able to measure positive reinforcement as it flows through the culture minute by minute. Real time, enterprise-wide, employee by employee. I hold a patent on how to do that because if you can't measure these things, you cannot manage these things, and these things matter more than how many boards got nailed today or how many yards of concrete got here. That is my passion. And the interesting thing, the amazing thing is we've implemented at construction company after construction company, manufacturing, all these industries. And usually we get 50% reduction in work or stop loss, sometimes more, 40 to 50% reduction in vehicle crashes, sometimes more. So are they walking the talk or are they delivering the positive reinforcement they should be without a measurement system. It was a great workshop, but it's flavor of the month and that applies to any, you know, any training system out there, if you don't have consequences to back it up, follow through, you wasted your time.

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Todd Miller: When you say consequences change behavior. Are you talking about good consequences or bad consequences?

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Bill Sims Jr.: Excellent and insightful question. Consequences can be positive for the employee. They can be negative. They can be punishing. Consequences can be immediate. They happen within 10 seconds or less or delayed. They happen a lot longer than 10 seconds after, baby. So they're very, very limited in their impact. They can be certain. I know it will happen every single time. Or they can be uncertain, right. And human beings have this, we have this really interesting system for decoding consequence potentials. And it it affects our behavior. Let me give you just perhaps a simple example. A worker is working on a conveyor belt on a construction site with aggregate that comes up, the conveyor belt drops over to another place. Maybe they're moving aggregate around a construction site and he's working on this conveyor belt, watching the aggregate move, and a very large piece of rock drops in the wrong angle and jams that conveyor belt. Now, the worker has been told by the safety department if that conveyor belt jams. Don't you ever reach in the arrangement. We want you to walk 45 minutes to the kill switch round on the other end of that conveyor belt where our management system conveniently located it for you. Hit the kill switch. Lock it out. Then and only then do you unjam it and attempt to unjam it. Now this worker, before he got his arm ripped off, which he will in a minute in my story, has learned that 199 times he can reach into that conveyer belt and unjam it. He's faster than the belt. He's done it 199 times. You see people rehearsed for injuries at least a couple hundred times till they get it right and get hurt. And so reaching into that conveyor belt, he's like, you know what? I don't have to make a 45 minute walk to hit the killswitch. I get more work done quicker. More production done. When we get more work done quicker what does our boss man on the jobsite usually say, Todd?

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Todd Miller: Job well done.

Speaker: 00:38:07

Bill Sims Jr.: Beer's on me. Come on out. Run. Beer and pizza on me, boys. So, hold on a minute. Did that leader just positively reinforce the unsafe at risk behavior of that worker? Yeah, because the consequences for doing the unsafe thing in most cases, in most every case, every company, every place on the planet, the consequences for doing the wrong thing are screwed up from what we want to be. They're positive, immediate, and certain. I get the job done quicker, I get a pat on the back from my boss man and I didn't get hurt. Now the consequences for doing the job and taking that little risk, there are some negative consequences. I might get hurt. But 199 times, I haven't. And so now people begin what we call drift, the normalization of deviation. It's a hot term. And and so they do it again and again and again until finally that that deviation from perfect human performance intersects the red fatality line. And now we have an amputation or a fatality. So, consequences drive behavior. And, you know, that's why T-shirts don't drive behavior. It's not something people want. I don't know if that helped or if I lost you guys.

Speaker: 00:39:37

Todd Miller: Yeah, no, it really does. I'm kind of curious, too. I mean, do you ever go into an organization and find that there are cultural or systemic things going on that actually discourage this idea of positive reinforcement? And if so, how do you help a company address those things?

