With over a decade of experience with the 3M company in a variety of technical and leadership roles, Jason Kunz demonstrates his passion for the safety and health profession across multiple platforms. He uses his voice to amplify the profession and the professional. His journey has inspired a commitment to building professional communities that ensure an empowerment of their people.
Jason is a community advocate and CIH and CSP, and he is grateful to be working with some of the most passionate people on the planet. Currently, he serves as the culture activation lead at 3M, a global technology company that offers manufacturing, industrial, safety, healthcare, and consumer solutions.
For our latest Faces of EHS profile, we sat down with Jason to discuss his biggest industry influences, leadership accountability, and shifting the role of the safety professional from a defensive position to an offensive one.
Q: Who has been your biggest influence in the industry?
In 2010, after graduating from Bemidji State University (“Harvard of the North”) with degrees in biology and chemistry, I found myself living back home, trying to figure out what to do with my life, working three jobs, selling kitchen cutlery door-to-door, working as a behavioral specialist at a local company that cared for people with traumatic brain injuries, and selling window and carpet cleaning on the weekends.
My sister was kind enough to share an open position at 3M, “Industrial Hygiene Technician.” A position and profession that sounded interesting, but I knew nothing about. After some research and several phone interviews, I sat across the table from Dr. Perry Logan in a small conference room in St. Paul, Minnesota, for a final interview.
That day in 2010, Perry talked about the EHS profession as it was the most fulfilling career path known to humankind; turns out he wasn’t wrong. He also took a chance on me that day, even though I didn’t have any relevant industry experience. Since then, Perry has acted as both a mentor and a sponsor and had a significant influence on my EHS related beliefs, leadership principles, and development. Perry’s influence on countless EHS professionals cannot be understated and I have an inkling that he’s just getting started—which is a really good thing for us all.
Additionally, not to be understated is the impact and influence of: Dawn Wurst, Abby Ferri, Mike Damasin, Steve Newell, Tony Militello, Josh Franklin, Subena Colligan, Rick Fulwiler, Carl Johnson, Laurie Shelby, Carter Ficklen, Tyler Lorenzen, and several others I know I am overlooking.
Q: What’s your best mistake and what did you learn from it?
Well, to start, there are far too many to list and remain within my wordcount. One professional mistake that stands out rather vividly was deploying an incident analysis tool across our operations in 2020 without the input of the people we were asking to use that tool. As you can imagine, uptake was minimal and the frustration from our operations was real. Looking back, I was more focused on hitting a deadline, delivering a slick solution, and appeasing upper management than I was concerned with doing the difficult, but necessary work to truly understand what was needed from the people who needed it.
Shortly after deployment, I asked our EMEA EHS Leader at the time how the rollout was progressing. He rather pointedly remarked: “You did to us exactly what you’ve been telling us not to do to our sites.” In other words, I had done safety TO our people and operations instead of WITH them. All while ignoring what I quickly learned after are five of the most important words in engagement: People. Support. What. They. Create. Not what we create in a vacuum.
Something in addition I’ve learned as a result of poor decisions is to keep people around you who constantly remind you not of your mistakes and mishaps, but of our character and meaningful contributions. My wife, Malia, has been that person for me for over a decade now. Just the other day after a presentation that didn’t go as well as I had hoped, she asked: “Will the company still run tomorrow even though your presentation wasn’t “perfect?” Yes babe, it will. And thank you. It’s good to have people in your corner who remind you that your mistakes and poor decisions don’t define you.
Q: What’s your favorite and least favorite part about working in the industry? Would you change anything?
I believe it was Dekker who first put me on to the line of thinking that Murphy’s Law doesn’t apply. Especially in EHS and operations. Everything that can go wrong, usually goes right. When things do go wrong, we take a web of complexity and often simplify to a singular “root cause.” When we do that, we identify something that feels causal, which makes us believe there’s no need to learn anything further.
There’s a lot to learn when work doesn’t go as planned, and a lot to learn when it does. Our job isn’t to prevent bad things from happening, it’s to help ensure good things do happen, consistently. It’s the difference between, say LeBron James and the head of Security for the Los Angeles Lakers. The head of Security plays a critical role in helping to prevent bad things from happening, but LeBron has it in his mind that he’s going to guarantee something good happens every practice, every play, every game, every day. This mindset is rampant amongst high performers. What if we were to think more offensively? For example, instead of the thought process I used to believe and one we’ve likely all heard, “If I do my job as an EHS professional, I will no longer be needed,” assuming we’ve stopped bad things from happening. Could we shift that mindset to: “If I do my job, there won’t be enough of us”? Because we’re constantly making good things happen.
