The key to protecting Alcoa employees, O’Neill believed, was understanding why injuries happened in the first place. And to understand why injuries happened, you had to study how the manufacturing process was going wrong. To understand how things were going wrong, you had to bring in people who could educate workers about quality control and the most efficient work processes, so that it would be easier to do everything right, since correct work is also safer work.
I think one of the important points on this story is this: “O’Neill’s plan for getting to zero injuries entailed the most radical realignment in Alcoa’s history.” If O’Neill had come into Alcoa telling everyone he wanted to realign everything, all the employees would have fought him on it. But because he got them invested in a fairly benign goal at first (improving worker safety) instead of emphasizing how much things were going to change, people were more willing to play along.
We tend to think of strong leaders as people who arrive promising to change everything. But in my experience, it’s the opposite: Strong leaders show up emphasizing the things everyone agrees upon - and then the changes occur without anyone completely realizing how thoroughly everything is shifting.
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