Speaker: 00:39:56

Bill Sims Jr.: Yeah, all the time. Positive reinforcement is the single greatest thing you have to master to become a truly great leader. And I always say, you know, it's like a Thor hammer, right? It's like the Marvel Universe Thor character,rRight? But 99% of leaders don't know where their Thor hammer is. Don't know how to use it. It's rusted out in the garage. It is the least utilized tool in corporate America. Global, global, corporate, whatever that is, if this is a global group. And so, yeah, there are most companies run on negative reinforcement, punishment and penalty. They're devoid of positive reinforcement. And so we have to overcome a lot to get this to work. But it works. It's not. It's science, man. It's not me sitting here telling you. And there also are system-created barriers to safety. We call these, the world of heart would call them latent precursors. So a practical example, we're interviewing employees on the front lines of a pest control company and pest control workers. It's a young man's job. You're usually 20 to 22. You're driving all day in your truck. You got 32 stops. You got to crawl in attics underneath crawl spaces. You got bug bites, spider bite, snake bites, dog bites, fall through the attic. And then when you're in the truck, you might you might be getting, "Hey, don't use the cell phone corporate policy. Don't use it." But your your front office says, "Hey, Miss Green says she's got mice and she screaming. Can you deviate over there and take care of the mice for her?" And so what are they going to do? They're going to take the cell phone call. So all kinds of system problems. But one of the things we found with this pest control company, a lot of slips and falls. We asked the workers, why is that? They said it's the booties. Well, can you bring a bootie in? The little booties they put around their muddy boots to go in Mrs. Smith house and not track up her white carpet have been bought by purchasing with no tread. So you can ice skate across those Charleston pine floors. No wonder they had problems. So there are latent precursors created in the system by the at-risk behaviors of the management team leaders. And those are combined in a perfect storm with knowingly or unknowingly at-risk behaviors of the workers. And when they all come back together, boom. Now we got somebody hurt.

Speaker: 00:42:39

Todd Miller: Very interesting. Any major differences from your perception between working with big companies and small companies, or does it just depend upon the individuals?

Speaker: 00:42:52

Bill Sims Jr.: You know, I've done consulting work with small companies. I've done it with big companies. I don't do implementations with small companies. I mean, I can give them some suggestions. And by small, I mean, you know, under a couple hundred. But I'm happy to do consulting for them and I don't know that there's a big difference except maybe in small companies. Big companies become big companies for one and only one reason. They have an incredibly profitable product that has wide space demand in the market and a profitable product with wide space demand can cover a multitude of sins.

Speaker: 00:43:32

Todd Miller: Mm hmm, gotcha.

Speaker: 00:43:34

Bill Sims Jr.: And so you become a big company that way. Small companies don't have that luxury. They live on the razor's edge. So I don't see as much waste. So the opportunities are probably bigger in bigger companies. The bigger you are, the more stuff that's happening that you don't know about, that your employees are doing or that your leaders are doing that's affecting your performance.

Speaker: 00:44:00

Todd Miller: So let's talk about leaders a bit. I know one of your keynotes is what makes a great leader great. Can you just give us some idea of what that might be?

Speaker: 00:44:09

Bill Sims Jr.: Yeah, yeah. And we've dabbled on it in this conversation already, but I'll try to frame that up for you. So Disney World bought my book. That was a great day. 300 copies of Green Beans and Ice Cream. Hey, Bill, you're now required reading for all of our leaders. I'm told UPS did; that's a huge honor. And then, you know, I was like, "Hey, Disney bought my book of leadership, Green Beans and Ice Cream. That's cool." And then I get this phone call and they said, "We want you to come teach us a workshop for 100 of our Disney World leaders on leadership." And I'm like, "Oh, no." And the reason I'm like, "Oh no," is Disney has their Disney Leadership Institute, right?

Speaker: 00:44:52

Todd Miller: This is what you're all about, supposedly.

