Graham Jackson on Safety Leadership and Losing Your Ego

Graham Jackson Wants You to Lose Your Ego

A near-fatal injury taught SkyFire Energy’s safety manager to trust his crews over his rulebook.

“I’m not telling you to do this because my book says you have to do it this way,” Graham Jackson says. “It’s because I want you to get home safe at the end of the day.”

Jackson is the Health and Safety Manager at SkyFire Energy, one of Western Canada’s largest solar contractors. The employee-owned company has been installing solar across the West since 2001. Like a lot of good safety people, he came up through the trades, not a classroom. He grew up on a farm in southern Alberta, rodeoed, and had his carpentry ticket by sixteen. He is also unusually open about what turned him toward safety, and he wants it that way. “I’m proud of my story,” he says. “It’s not something I’m ashamed of.”

The accident

In 2014, Jackson was a project manager for a demolition company. The operator called in sick, so he stepped in to keep the site moving, cutting man-doors into an elevator shaft and hoisting out chunks of concrete with a 2,600-pound anchor set into the roof. The anchor sheared in half. The concrete came down on him in a stairwell, where there was nowhere to move, and pinned his arm.

He lost roughly 75 percent of the use of his right arm. The damage was internal, a full-thickness tear in what his surgeon called “the black box” of the wrist: supposed to be indestructible, and once it goes, beyond repair. What came after was in some ways harder than the injury itself: roughly three years without a paycheck, thirteen appeals before his claim was recognized, and a relationship that came apart under the strain. By the end of that fight, he nearly took his own life. What pulled him back, at the last possible moment, was his young son calling out his name. He calls the boy his little angel, and says his son still does not know that he saved his father’s life. He has spent years in therapy since, and he tells the whole of it now, on purpose, because he has watched how fast a workplace injury can pull a person under. That is the engine behind everything else he does. “Because I almost didn’t,” is how he tends to finish any sentence about why he cares this much.

Boots on the ground

The detail Jackson never lets a crew forget is that his accident was not a freak accident. “It wasn’t something that was out of the ordinary. It wasn’t something that was unsafe,” he says. He was working within the rules, doing a routine task, on an ordinary day. “If I had been standing a foot to the left, I’d be dead.”

That is why he spends his days on site instead of behind a desk. With a dozen crews out on a given day, working live power and heights, he tries to lay eyes on nearly all of them, watching for the small things that experience makes invisible. He is blunt that skill is no protection against drift. He sees “highly trained individuals who get complacent,” and when he flags something, the reaction he gets most often is a quiet thanks and an admission that they had stopped noticing it themselves.

Honey, not vinegar

Jackson’s larger mission is to kill a stereotype. “Safety professionals are typically hated,” he says, “and I want to get away from the stigma of we’re out to get you.” He thinks the field has earned some of that reputation by leading with authority instead of trust, and his fix is not complicated. “You’re going to get more flies with honey than you are with vinegar.” He once argued with a university professor for three hours over whether a safety lead can be friends with the workers. He still believes he was right. The rules do not bend, but the tone does. Yes, it has to be done this way, “but not in a threatening tone.” When crews trust that he is working in their interest rather than his binder, they stop dreading him showing up on site and start welcoming it.

The proof he is proudest of is not a number. When he arrived, safety at SkyFire was “a lot of lip service,” he says. “We have the processes, we just don’t follow them.” What changed was the culture. “There wasn’t much respect for my department, and now there is.”

Lose your ego

Ask Jackson what he would tell his younger self, and the answer comes without a pause: “Lose your ego.” He watches people leave school certain they know more than the crews they are there to protect, and he was one of them. He graduated with distinction, and it still took swallowing his ego to see how little he actually knew. The people in the field, as he puts it, are the real product experts. “They know everything there is to know about what they’re doing.” Learning to listen, to ask instead of dictate, was the hardest thing he has had to do in this career.

Graham Jackson does not lead with the rulebook, because a rulebook did not save him, and it will not save the person in front of him. What might is a safety manager who has been under the concrete himself and knows exactly what a foot in the wrong direction costs, one who has decided the job is not to be obeyed but to be trusted.