Jill James:

Welcome back. This is the Accidental Safety Pro, brought to you by HSI. This episode was recorded April 20th, 2023. My name is Jill James, HSI's Chief Safety Officer, and my guest today is Felix Nater. Mr. Nater is President and Owner of Nater Associates Limited and works as a certified security consultant and advisor to the manufacturing, processing and production industries as an expert in workplace security and violence prevention. Felix joins us today from Charlotte, North Carolina. Welcome to the show.

Felix Nater:

Honored to be here, Jill. Thank you for that great introduction.

Jill James:

Well, you are welcome. I am so excited. Yes. I'm excited to speak with you. And also very interested for you to share your wisdom and expertise in workplace violence prevention, something that we're certainly seeing so often. But before we get there, as we do with all of our guests, and how you came into this work and made it your life's work and passion, I'd like to know how did this all get started for you? How far-

Felix Nater:

Yeah, it's an amazing question. I think when I look back, Jill, it was almost like pre-ordained that everything that I had been involved in up until now was almost destiny. And what do I mean by that? So I was a postal inspector for about 18 years, working on a variety of different criminal security administrative projects over the years. And I took a position in Washington, in the public affairs branch as a promotion, and my specific responsibility was to come up with policies, plans, and procedures to address media relationships from a postal inspector point of view and the outside world. I arrived June of 2089, 86, I'm sorry. August 20th of 86, we had the biggest tragedy ever in the United States Postal Service at Edmonton, Oklahoma.

Jill James:

Remind our listeners, especially those who weren't alive or were a teenager.

Felix Nater:

Yes, yes. So Edmonton, Oklahoma is a post office. It was a post office situation where a former letter carrier by the name of Patrick Shell decided that he couldn't cope with the issues of his employment and had some prior personal problems dealing with coping and limited skills. And he never made the adjustment from military. And by the way, it wasn't because he was in the military or that he had issues with the military. He just has limited coping skills. And one day he decided to come into the office on August 20th, 1986, carrying a bag and shot, killed, and wounded 20 coworkers. That was the tragedy. That was the shot hurt around the world for us as postal inspectors. And I was, like I said, the public affairs branch. And I spent all of that time coordinating with our organization internally and externally, the events following the shooting in Oklahoma. I became so enrolled in the aspects of what transpired, because prior to that, we were responsible for workplace security, but we had never experienced the magnitude of that impact to the organization and what it would do to us from a congressional standpoint and the White House interested in what transpired that sitting in that chair, I suddenly began to acquire an insight that was unique to what I am doing today from an operational and senior management perspective.

Jill James:

So 1986. And so Felix, this is where, oh my gosh, the unfortunate phrase that many of our listeners are going to know: going postal.

Felix Nater:

Yes, yes, yes.

Jill James:

This is a pivotal story for our country in terms of workplace violence. Not that we were void of it before, but like you said, it was heard around the country.

Felix Nater:

And unfortunately, Jill, just from the perspective and education, prior to Edmonton, Oklahoma, I had been, like many other inspectors in large cities, involved in major investigations involving armed robbery of postal stations, armed robberies of letter carriers on the first and third of the month. So really, the connotation was a buildup of those extreme exposure to homicidal threats that our letter carriers and window clerks were experiencing then came Edmonton, Oklahoma, and the media ran with that term "going postal".

Jill James:

Right.

Felix Nater:

And we lived with it. And I tell people when I get introduced, I'm the only one in this room that can get away with saying, "Going postal".

Jill James:

That's right.

Felix Nater:

Because I have the answer.

Jill James:

That's right. That's right. And what workplace exposures... These are extreme workplace exposures for anyone who thinks, oh, a letter carrier. Oh, they get to walk all day. The biggest risk they have is maybe a musculoskeletal pain.

Felix Nater:

You would think.

Jill James:

Yeah. Big workplace.

Felix Nater:

You would think. Unfortunately, on the first and third of the month, there were opportunistic criminals that knew that letter carriers who drove the vehicles and letter carriers who had access to the city delivery storage boxes, as well as the apartment dwellings had keys, and those keys gave them access to large volumes of mail.

Jill James:

That's right. Carrying people's checks.

Felix Nater:

Yes.

Jill James:

Yes. Yeah. Wow.

Felix Nater:

Yeah.

Jill James:

So you're in Washington DC, this happens. You start really thinking about policy and procedure. Yeah. What happens next?

Felix Nater:

It was a fascinating experience because my work emphasis shifted from the development of policies, plans, and procedures to actually being in the middle of all these discussions between the chief inspectors, the regional chief inspectors, the postmaster general's office. And even though I wasn't a significant voice, I listened a lot to what transpired. And I was impressed with the ability of the postal service to coordinate and collaborate at such a high level to recognize you can't bury a problem, you got to deal with it. It's upfront. We're a national organization. We touch customers that don't really understand what's going on in the postal service. So we've got to be very outward in our desires to get the help that we need. And when the White House said, you got a couple of options, you clean up your own act, or we'll have the FBI come in and do it for you.

Jill James:

Oh, wow.

Felix Nater:

So that intensified our desires to the chief inspector's office to really, really ramp up what we as postal inspectors could do to prevent through education and response to scenes that might need our intervention. And eventually, through the Chief's Office, they formed field units that would be specifically designed to interdict, if you would, reports of workplace violence at local post offices around the country in the high crime areas. And when I was given an opportunity to return to the field, I returned to the New York division from Washington in 1989, and they asked me to consider taking the assignment. I said no, I was uncomfortable with the field work aspect of it. I knew the strategy and I knew the process piece of it, but I didn't think I wanted to do that kind of work all the time.