Speaker: 00:44:55

Bill Sims Jr.: Oh, yeah. Get your boss to send you down there for five days because your boss is gonna drop five grand on that, right? And and I'm like, "Who am I to teach Disney anything about leadership? These guys have a freakin five-day course. You know, I got I got maybe 10 hours of content. If you ain't figured it out by 10 hours of Bill Sims, you ain't gonna get it, son. I don't need to waste any more time with you." And so I go down and I do like a half-day course, and I'm really nervous and it goes great, right. And they said there was a lot of things that dovetailed with their model, but there are a lot of things their model doesn't have. One thing their model is missing is safety leadership. That's important. And what that means and what that is, and I'm very passionate about it. But back to the ranch. I'm sitting there in the contemporary hotel and we run this exercise with these people in the room and a pop up a picture of George Washington at Valley Forge. And we talk a little bit about how he went from being considered a weak general, a loser that Congress wouldn't even send in money for troops to being this truly great leader. And we we run a little exercise with the class. I do it every time I do a workshop, so much fun. I say, "All right, let me split you into teams. I want you all to come up with 8 to 10 core traits of great leaders." And I give them 3 to 5 minutes and then they come back and we put all of that up on the the board, the whiteboard. And these are things like vision, ethics, empathy, integrity, servant leadership. You know, we put that up there on the board, right? And then we talk a little bit about some of those that are, I think, stellar and extremely outstanding attributes that make great leaders great, right. Because that's the premise. How do you go from good to great? How did George Washington do that? And then after we got some clarity there, we say, you know, by the way, this is the list from Disney. Here's the list from Boeing. And here, this webcam's gonna zoom in and out. Let me get it to go back. There you go. Here's the list from Boeing, here's the list from Marathon Oil down in Africa when I was there, here's Aramco's list. And either way, they're all amazingly similar. So apparently you guys, wherever I go on the planet, can build a list of what makes great leaders great. And then we say, but, none of you, not even Disney ever really got the answer to this question. No team ever does, right? What truly makes great leaders great? And I'm not going to spoil the secret on this because I want your your clients to call me up, but I'm going to give you some clues. What makes great leaders great, like George Washington, Paul O'Neill, and President Zelensky, they create a culture of commitment where people give discretionary effort, more safety, more quality than they normally would without the leader present. That's how you go from people show up and they give you a fair day's work for a paycheck. Most of them, not all, but most. Your job is not to get paycheck performance. Your job is to get world class-performance. And the only way you get them there. The only way George Washington did it, the way Zelensky's doing it right now, Putin is not. Zelensky is interesting, you know, night and day comparison. The way to get there is through a secret hidden superpower. Every one of the leaders that comes into my class has it, but 99% of them don't have a clue what it is, nor do they know how to use it, right. What is that hidden superpower? It's R+, positive reinforcement. The single greatest consequence great leaders use, and the one most leaders are unaware of tragically and never use. And my job is to teach your leadership team and you how to master, become a master Jedi in the use of positive reinforcement. I know what that looks like. My 94 year old dad has done it on me. I'm the lab rat. So I've been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

Speaker: 00:49:28

Todd Miller: Well, Putin seems to be good at negative reinforcement, so we kind of see the flip side of it.

Speaker: 00:49:33

Bill Sims Jr.: Yes.

Speaker: 00:49:34

Todd Miller: Interesting stuff.

Speaker: 00:49:36

Bill Sims Jr.: Yeah. And Prigozhin was a bit duped. I saw a recent interview with him from Africa and he was quite complacent, you know, how safe he was and he was fine and he was doing his job. And it was not long after that that he met his end in a very purposefully spectacular way.

Speaker: 00:49:56

Todd Miller: So I'm curious, what what do you love about what you do, Bill?

Speaker: 00:50:01

Bill Sims Jr.: Oh, man, there's so much I love about it. I don't like delayed flights. I really don't like motel room beds. I love Zoom. You know, that's my favorite now. I think it's when leaders, when the lights click on in their head and when people come up to me after a session and say, "You'll never know. But let me tell you, this is the best training I've attended in my whole life. This changed the way I look at life. I was never raised like this. My parents spent their whole time telling me and still do what I do wrong. I never knew you could lead people a different way, right?" And it's when they get that happy moment and they connect with that. You know, that's probably moment number one. And then moment number two, when they leave my workshop, as Allen Pridmore did at GE Appliances, and went out and implemented just some very simple things that I teach. And he doubles or triples productivity of people building appliances. Wow, that's rewarding. Work wins. When we implement and we we see a 10 to 1 differential in safety performance from employees who've had positive reinforcement versus those who haven't. Those things, those things are why I keep doing this.

Speaker: 00:51:31

Ryan Bell: Well, I've got to say, Bill, you've certainly made a topic that I would normally not have any interest in, very interesting to me. And I can see why people that attend your workshops and stuff, you know, love it so much. I've heard this phrase before and I can't remember where I heard it, but it's something like a safety unicorn. Have you heard that at all or can you expand on that a little bit?