“Sending workers home in the same condition as they came” may have been sufficient before the pandemic. Our hearts are in the right place with such platitudes as this, it’s simply too cliché and no longer sufficient. We owe it to our workforce to do far better than that. Imagine if your dentist, doctor, therapist, counselor, or chiropractor led with that mantra, proudly advertising on billboards across your city: “Send your family to us and we’ll send them home exactly as they came.” Their business would quickly go bust. Instead, could we consider being bold enough to declare people will leave our workplaces and jobsites better than they came? Physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, even spiritually. The work Harvard is doing in this space with SHINE is next-level, worth keeping a close eye on, and something forward-thinking companies are really going to get behind, if they haven’t already.
Q: What are your thoughts on safety culture? How can company leaders make safety a value within their organization?
We talk about what’s important to us. Barbers talk about how you should get a haircut, a butcher will say you need fresh meat from the deli, and a realtor will tell you now is the perfect time to buy a home. If our senior leaders, mid-level managers, frontline supervisors, and everyone in between aren’t talking about safety and health in a consistent, genuine, compelling manner, it’s a pretty strong signal that it isn’t yet important enough for them to do so. I’m aligned with Tom Krause’s view on culture in this regard. That is, leadership creates culture and culture drives behavior. Leadership is always creating culture, for better or worse.
It’s one of the reasons I think our primary duties as EHS professionals continue to evolve beyond assessing and analyzing and into coaching and counseling. That is, helping our senior leaders understand specifically what’s needed from them to drive the organization’s culture forward, while delivering thoughtful coaching critiques in a way our senior leaders can hear it.
Q: What safety concerns or issues do you think need more prioritization in EHS programs?
Three things:
- Leadership accountability: That is, extreme ownership in EHS from the top down. Similar to what you see with Duke Austin, CEO at Quanta. Regardless of your views on “The Capacity Model,” garnering this type of CEO engagement would greatly benefit our EHS programs and performance.
- Standards: Clear, concise standards as to what is and is not acceptable, with accountability to those standards. For example, “no texting and driving” is a pretty cut and dry standard. A document that says the same thing in 17 pages is not. I often need to remind myself that complexity is the enemy of execution, and it’s really hard, but really necessary to make the complex, simple.
- Worker engagement: Intense, consistent worker engagement with robust follow-up and follow-through. Keeping in mind that management probably shouldn’t consistently be walking away from worker interactions with a list of action items, but instead leverage the engagements to deepen trust, to learn about work being done, to create an environment that empowers the workforce to make improvements on the spot, then raise their hand when they need management support to do so. We owe it to our workers to move beyond observation and into authentic conversation.
Q: What are you most proud of?
The people across our global operations, manufacturing, and supply chains who weren’t given the opportunity to “work from home.” There wasn’t a “return to work” for them because they never left work. They never went home. I’m proud of their grit, their determination and resilience, their selflessness. I would even say their “antifragility.”
When the hits kept coming throughout the pandemic, when the supply chains broke, when they became home schoolers, babysitters, and counselors, when the politicians got more airtime than the occupational health professionals, and the system continued to get shocked, they kept getting stronger. I’m proud of them, and I probably haven’t thanked them enough.
Q: Do you have any advice for people entering the profession?
I have two pieces of advice. First off, as Ben Meer recently wrote, life is much more interesting when you pretend everyone was sent to teach you something. The demanding boss or senior leader, your close-talking colleague, the loud-typer next door, the novice operator, senior supervisor, not-so-subtle superintendent, the less-than-merry maintainer. In each interaction, whether new to the profession or not, we can ask ourselves: “what are they trying to teach me? What lesson am I meant to learn?” Keeping in mind Epictetus’ famous line, “It is impossible for a person to begin to learn what he thinks he already knows.” Or, Cato the Elder’s great maxim, “Be careful not to rashly refuse to learn from others.” Our profession, and your career path will be much more interesting from there.
Second, we can teach what we know, but we reproduce who we are. Whether we’re an entry level EHS professional or a senior executive, it seems the most important work we can do is self-work, because I think the role of leadership isn’t so much about production, but about reproduction. And just like you, I want to be sure that what I’m reproducing is generating a net positive impact to the people and organizations I represent.
Q: Anything else you’d like to add?
Let me share something that isn’t meant to be controversial, but may be seen as such. If we were to take a poll of the readers of EHS Daily Advisor, asking the question, “What is the role of the EHS professional?” I trust we’d get as many perspectives as people responding. And each response would be valid, because it’s someone’s perspective.
One particular response I’d suggest we challenge, or at a minimum have some respectful dialogue around, is that our role is to keep people safe. I don’t think keeping people safe is our primary role. Because you and I can’t keep people safe. Controls, safeguards, defenses, layers of protection, operational capacity, and the like can keep people safe. We, no matter how powerful, cannot.
But what we can do is help workers learn, to help the organization learn, mainly from the workers, and to convince the people who need convincing to understand and then act on where we need to add capacity into our systems. And then invest in making the workplace safer, by truly making the workplace safer. As my colleague says, our senior leaders are the most powerful locomotives in the railyard. We are not. If the most powerful locomotive in the railyard hooks onto the EHS railcar, and we get things moving in the right direction, that level of EHS momentum would be difficult to stop.