Jill James:

Yeah.

Felix Nater:

Relentlessly, I accepted it. And those were the best eight years of my 26-year career.

Jill James:

Was going back into the field.

Felix Nater:

Was going back into the field and working as a workplace violence specialist, workplace violence prevention specialist.

Jill James:

So you were reluctant to do it and you did it. And what lights turned on for you that informed what I'm assuming is the launching point of your career? Well, a second chapter maybe.

Felix Nater:

Second chapter, yes. Yes. Earlier, I said that everything I did was pre-predestinated. So also a lot of the concurrent things I did were around enhancing my performance and experiences so I would acquire expertise in every area that I was assigned to to help improve my ability to deliver and perform at the optimum level. And so working with the letter carriers and clerks and other low level employees of the organization helped me to be patient in elevating their sense of lack of awareness. Working with postmaster supervisors at the stations helped me to understand the dilemma of their situation. And then working with the unions helped me to further employ them as unofficial postal inspectors in managing the environment from a behavior perspective, so that when I came along, it would be, "We have a problem and everybody wants to collaborate to resolve it." And then the interesting thing at the mix of this was the senior level organizations, both in Long Island and in Queens and Brooklyn, all had executives that were responsible for postal operations. I thought that since I had this keen insight and this ability to communicate and understand the issues, that prevention needed to start at the top contrary to the envisionment, that it needs to start from the bottom up. I felt it needed to be resourced. I felt it needed to be understood, and I felt it needed to be owned from the top down. So I met with the district managers and I was embraced on the concept that they needed to lead the way, and that I just need to be a backup figure and not a lead figure. And I love that because in order for an operation to be successful, it has to have a strong leader and people who are willing to follow that leader. And even though they weren't in my chain of command, I followed those leaders because they were willingly accepting the senior management role and their commitment and their investment in what I considered to be an important entity. And that's education and awareness.

Jill James:

You can't drop in as the leader and then leave and expect everything's going to happen.

Felix Nater:

And from a process, it does not work that way. And from a process improvement perspective, that's the way it's got to work, Jill.

Jill James:

Yeah.

Felix Nater:

You got to remove yourself and say, I can retire because it's working well without me.

Jill James:

That's right. That's so much of our work you want to teach. It's the old adage of you want them teach people to fish, right?

Felix Nater:

Yes, yes, yes.

Jill James:

Uh-huh. Yeah. So I'm just going to guess, you saw some success there, including your own, as you said, your expertise growing and your own development of self.

Felix Nater:

It was very, very successful. And it wasn't successful as a result of me. It was successful because my bosses, the postal inspectors and the inspectors in charge saw that I was making a contribution. And even though I was untraditional in terms of my approach, they gave me the rope and the latitude to continue. And they kept me on that assignment for eight years. And it was an intense assignment, Jill. It did require a lot of credibility, M&As from visibility. So I needed to be there in those difficult moments, take the shots from the union, spend those quiet times with the postmasters, hold their hands, reassure them, get beat up by senior managers who wanted it to stop, and were depending on my leadership in the field to help stop it. We never had any major events that emanated from an employee homicidal consideration. We did have two events that occurred on my watch. One was a suicide, actually, two suicides, one that I was directly involved in. And I give all the credit to the Long Island District executive in charge, who contrary to the relationship we were supposed to have as postal inspectors with senior management, he oftentimes took my recommendations under consideration. And this young man who eventually committed suicide wasn't because they lacked empathy, it was because he just didn't have any interest in surviving anymore. And he committed suicide.

Jill James:

So Felix, when you were working with these postmasters and other leaders, and you're introducing, well, probably these are a lot of soft skills things, right?

Felix Nater:

Yes.

Jill James:

And you're talking to them about some touchy-feely things that aren't necessarily data-driven, like other pieces and parts of their work lives. How did those conversations go and when did you start feeling or knowing you had to shift?

Felix Nater:

It was be because I also had another hat that I wore in my other career as a army reserve senior non-commissioned officer that rose to the ranks to become a major senior non-commissioned officer, if you would. I also knew then, I was dealing with two kinds of reservists, the kind that when they were notified, they had to go to war, had to go, or the kind that I needed to prepare for those difficult moments in telling them they had orders that they had to deploy. So I didn't go into the postal service with a fear mongrel approach. I addressed it from a storytelling point of view. I elucidated, if you would. I amplified their fears and concerns by translating that into life's experiences. But in pursuing those life experiences, you have to know what you don't know, and you have to elevate your sense of situational awareness to be prepared to understand these things can happen to you. It's just like when you get out of the car, I would say, and you make an assumption that nobody is on the other side of the hedges as you walk from the driveway to your front door and then behind the hedges, somebody comes out and says, "Your money or your life." You have to be aware of your environment, and you have to pay attention to things that are unique and unordinary. And you can't be afraid of reporting an observation of a coworker because zero tolerance is going to automatically deem them wrong and inappropriate. You have to look at it as a personal responsibility to yourself, to them, and to the workplace to do whatever you can to deescalate situations. So it was a conversation that I would have with them using their own situations that previously got me involved to show them how things could have been done differently, better, smarter, and even avoiding them. So I tried to deescalate the fear factor, and it bothers me today that instead of focusing in on the prevention to never get to that active shooter, businesses are more concerned with preventing the active shooter, which is a too late factor than they are with investing in never getting there.

Jill James:

Yeah. This is the failure of our society is that we are fantastic as a country to race into a situation once things have gone sideways and remediate it and take care of it once it's gone sideways. But we really don't do really very well as a country. From healthcare prevention to health and safety, workplace safety prevention. Yeah. We're just so great at prevention. I don't know how that started in our country. I don't think that's universal. I don't think that's a global thing. I think some countries are really great at prevention. We haven't excelled in that area.