Speaker: 00:51:55

Bill Sims Jr.: Ding, ding, ding.Yeah, I'm going to be presenting on safety unicorns in New Orleans for National Safety Councils, not ASSP, but I will be with National Safety Council, and I encourage everybody to join me there. I teach a one-day course pro-bono, free for them. They'll of course charge you. And I think that's October 22nd in New Orleans. Sunday, 8 hours. But there's going to be some gumbo at the end, maybe a cold adult beverage, who knows? And then I teach a one-hour course on safety unicorns on the 23rd. Monday before I fly to Toronto. And so here's the deal. Safety unicorns: what are they? Why do they matter? And how do you create more more of them? And so I did a little research ahead of my presentation. It's an all-new keynote, and unicorns are defined as being highly desirable and difficult to obtain. So, alright, so here's a few attributes of what safety unicorns do for your business. On the front lines and as supervisors, they put safety first no matter what. They do the right thing, whether you're there as the safety person watching them or not. Hopefully you have a safety committee loaded with safety uniforms. Hopefully you don't have any CAVE people on your safety committee because they are citizens against virtually everything, CAVE people. So they're the opposite of your unicorns, right? The CAVE people. But if you've got unicorns, they energize your safety committee. In the moment of choice, when you're not watching, they look out for their coworker. They are their brother or sister's keeper and safety unicorns like Paul O'Neill at the C-suite level put safety before profits. And here's another thing they do They grow and mentor other safety leaders. So, how do we create safety unicorns? What is the unicorn factory? I'll talk about that. And then what is the the flip side, the dark side here. What's the unicorn glue factory look like? So what are the things that leaders do that essentially takes all the unicorns and ships them off to the glue factory? So all you got left are your CAVE people. And that's the key there. The clue there is the CAVE-man CEO. All of these are based on true stories. So, I mean, I can drill down if we have time and more of that if you want to. But, um, just strategically, how do we get and grow more safety unicorns and how do we get rid of our CAVE people, whether they're C-suite leaders or mid-level leaders or frontline workers? It's a battle between unicorns and CAVE people.

Speaker: 00:55:09

Todd Miller: Very interesting. Well, would be great to have you back on the show some time and we'll kind of pick up on that.

Speaker: 00:55:17

Bill Sims Jr.: Take good notes, because I have no clue what we talked about. That's like attention span of a gnat. Yeah, that sounded good. Okay, move on. Did we really talk about that.

Speaker: 00:55:26

Todd Miller: Fortunately we have a solid recording, so that's good. So I guess you have to touch on one thing, though. You said you hate hotel beds. I got to tell you, if there was a hotel chain that came out and said that they have the world's most comfortable heating and air conditioning system in their rooms, that was all they would have to say. They would get my business every night I'm on the road. So anyway.

Speaker: 00:55:51

Bill Sims Jr.: Yeah, you get that. Listen, let's start a hotel company, best HVAC and mattress on the planet. And I guarantee you we'll have 100% occupancy every night from road warriors.

Speaker: 00:56:03

Todd Miller: That's all they got to worry about, I agree. Hey, Bill, this has been very informative, been a great conversation, a lot of fun. We're kind of close to wrapping up what we call the business end of things, Anything that we haven't covered that you wanted to work in today?

Speaker: 00:56:18

Bill Sims Jr.: No. I mean, I thank you guys for what you're doing in the world of safety. You know, I'll tell you what Dan Peterson told me when he shook my hand before he passed away. He said, "You'll never know how many lives you save." And I think that's true, you guys and what we're doing here and all safety professionals, we'll never know how many lives we save. That's the lot in life of a safety leader. So thanks to all the safety leaders on this call, I always say safety leaders. You are the last conscience of business. Without you, every business just has no conscience, no heart and soul. It's not easy. It's hard. But don't give up. So I encourage safety leaders to continue on that path. Other than that, I think we've covered it. If they want to know more about me, beyondzeroinjuries.com, get out there, check me out. Come see me at NSC or some of the other events that I'll be doing over the next year or so. But it's been a privilege and an honor to be with you guys. And once again, thank you for your time and having me here.

Speaker: 00:57:24

Todd Miller: Well, thank you. And we actually do have one more part of the show. So we do something at the end of every show if our guest is willing and don't be the dullard who isn't willing to do it. So far, everyone has. We do something called our rapid fire questions. So these are seven questions that we ask you. Some are serious, some are silly. All you got to do is give a quick response. You have no idea what we're going to ask, are you up to the challenge of rapid fire?

Speaker: 00:57:51

Bill Sims Jr.: I may need an adult beverage here, but I'm going to say, Yeah, go for it. Lay it out there, dude.

Speaker: 00:57:58

Todd Miller: Let's do it. Well, we will alternate asking. Ryan, you want to ask the first question?

Speaker: 00:58:02

Ryan Bell: Absolutely. Question number one, have you purchased a product or service recently that was kind of a real disruptor or a game-changer in your life, something that kind of made you say, "Wow, where has this thing been all my life?"

