Thought Leaders

JACK BALSAMO

Vice President, Team Leader

AREAS OF EXPERTISE
  • Multisite intervention programs
  • Serious injury and fatality prevention programs
  • Union relations
  • Leadership coach
A former safety manager and maintenance/engineering manager, Jack excels at leading implementations for industrial organizations — particularly those where safety competes, or could potentially compete, with productivity.
For more than 16 years, Jack has managed complex, multisite interventions. These include projects focused on culture change, serious injury and fatality prevention, safety leadership development for senior leaders, and increasing and improving hourly employee safety participation.
He is adept at overcoming union resistance and gaining union buy-in and support for behavior-based safety implementations, often improving morale and trust between the workforce and the organization in the process.
Jack is an accomplished leadership coach. He conducts 360-degree assessments, develops safety leadership and professional development action plans, and provides coaching and mentoring to leaders at every level, including executives to first-line supervisors.
Among Jack’s notable successes, he developed an intervention program in preparation for an outage, or “turnaround,” project at a nuclear plant. The project included leadership development, a modified BAPP® technology system for management, and union oversight. The results of the intervention initiative helped the plant achieve zero injuries during the outage, compared with nine during its previous outage.
Jack is a dynamic speaker with extensive association seminar experience. He has delivered more than 200 presentations on employee involvement and behavior-based safety topics to professional and industry groups.
Before joining DEKRA, Jack was a safety manager at a major food manufacturing company, implementing behavior-based safety programs and driving OSHA compliance for multiple unionized sites.
Jack graduated cum laude from Illinois State University with a bachelor’s degree in industrial technology.