Felix Nater:

It is an amazing observation. I have a lot of interests. When I look at my analytics on my website, I have a lot of hits and visits to my website from outside of the United States, more so than they are in the United States. And when I advertised that our book was impressed and soon to hit the street, the majority of the interest was from outside the United States.

Jill James:

Interesting.

Felix Nater:

Yeah. I think we're a gratification predisposed country where we want to see things right away, which is why we like active shooter.

Jill James:

Yeah.

Felix Nater:

The rest of the world is process oriented, and we're not. Let's get things done, boom, boom, boom. And it's over with.

Jill James:

For sure. For sure. So you did this work for, you said, eight years. What happens next?

Felix Nater:

Well, I started to get less and less calls on my old cell phone and my pager. And I said to my wife, it's 7:30 and I'm actually home to have a cup of coffee with you. Maybe that's a telltale sign, that was around November, 1999, telltale sign that maybe it's time for me to walk away from this because postmasters obviously are doing a grand job and I'm not needed anymore. So in November of 1999, I went into my immediate field supervisor and I said, in a lunch environment, I said, "Hey guys, I think it's time for me to move on." And they all started laughing because they saw me as Mr. Postal Inspector. I would never retire. I was like Colonel McArthur. I would just fade away. And I was serious. And my wife was happy to see me do that. And I put my papers in officially December of 2000. And I retired effectively December 31st, 2000. But I got to tell you something, it's a little bit of braggadocios because I never expected this. So my team was asked to schedule a luncheon as a going away for me. And I was very happy with a simple luncheon because I didn't want anything that involve a fanfare of putting people out of the way for a little old me.

Jill James:

Yeah, sure.

Felix Nater:

And they came back to me and said, they used to call me Phil. They said, "Phil, it's difficult for us to put a luncheon for you because too many people want to come." So I said, "Well, then I don't want to do anything." And they came back to me and said, "It's out of your control. The inspector in charge feels you should have an appropriate sendoff. So now we're looking for a facility to accommodate the number of people." So I said, "Come on, accommodate little on me. What's going on here?" Then they came back to me and said, "What is the name of the country club that you patronized?" And I said, "Why?" And I gave them the name. 350 people later. That's amazing. Right?

Jill James:

You touched a lot of lives. That's fantastic. That's fantastic.

Felix Nater:

I didn't know I had.

Jill James:

Oh, that's fantastic. And why not celebrate that? After how many years? How many years of service in the...

Felix Nater:

26 years as a postal inspector, two and a half years as a postal police officer and a year as a letter carrier, a year and a half. So I'm one of those guys that grew up within an organization to understand the organization, its strengths, weaknesses, and I was very empathetic to it because they gave me an opportunity.

Jill James:

Fantastic. So it's 2000, you're officially retired.

Felix Nater:

Yes.

Jill James:

It's now 2023. You are still at this, thankfully. Yeah. What has been spanning the gap? What happened?

Felix Nater:

When I stood at the podium on February 3rd, 2001 at my retirement party, I said, honey, you can rest assured that I'm all yours. Get the honey do list ready. And then what happened September 11th, 2001?

Jill James:

Oh, yeah.

Felix Nater:

And that dictated the future that I am now involved in because they asked me to come back just to do security assessments because the workforce was concerned about their personal wellbeing. And I did an assessment of 125 post offices on Long Island and eventually rendered a report that said, "These are all the things that I would recommend you do to enhance your environment." And they pretty much implemented a majority of my recommendations. The word got out that Inspector Nater was back out doing his thing. And after I finished that project, I hired an accountant and an attorney to look at the possibilities. The name was suggested that I keep it as close to my name for identity purposes. And October the 2nd, 2002, Nater Associates came alive. And that's 20 years later. Right?

Jill James:

Wow. Congratulations.

Felix Nater:

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah.

Jill James:

Your life's work is still workplace security and violence prevention. Yes?

Felix Nater:

Yes. Yes. I help. I'm not afraid of saying that I help organizations to implement and manage workplace security with a specialty or focus on workplace violence prevention. I'm not afraid of saying I help because you may think you know, but I just want to make sure you know.

Jill James:

Yeah. Right, right. Yeah. And so when you're working with people now, Felix, where do you usually start? Or do you want to talk about your philosophy on workplace violence prevention?

Felix Nater:

It's one of the same. Great question. So I start as part of my philosophy. I try not to be a micro consultant that always focuses in on statistics and the data about everybody else's. I try to focus in understanding what your organization looks like. So that first conversation after you're serious about engaging me is to get an understanding of what you really, really want. What are the concerns, the drivers that are necessitating for us to have this conversation, and what do you want it to look like at the end? And then when I get answers to those questions, I begin to introduce my philosophy, which is, this is not going to happen with Felix going out of here and telling you what to do. This is going to be a discoverable process where you all are going to be a part of what I discover, so that you can understand that the discovery is a solution, and that the solution is going to be joint. It's going to be my suggestion. And you're embracing of the solution with tweaking necessarily to make it be a part of your culture. So I was a true consultant from that process experience I acquired as a postal inspector in the public affairs branch, and I didn't want to be the guy with the hammer and the nail. You're showing them how to nail the hammer, but rather, how big do you want the hole? And what do you want that hole to look like as opposed to looking at the outside of the donut, what's inside the donut that we can... So I became an advisor, a trusted advisor over the years, and a consultant and a mentor to organizations who wanted to continue to retain me after the major project was completed, they would retain me as a mentor and advisor, and they would have access to me answering their questions if necessary, responding to an incident that needed higher level adjudication. So I effectively was able to leave a part of my philosophy with all of my clients so much that they would call me in only when they couldn't resolve issues. And I found that to be a fascinating part of my contribution, because that was my philosophy. I didn't want to scare you. I didn't want to make you dependent on me. I wanted you to become interdependent on yourselves, and I wanted you to understand that the data that everybody else produces is good for the world, but your data is more important and it's pertinent to your decisions on how you're going to engage this problem.