Speaker: 00:58:15

Bill Sims Jr.: Yeah, I just bought a robot lawnmower.

Speaker: 00:58:19

Ryan Bell: Did you really?

Speaker: 00:58:21

Bill Sims Jr.: That sucker's four-wheel drive and I ain't got to cut the grass anymore. He does, though. So that's, you know, that's my latest gadget or toy. And. And I'm pretty happy with that.

Speaker: 00:58:34

Ryan Bell: What brand is it, can I ask?

Speaker: 00:58:35

Bill Sims Jr.: Yeah, sure. Yeah, I'm currently. Well, okay. I've been through four of them to find the right one. So, the Amazon guy and I are on a first-name basis. I'm like job security for him. Yep, that one's going back; bring the new one. Um, I tried the EcoFlow Blade. I loved it, but it just didn't cut the mustard, so. Two of those died and went back to their maker. Now I'm on something from Amazon called Mammotion, M-A-M-M-O-T-I-O-N, and I am testing that one. I have pretty good confidence in that one. But the one I'm really, really looking forward to is made in Germany because German engineering, right. You know, you can't beat it and that one's by Kress and so that one I look forward to trying. So, you know, check with me in about three months and I'll be the definitive expert in the latest technology on robot mowers.

Speaker: 00:59:38

Ryan Bell: Well, I was just going to say it's kind of interesting that the guy that talks about safety is trusting a robot with a spinning blade to cut his grass.

Speaker: 00:59:47

Bill Sims Jr.: Hey, hey, listen, you know what I'm going to be doing on Sunday is flyboarding. Dude, you ever done that on the big jets of water? You do the Iron Man thing out of the water.

Speaker: 00:59:54

Ryan Bell: Oh, no. I would love to, though.

Speaker: 00:59:56

Bill Sims Jr.: You go fly boarding, it's a trip. Until you fall, then it's not.

Speaker: 01:00:00

Todd Miller: I've seen that before.

Speaker: 01:00:01

Ryan Bell: Cool. Cool.

Speaker: 01:00:03

Todd Miller: Okay, question number two. What was the first car you ever drove? Please tell me it was a Corvair.

Speaker: 01:00:08

Bill Sims Jr.: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker: 01:00:10

Todd Miller: What was the first car you ever drove?

Speaker: 01:00:12

Bill Sims Jr.: Oh man, my first car was probably my dad's. Banana yellow Cadillac sedan Deville and banana yellow seats. And of course designed with GM's planned obsolescence so that things began falling off six months in so your dad would trade it out for a new one. That was probably, that was private car number one. And I didn't want to be caught dead in that thing, man, with my friends. So I managed to paint my mom's house. She needed somebody to paint the house, and she paid me $3.25 an hour. That was minimum wage back in the seventies, and I saved up the down payment for a Jeep Golden Eagle, V8 engine, Soft top, flaming eagle on the hood.

Speaker: 01:01:06

Todd Miller: Oh, yeah.

Speaker: 01:01:07

Bill Sims Jr.: Big old headers. I put them in myself.

Speaker: 01:01:08

Ryan Bell: Nice.

Speaker: 01:01:08

Bill Sims Jr.: And that was a ride, man. I had fun with that vehicle.

Speaker: 01:01:12

Todd Miller: Good stuff.

Speaker: 01:01:14

Ryan Bell: Awesome. Question number three: Do you prefer the top or bottom half of a bagel?

Speaker: 01:01:21

Bill Sims Jr.: The top, where all the good stuff is.

Speaker: 01:01:24

Todd Miller: That's my answer too. Question number four.

Speaker: 01:01:26

Ryan Bell: That's the right answer. That's what I was going to say.

Speaker: 01:01:27

Todd Miller: Yeah, that's the right answer. So when one sits down to eat green beans with ice cream, do you put the ice cream on top like a scoop on top of apple pie or you put the green beans on top, sort of like sprinkles on top of ice cream?