Jill James:

That's right. It's real to them. It's real to them.

Felix Nater:

It's real to them.

Jill James:

When we spoke prior to recording, you were sharing with me OSHA's five principles.

Felix Nater:

Yes. Yes.

Jill James:

And the concept and idea of free from recognized hazards When you're trying to approach, Hey, is this workplace violence prevention thing really, do we really have to tackle this? Yes. Yes. Is this a hazard? Yeah. Do you want to talk more about that?

Felix Nater:

Yeah. Yeah. And that goes back to that process piece that I think it's missing because people that consider themselves to be consultants, that understand workplace violence, if they're like me, who retires from a law enforcement environment where we understand law enforcement, the connotation of violence seems to create the impression that just because I was in law enforcement, I know what workplace violence prevention is. And that could be no further from the truth. It really is. It took me two years to readjust, and restate how I was going to approach this, because my thinking was all wrong. My thinking was all wrong. And so I started to become acquainted, and I acquired additional insights in my practice that allowed me to use those five principles to continue the education as part of an necessary process. It doesn't exist in all of my client relationships. And another point of bragging, little me has touched at least 300 clients in a variety of different formats. None of them ever say they have a process or they have a system. But what they say often is they have a problem. And the problem really is an incident that has motivated or triggered them to do something. But their policies are so lacking in depth and substance that it's hard for anybody to develop a program from their policies. And their policies are simply designed to protect them, but not to inform, educate, or prepare them. And so the more they say on a policy, my lawyers say, the clients say to me, the more after I'm likely to eat my words.

Jill James:

Because you have to live what you put on paper.

Felix Nater:

That's the belief. And I said, that could be no further from the truth because the jury wants to look at your investments and your commitment. And a piece of paper that has nothing on it, unsupported by plans and procedures, unsupported by training is meaningless.

Jill James:

Yeah. So for anyone who's not familiar with those five principles, do you want to touch on those?

Felix Nater:

I don't want to bore them, but yes, I would.

Jill James:

Okay.

Felix Nater:

Yeah. The first one that's very important is management commitment and employee involvement. And that essentially means you can't develop a prevention program without going to the people who are the victims and ask them for their involvement. And as I said earlier, Jill, you can't really implement anything without having senior leadership understanding of what their responsibilities are. So that senior management commitment translates into recognition of their fiduciary responsibility to protect the workforce. And then the hazards, recognition of the hazards. Typically, one would think a hazard is an inanimate object, but a hazard is Felix Nater, the bully. Felix Nater, the harasser. Felix Nater, the intimidated. Felix Nater, all the things that a human can throw out at you to make you feel uncomfortable is a hazard in a workplace. And management has to take the responsible actions to reduce that, eliminate that to figure out why that's occurring. But if you want to stretch that to an inanimate object, a hazard could be a light in the corner of an employee parking lot that at midnight creates a dark spot that if left unrepaired over 30 days or 40 days, and there might be an attack on a female who gets assaulted, raped, and assaulted, you're going to own that civil issue because you failed to recognize that as a hazard that contributed to the possibility of this lady being attracted to this opportunistic criminal who took advantage of her. So the known hazards of have to be dealt with and resolved with as quickly as possible. Hence, you create a problem. And then there's the training aspect or the safety recognition of the safety considerations that could expose the workforce. Translating that into meaningful quality training presentation is not training. A one off opportunity to share and never doing it again is not training. Okay? Let's get real. Training has, for my training, a task or condition and understanding. This is why you're here. These are the conditions that bring you here, and this is the objective. Oh, okay. And then you train to those conditions and those objectives so that when the persons leave that training, they now know what deescalation is all about. It's about my dumb incapacity or incapability to communicate, and therefore I escalate by my own expressions so they understand. And then the fifth thing is documenting it, reporting it, and then following up on it to ensure that the things that are reported are monitored and tracked, and the things that are reported get resolved and corrected.

Jill James:

Yeah. So Felix, when you're working with organizations specifically around recognizing the hazards, and you gave an example of a physical hazard, what are the, I'm just guessing there's some, let's see, how do I want to say this? Some lights that are going on in people's heads, when you start talking about some of these hazards that they may not, the non-physical ones, that they may not have considered or thought about because of their lived experience or because maybe they think it's like, well, that's a personal thing. What are some of those kind of typical, if you will, items that employers are like, oh, now I get, oh, I didn't think about that. What are some of those items?

Felix Nater:

I think that you may have been the fly on the wall in many, many of my training programs, because I have a... Yeah, I think so, Jill, because your questions indicate to me that you have a lot of knowledge and experience in my work, and I appreciate the relationship. Thank you very, very much.

Jill James:

You're welcome.

Felix Nater:

There's a slide that I called realities, and it takes the activity that, in one slide, it takes the activity that exposes them and the contributing factor that created the activity that exposed them. So I'll say, for example, when it comes to workplace security, I know Mr. Postmaster and Miss Postmaster, I know that letter carriers and truck drivers are coming in and out of those swinging doors in and out during this bracket of time because it's a high operational peak for you. And so therefore you can't afford to lock doors. But if I'm a former disgruntled employees, that's your weak points. So I can come in right behind a truck driver or behind a letter carrier, gain access to the workplace very easily. Oh my goodness. So that means operationally, we've got to reconsider. And I would say, I don't want to tell you what to do, but I want to elucidate your thinking on how vulnerable you are. I would say I walk through and I see drivers sitting in their vehicles, and I know that when I speak to them, the air conditioning units work. But when they're driving to the city streets, the windows are down. And I know why, because they stick their hands out the door and they open up the latch and they're out the truck and it's expedient for them. But here I am, an opportunistic criminal who jumps on the running board of that truck driver while he stopped, I put a gun in his head and I say, your money or your life. When that window could have been closed and the air conditioning could have been running. I am the letter carrier who's rolling down the street, pushing my cart, leave the cart downstairs, pick up the bundle mail for that apartment building, and you leave the bundle of mail. You leave the cart down there, you can't reach it. And someone comes along and steals the cart. I'm the female letter carrier who assumes that everybody is nice. And I get caught between an interior door and an exterior door having a discussion with an unhappy customer who hadn't received his first of the month check in two months, and now who is he taking it? On you. And you're stuck between two doors. So it's the obvious, but doesn't translate to an insecurity in the hearts and minds of the employees because they're so focused on business. And most people are focused on business that they let their guard down. You take a field inspector working for a city agency or even a private company, a utility firm. They're asked to do certain things, but they're not trained in the risk that they're likely to be exposed to. And how to mitigate those risks. So when a utility company, a gas company, true story by the way, gets called at three o'clock in the morning to respond to a gas leak complaint by the very same customer who confronts them with a shotgun and says, "What are you doing on my property at three o'clock in the morning?" And the employee tries to explain, I work for blah, blah, blah gas company, and I'm here because of your call. And the person says, "I don't care what you're doing here. I don't allow your people on my property." Those are difficult moments. But how do you deescalate that? And he did very well, old gentlemen who knew how to do to diffuse situations. But every day when we talk about workplace violence prevention, we only think about the employee on employee threat, Jill, and whatever is done to put a bandaid on that limited exposure to quality training, it suffices to them, to the organization, but really doesn't adequately prepare the employee for the real risk they're going to face outside of the workplace. And how do you deal with those issues outside? What's the policy in dealing with a victimization by a non-employee? How do I handle that?

Jill James:

Well, especially in a cultural construct that we have where people, especially when it's a customer.

Felix Nater:

Yes.

Jill James:

Where you think you have to be... You have to be kind, or you're using your social etiquette or it's a patient, it's a customer, it's this, it's a that. And like, oh, I have to now take it because I'm here to serve them.

Felix Nater:

And part of the deescalation training that I offer, and I used to call it risk minimization, not mitigate, minimization. I would introduce a component called communications. And I would say to that scenario, I would say, I can control that scenario just with my voice and my body language and earn the trust and respect of that customer because I'm doing it with empathy. But it's knowing how to communicate and know the various terminologies that go into play and understanding how you manage your voice, your tone, your presentation, your body language, and the whole issue of effective communication to deescalate. Unfortunately, the leaders who don't take time to invest in that management commitment to understand what quality training is all about, they don't train to those four categories. They just train to the one category, which is the employee on employee threat. And that's very simple, zero tolerance, and you're out the door. And well, that's not the approach. Because I look at zero tolerance ineffectively adjudicated as kicking the problem down into the future because you really haven't identified what was a contributing factors that made him or her go off.

Jill James:

Yeah. So Felix, when you're working with, let's call it the ideal client, they're interested and want to be committed, and they're interested in doing this, and you're working through your areas and you're talking about what are the realities you were talking about, what are the situations, and then you start doing training and you're doing things on communication and deescalation. Where do you end up spending the majority of your time? Or is it really different for each customer?

Felix Nater:

It can be different, but I'm intentional in my design.

Jill James:

Sure.

Felix Nater:

Because when you call me Jill, it's not a call of an emergency. Oh, I've got an active shooter situation that I'm concerned about. It's usually a process decision that they've made over a couple of years where they finally said, "We know it's going to be expensive, but we got to get this gentleman in here." When I get the phone call, it's not me selling anything. It's me listening to what they want me to do. So generally, I spend a lot of time in the organizational design. Because I want them to appreciate their fiduciary responsibility to getting this right. And then I say, when we go to all of this and you understand what we need to do collectively as a team, I will then roam about the organization from your level all the way down and introduce content that I consider to be educational awareness content that will expose senior managers to their responsibilities, mid-level people to their responsibilities and the workforce to their responsibilities. So everybody gets a piece of what they're supposed to do, and the senior managers get an understanding of what they need to do for the organization. And then we tie that all in into what is the organization's response to something that happens, even if it's just minimal like I want to report Jill because she's constantly harassing me. What is that reporting process? And do we build trust and confidence in the reporting process so that the workforce has credibility in that report? It's not going to be as harmful as much as it's going to be helpful and maybe harmful because the person was an idiot and did something inappropriate. So it's an education that takes, in my role down here, for example, the large clients want things that help their organizational leaders understand their commitment. So it isn't selling just to one person at the lowest level. It's educating everybody at a senior level first.

Jill James:

Yeah, absolutely. So Felix, you used the word fiduciary responsibility a couple of times.

Felix Nater:

Yes.

Jill James:

I would love for you to dig into that, particularly for our listeners who are thinking, oh, I'm going to try to talk about this with my leadership team. And they're going to say, the whole idea sounds sort of scary or too touchy feely or communications style, oh boy, that's whatever. But fiduciary responsibility sounds pretty concrete and maybe an opening for EHS professionals. So can you talk more about that?