Speaker: 01:01:43

Bill Sims Jr.: Yeah. You know, we've struggled with that, how to do that? In fact, this shot on the front of my book was shot by a photographer. Pretty notable, Richard Brown up in Asheville. I guess Richard's still around and he actually put mashed potatoes on frozen green beans. So if you got to make the shot, that's how we do it. But I recommend if you're serving up green beans and ice cream. There you go, thanks for keeping the faith. Scoop some vanilla ice cream. I like the little French green beans that go in there. I mean, if you wanted to if you wanted to really get crazy out there, go ahead and and and roll those suckers in some powdered sugar or stick it in some honey and stick it in there. And I think then maybe I could tough down one or two of them. I still struggle with green beans, but I'm good with ice cream.

Speaker: 01:02:39

Ryan Bell: That might not be terrible.

Speaker: 01:02:42

Bill Sims Jr.: The Japanese, believe it or not, somebody told me, have a green bean-flavored ice cream. I haven't tried it yet, but that's on my list, bucket list. Going to Tokyo and going to eat green bean ice cream.

Speaker: 01:02:52

Todd Miller: They do. Yep, that's right.

Speaker: 01:02:54

Ryan Bell: I would try it. Okay, next question. This one's a little more serious. What would you like to be remembered for at the end of your days.

Speaker: 01:03:02

Bill Sims Jr.: Man, that's deep, dude. You know, there are a lot of things, right? Doing the right thing the way my creator expects me to do it is probably number one. Figuring out what that is and being able to pull that off, doing the right thing, or making the hard, right decision rather than the easy, wrong decision.

Speaker: 01:03:31

Todd Miller: Hmm.

Speaker: 01:03:31

Bill Sims Jr.: And along the way, if you're going to change the world, I believe you got to ruffle some feathers. So ain't everybody going to like you and ain't everybody going to agree with you. That's okay.

Speaker: 01:03:43

Todd Miller: Good answer. Okay, next, to last question. Okay, would you prefer to have to sing or to have to dance along with every song that comes on the radio?

Speaker: 01:03:54

Bill Sims Jr.: Man, I tell you, you know, my wife, she'll tell you she can dance, but I can't dance, right? So I'm typically on the dance floor in a chair, and she'll dance around me. That's about as much dancing as I do. I actually differ, disagree with that. I think on snow skis, I'm pretty good. I got rhythm, right? You know, you just watch me on that. But short of being in a chair or snow skis, dance is probably not my strong suit. Now, I think, you know, singing I'm all right. My wife says her ears bleed. So I may have to say that either way, you guys probably don't want to see either one of those things happen. But I do have to go with singing over dance.

Speaker: 01:04:37

Todd Miller: Which, either way, those around you are in for a painful experience, it sounds like.

Speaker: 01:04:41

Bill Sims Jr.: I recommend you wear your PPE. Get ready.

Speaker: 01:04:47

Ryan Bell: Okay, final question. What non-family person have you been continuous friends with the longest?

Speaker: 01:04:56

Bill Sims Jr.: Non-family member friends with? Well, I got two buddies. I got a buddy named Marvin Benford. I've known him my whole life. I got another buddy named Steve Irwin, known him my whole life. Literally 55+ years. So I'd have to put those guys up there and I'm probably forgetting. And, you know, that's the longest right? But I've got I've added a collection of a good half dozen other friends that are the guys I'd want with me in the foxhole. You know, they're the guys where any one of them would jump on the grenade to save the other. And they're a wonderful group of people. If I had to look out there. By the way, Steve. So there you go. I guess I answered the question maybe, right?

Speaker: 01:05:48

Todd Miller: Great answer. It's good, good to think about that stuff. So again, folks want to get with you. It's beyondzeroinjuries.com. Do I have that right?

Speaker: 01:05:57

Bill Sims Jr.: Yes, sir. You got it.

Speaker: 01:05:59

Todd Miller: Awesome. Well, we will have that in the show notes as well. So, thank you again so much for joining us. It's been a blast and very informative. And I want to thank our audience for tuning in to this very special episode of Construction Disruption with Bill Sims, Jr. of The Bill Sims Company based in Columbia, South Carolina. So please watch for future episodes of our podcast. We're always blessed with great guests, just like Bill. Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or YouTube. Keep on disrupting, keep on challenging the status quo, keep on looking for better ways of doing things out there. And don't forget to have a positive impact on everyone you encounter. Make them smile, encourage them. Simple yet powerful things that we can all do. So in the meanwhile, God bless and take care. This is Isaiah Industries signing off until the next episode of Construction Disruption.

Speaker: 01:06:53

Intro/Outro: This podcast is produced by Isaiah Industries, a manufacturer of specialty metal roofing and other building products.