Felix Nater:

I take verbiage and I stretch it to apply it so that it has attention grabbing. And I stretch the application of fiduciary because I really want people to understand that just because you've been doing things the way you've been doing and nothing has happened, when you have a situation that's rare and unique, and it does happen, all of that, the way you did it is going to go out the window because you're going to be left hanging an empty indefensible bag that the jury will see through. So for example, of the application of fiduciary, you, if you're the CEO or the executive director of an organization or the school superintendent, you can't blame it on mental health when someone comes in your front door, back door and shoots the place up. Because the question I'm going to ask you when I open up that closet and find all the skeletons is what have you been doing with that known hazard and the potential issues that they bring before they became your scapegoat and now is your mental health? So your fiduciary responsibility is to embrace the limitations that your organization likely has and do what we do in the business world. A SWAT: Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threats assessment of your environment to come up with a game plan and approach because just because injury compensation covers the employee who was gainfully employed incident to an injury related to the workplace doesn't mean that you can't be sued for negligence. So hiding behind injury comp and minimal investments in the things that I would consider to be significant investments doesn't get you out of the deep water when you're on the witness stand and you're asked, "When did you do training on this particular content? And was Mr. Nater there to receive the training?" Also, there was no follow up training. Also, I'm beginning to see that you're a little negligent in your training management perspectives. So the fiduciary from my perspective, even though it has a legal terminology, means that you're going to be smarter than you think you are by asking tough questions. You're going to be like that company commander, battalion commander, brigade commander in the army who owns the whole thing and has people assigned to those whole things so that he is or she is never caught with their back against the wall. And so I say to corporate America is: stop downgrading this thing called workplace violence. If you really, really have a fiduciary investment in claiming that through these doors walk the most important people in your workplace. But yet you give minimal focus and attention to their safety and security as it relates to workplace violence prevention. Because when we are talking about a situation that you contributed, Mr. CEO, Mr School superintendent, Mr. Executive director, you send somebody out on an errand for you, and it happens to place them at staples to pick up a box of copy paper. When they pop that trunk, their back is exposed as they put the box into the trunk. And depending upon my observance of an opportunity as a criminal, I may walk up to you and say, your money or your life. Instead of knowing how to minimize your risk, you expose yourself because nobody exposed you to risk mitigation tactics.

Jill James:

That's right.

Felix Nater:

So fiduciary responsibility is important in recognizing what the ownership of the problem would look like in the event something happens.

Jill James:

So Felix, with so many things, workplace health and safety, the old tired thing that those of us in the profession here is, eh, but we've been doing it that way for 30 years. Nothing bad has happened yet.

Felix Nater:

Yes.

Jill James:

And you talked before about statistics and really looking at an employer's their own things instead of the outside.

Felix Nater:

Yes.

Jill James:

However, with this situation, is it sometimes necessary to say, you're going to run the clock. None of us are insulated from workplace violence. So how do you talk about that?

Felix Nater:

I talk about it just the way you exemplified it. And that is reality. Look, you can take the outside data and you can compare it against yourselves and come up with justification and rationalization to do something. But you all don't want to know. I hear it told to me all the time by the HR community, why do we want to ask employees how they feel? That's going to create more work for us. So they're afraid of doing surveys like I do. I'll ask a client to do a sample of my employee survey before I come into the organization so I have an idea of their concerns. And then I can use those concerns and align them with management survey and say, look, you're not addressing their concerns. A myth to think that just because it hasn't happened here won't happen here. It's a myth to think that workplace violence is unpreventable. Yes, you can't get into the heart and mind of an armed robber who doesn't work for you, but you can identify the contributing factors and warning signs of an employee who works for you. And if you don't, shame on you because then you're not a leader, Jill.

Jill James:

Right, right. Yeah. This week, Felix, you don't know this because we haven't spoken in a week or so, but I went to a conference this week in Wisconsin and the title of my presentation with a friend of mine was Stop Yelling at Me. And it was a little seminar on a piece of this workplace violence. We didn't call it that, but we talked about why are we such an inflammatory culture right now and what does yelling mean? So getting in people's faces and email and derogatory things and the way that we come across on social media. And we offered in our training session an introspection. What is your body doing? What are you thinking? Tools and techniques when talking with someone who might be agitated, a bit of deescalation, some of those soft skills. And what was just amazing was we didn't really think people would show up for this presentation. And the room was standing room only. And when we asked people why they chose the session, our assumption was because things were coming at them as EHS professionals. And what they told us is that they're the problem. People were saying things like, "I guess I didn't know that I could be intimidating. I guess I didn't know the volume of my voice can be scary to people. I've been told that I am an ass sometimes." That wasn't everyone's, but the majority of the audience was like, "I need help." And I think our society is really needing those skills that you're teaching.

Felix Nater:

August, I'll never forget the date, August 24th, 2021, someone on Long Island that I have a relationship with through social media invited me to be a guest on their podcast. They had read an one of my blogs from my website that dealt with the very same topic that if you thought things were bad and weren't all that bad before COVID-19, the return to work post COVID-19 and all the associated conflagration of feelings and are going to be combustible in terms of how people are going to be reacting to you for a variety of different reasons. Defiant, you're describing defiant behavior. Defiant behavior, aggressive behavior, angry behaviors, were all sedating us because we were operating within a political environment, if you would, that didn't condone that. We went through a terrible period where if I went on and I'm just going to change locations, I went into Manhattan on 8th Avenue and 38th Street and shot someone, no one would care. That kind of thinking and mentality empowered people that were angry at things to externalize that anger. So now you're telling me when I come to work that the CDC mandates that we follow these risk mitigation strategies and tactics, I'm not wearing no mask. You can't tell me what to do. I'm not standing six feet apart from him or her. I come here to work. I come to work. I'm not going to be isolated. Besides, you never spent time visiting me when I was isolated, when I was locked in for those months. And then when you had an opportunity to talk to me, if you could jump to that screen, I got the impression you wanted to choke me the way you were speaking to me. Yes. So I'm glad that those people that showed up to become standing room only recognized that they're in I am the problem.

Jill James:

Yeah, they did. And it was beautiful. It was a beautiful transformation. It was a vulnerable conversation. People are starving it seems, for tools, strategies, techniques. Because you know what? We don't want to live angry. That's not our default.

Felix Nater:

You and and I may not, but people that I encounter enjoy being angry because that is how they psychologically control their environments. They don't rely on their leadership. They don't rely on their social interpersonal skills to get along. They rely on that tough guy, that bully. And sometimes it gets him in trouble. And all we've done over the last few years is permit that behavior to become visible and noticeable.

Jill James:

Yeah. Yeah.

Felix Nater:

It's unfortunate. And we are a microcosm of our society. So just because you're loud and aggressive at home with your spouse doesn't mean you're going to contain that when you come to work.

Jill James:

That's right. That's right. That's right.

Felix Nater:

We're a microcosm and we reflect cornucopia of feelings and behaviors and expressions that can't be corralled anymore. And it's unfortunate, we're actually a melting pot. And then you take all of the behaviors that were there before COVID-19, the anti this, the anti that. Now, they're verbalizing those anti feelings. Don't put on that radio station. I don't listen to that news station. So yeah, we have an escalation of behaviors and attitudes that are difficult to contain. And you need leadership that understands how to tell someone to go to hell, excuse me, in a way that they enjoy the trip there and back. You have to have that communication strength and style to be able to do that.

Jill James:

Felix, you can't retire a second time. There's so much more work to be done. There's so much work.

Felix Nater:

There is.

Jill James:

Yeah.

Felix Nater:

There is. And the companies that are relying on people that have this so-called expertise because the alphabet soup maybe behind their name, and you see, and hear all these wonderful things from Felix Nater, but there's no alphabet soup behind his name. I'll tell you what my co-author says in the upcoming book. And he is a behavioral specialist and he is a theorist. You can have all the theoretical knowledge in the world, but without that practical expertise, there is no application of theory.

Jill James:

Yeah.

Felix Nater:

I've been blessed because I've acquired this knowledge and this insight from people like you who interview me and force me to prepare and think, and clients who hire me for different situations almost every time that forced me to come back to my office and say, okay, what's going to be my approach? So I'm constantly learning.

Jill James:

There's so much truth to that, Felix. It's like me as a woman trying to teach a man in my life what it's like to walk through my life doing a constant threat assessment. Women are great at threat assessments because that's how we live.

Felix Nater:

Yes, that's right.

Jill James:

That's how we live. Or how you're trying to explain as a black man what it's like to a white man being a black man. Our lived experiences are so critical and important and how we share those is really critical. It's so critical that we do share our lived experiences and hope that the recipient learned something from that.

Felix Nater:

Can I add something to that?

Jill James:

Yes.

Felix Nater:

So I am unofficially, I can't give you the name of the city or even the state, working with the NAACP in this particular city and state to help their police chief and sheriff deal better with community and community response. And my first meeting with these gentlemen, even though I was well-prepared, I felt as though they were not listening. They didn't care. Who is this postal inspector, retired violence prevention guy who's going to tell me what I need to do? And then I get a phone call two weeks later from this president of the NAACP who says, "Mr. Nater, I just want you to know you're a hit in our town." And I said, "What do you mean?" And he says, "Those two professionals that you told me you felt as though you hadn't touched them were excited about everything you said."

Jill James:

Whoa.

Felix Nater:

And here's why I introduced that. In my methodology, I use acronyms. And I told you I stretch the utility of verbiage and meaning of words. So I have an abbreviation called ACE, and it's called the ACE Factor. And the ACE factor takes me and my thinking to help people go through their thinking in helping them resolve and rectify opinions and ideas and miss, so A stands for assumptions. So to your point about me being a person of color, well, there are certain assumptions that a police officer makes when he pulls over a person of color that wouldn't exist for a person that is not of color.

Jill James:

That's right.

Felix Nater:

So assumption drives the thought and the relationship that ensues in that relationship. And then the C stands for convenience. If it's four o'clock and I'm heading home to take my child to little league bowl and he has to be there at 4:30, and a letter carrier is coming in from the field with an issue, unless he's dying, I'm not going to give him the empathetic ear because 4:30, my son has to be at little field. So I make a convenient decision that tomorrow morning he is exposed to a serious problem that wasn't resolved the night before. Expediency is the E in my ACE Factor. And this happens all the time. And I see it particularly where there are no rules or regulations before them if they don't do it the right way. And corporate America, unfortunately, is a victim of that because expediency drives the decision making process in what they do that is business oriented. So instead of taking time to invest in quality training, they'll put the car before the horse and they'll invest in active shooter stuff because they think that that is what they need. That's expedient. The investment is in the prevention understanding of what it is, how it impacts, and what we can do as an organization. So I think in terms of how do we get the thinking to change so that there is an understanding that's collaborative, that's organizational, that's cultural. As opposed to paying lawyers to take the witness stand to defend you on the witness stand, you could prevent all that from occurring by being adequate now, by being prepared now, by being responsible now and by being fiduciary now.

Jill James:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean the A, the assumptions in your ACE thing is like, gosh, if we just worked on that alone, we could shift a huge piece of our society. Couldn't we?

Felix Nater:

We could, we could. And a lot of it deals with just looking at one another.

Jill James:

Yeah.

Felix Nater:

I came to the south and I say to my wife, she says, how do you get along so well with the white southerners? And I says, I don't try to get along with the white Southerners, "I just am who I am." But what they're reading is I came through the South as a young soldier, Fort Gordon, in South Carolina, I'm sorry, in Georgia, Fort Jackson in South Carolina. And I believe that these people that I touched back then are the ones that are looking in my eye and say, "Hey kid, we go back a couple of years, we go back." So the essence-

Jill James:

There's this familiarity.

Felix Nater:

Yes. Yes. Exactly. Yeah. So I don't make an assumption that just because I'm here and you are there, that we're different. No, we're the same. We just got to break the barriers of communication.

Jill James:

Yeah. Yeah. Felix, you mentioned books, I think plural.

Felix Nater:

Uh-huh.

Jill James:

Do you want to share a bit about your writing, about your books in case you've struck a nerve and people are like, how can I learn more? How can I learn from Felix?

Felix Nater:

I never had any idea or any thoughts of creating a legacy beyond Nater Associates because I'm a subscriber to one of my favorite, I call them the consultants' consultant, Alan Weiss. And Allen Weiss is millionaire consultant. I mean, multi-millionaire consultant. And he has very simple premises is do everything you can while you're alive. And when you get to the 31st day of the month, make sure all the money you made that year is spent wisely. Don't carry it into the next year. So I always looked at my business as giving all that I had without any sort of legacy being left behind. But this gentleman that I was telling you about that is a professor was in Arizona, he moved to the West to California these days, talked me into taking all that I have written and spoken about and write this book and see since he has written so many books, he said, "Send me all your junk and I'll take a look at it." So I thought that he was going to be a co-author with me. And the name of the book is Combating Workplace Violence: Creating and Maintaining Safe Work Environments. It's a thought process that it encapsulates everything you and I have been talking about in a manual type book. That's how to help. How do you can help yourselves before you hire Felix or long after you've hired someone like Felix. And the authorship relationship that I thought I was going to have, I saw that when the first draft of the book came back to me. He said, buy Felix Nater with him and his wife. Isn't that that amazing how much credit he gave me?

Jill James:

Yeah.

Felix Nater:

He just made me feel as though these 20 years have been worth the effort.

Jill James:

So is it available or are you still in editing mode? What's the situation with the book?

Felix Nater:

It's in publication.

Jill James:

It is?

Felix Nater:

Yes. So as soon as it's out, I'll send you a link to it. As soon as it's out, it'll be available.

Jill James:

When is it supposed to be done? What's your target date?

Felix Nater:

Last week, I was told before the end of the month.

Jill James:

Oh, wow. Okay. So this is very timely.

Felix Nater:

It's been a long process too, because the reviewers of it really were trying to produce a top-notch document for us. And I think they have.

Jill James:

Yeah. So you started this conversation by talking about the fact that you were predestined for this work, and then as synchronicity would have it, you and I are talking in the month that your book will be drop. And I didn't know that when we set up this conversation, but do you want to end on a note of pre-destiny as we're wrapping up our time today? Or what would you like to share?

Felix Nater:

Okay, okay. Thank you. It continues to be an enjoyable run. I know that my ideal clients are on their way to me because they don't know what they don't know, but they like what I have to say and they're willing to invest in me. So I don't sit here like I did the first 10 years and worry about my phone not ringing because I know when it rings, it's somebody who really wants to engage me. And I think it's a part of my lifelong nurturement. So I didn't finish college, and I won't go into the reasons why, but I have six wonderful kids, and the last one is going to complete college next year. So all college individuals that had their own aspirations. And I was sitting with my son watching the ballgame last night, the Lakers and the Memphis Timberwolves. And I was telling him about the recent conversation I had with a relationship that I have here in my business world. And I talked to him about the process and he looked at me and he says, "Dad, you have been not only a father," and I'm getting a little teary. He says, "But you've also been a mentor and a leader in my life, because that's exactly how I think." So when I decided to retire, it was because I left them exactly how I think. I left them feeling as though they can do a much better job than me without me because they've got the skills now to at least do minimal parts to contain it from escalations.

Jill James:

And what a beautiful compliment from your child.

Felix Nater:

Yes.

Jill James:

It doesn't get any better than that.

Felix Nater:

No, no.

Jill James:

Yeah. You've left a mark and a legacy in your family and around the country.

Felix Nater:

And I hope that this book-

Jill James:

And you continue to do it.

Felix Nater:

Thank you. And I hope this book does that in a different way and that people who look at it don't say, oh my God, I could have done this. Well, you can't.

Jill James:

You didn't.

Felix Nater:

And you didn't.

Jill James:

Yeah. Right.

Felix Nater:

Yeah.

Jill James:

Oh, that's fantastic.

Felix Nater:

Thank you for this great time, Jill. I've enjoyed it more than you have.

Jill James:

Oh, it's been wonderful, Felix, thank you so much and continued success to you. And thank you for all of the contributions that you've made to our society. Really appreciate it.

Felix Nater:

Humbling. Thank Emily for making my end of my contribution with you today that much more comfortable.

Jill James:

Yeah, absolutely. And thank you all for spending your time listening today. And more importantly, thank you for your contribution toward the common good: making sure your workers, including your temporary workers, making homes safe every day. If you aren't subscribed and want to your past and future episodes, you can subscribe in iTunes, the Apple podcast app, or any other podcast player you'd like. We'd love it if you could leave a rating and review on iTunes. It really helps us connect the show with more and more professionals like Felix and I. Special thanks to Emily Gould, our podcast producer, and until next time, thanks for listening.