Meet Our Speakers:
👤Scott Chest, Harrison Western / UIT Safety Manager & Founder of Lead the Middle
🎙️Lindsey Schultz, CEO of MRC RecruitingÂ
This conversation between Lindsey Schultz and Scott Chest was really about the people in the middle of every mining project, the foremen and superintendents, and what they need to lead well.
Scott’s own start says a lot about how he works. His dad was a miner with about forty years in, and when Frontier Kemper came in to contract a couple of shafts in upstate New York, Scott was just out of high school with no experience. He met the superintendent at his truck at 5:30 every morning and kept hearing that father and son combinations don’t work. After about two weeks, the superintendent gave in and told him to come back at seven and get his PPE. Years later, a phone call sent him past Chicago to a shaft rehab job in Salt Lake City instead of an oil job in Williston, and he never left the industry.
Today Scott works in safety for a contractor, and he runs an internal podcast for the company’s project managers and engineers. His toolbox talks used to be words on paper, until the crews told him they couldn’t speak like him and asked for pictures. He went further, worked with a company to build an app, and started sending out weekly videos. The idea was for supervisors to watch them with their crews, then follow up in their own words. It seems to be working, because guys in other states who’ve never been to the head office now tell him he’s the guy on the video.
Ego comes up again and again in Scott’s content, and he leans on Marcus Aurelius and Meditations to explain why. People have been wrestling with this since around 160 AD, and Scott says he still does it every day. For him, the first step is recognizing you have one. Once you do, you can look in the mirror, see what you did wrong, and fix the thing that caused the problem. He’s honest that many of his own mistakes came from ego, times when someone brought him a problem, he waved it off, and ten more problems followed.
Once a leader can check their ego at the door, Scott says they can start to recognize other people’s egos and work on influence. That matters most in the middle. He describes the superintendent and foreman as the filter on a project, taking everything from above, sorting it, and putting it into action, while listening to their crews and influencing back up the chain to get what they need. They’re getting hit from both sides, and when they’re trained to handle it, communication flows like water instead of disappearing into a black hole.
Scott got his first leadership role the way a lot of people do, because he was good at running equipment. He couldn’t understand why someone wouldn’t run a machine through lunch, and he’d jump into the weeds himself and miss ten other things. Lindsey hears the same story in her work, from people who’ve been promoted and suddenly have to lead with no preparation. Scott’s answer is accountability. If you’re the leader, it’s your problem, and you have to do something about it, whether that means delegating, putting a procedure in place, or handling it yourself, and then following up.
On culture, Scott believes every site needs a champion with influence over safety and operations at the same time. Without that person, you get a fight between two groups where one is the gas and the other is the brakes. Culture also comes down to what you tolerate, because your crew is always watching what you say, how you react, and whether you walk past a hazard. When someone isn’t meeting the standard, Scott has a direct conversation about the expectation, what good and bad look like, how long they have to fix it, and what happens if they don’t. In his experience, almost 90% of the time, people self-correct. Lindsey added that feedback is a gift, and that people who get good feedback tend to pay it forward.
The right champion, in Scott’s view, is competent, has done the job, has the respect of their people, and brings humility and a real desire to keep learning. They need empathy, too, applied evenly, since crews notice right away when one person’s lateness gets ignored and another’s doesn’t. His time as an MSHA inspector sharpened all of this, because he could often tell within ten minutes on site whether an operation ran a tight ship.
For anyone making project, hiring, or investment decisions in mining, Scott’s point is worth sitting with. The people in the middle are often promoted for technical skill and left to figure out the rest on their own, and yet they shape how safety, operations, and communication actually work on site. A question a colleague of Lindsey’s asked during an earlier consulting assignment fits here, too. When you ask a crew whether they’re safe or lucky, the answer tells you a lot about whether the middle has been given what it needs.
Learn more about Scott and his work at leadthemiddle.com
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS: ⏱️
2:03 – Growing Up Around Mining and Starting His Career
5:25 – Introducing The Toolbox Podcast: Safety and Leadership
7:45 – Making Safety Training Accessible Through Toolbox Talk Videos
10:15 – Mental Health Awareness in Mining and Beyond
12:15 – Understanding Ego, Self-Reflection, and Accountability in Leadership
15:00 – The Critical Role of Middle Management and Communication
17:00 – Developing Leadership Skills and Taking Ownership
20:40 – Learning Leadership Through Mistakes and Experience
22:40 – Learning From Failure: Are You Safe or Just Lucky?
24:15 – Building a Strong Safety Culture Through Leadership
26:30 – Setting Expectations and Leading by Example
28:00 – The Power of Constructive Feedback and Self-Correction
30:30 – Identifying Effective Safety and Leadership Champions
32:00 – Balancing Empathy, Fairness, and Continuous Improvement
33:30 – The Value of Diverse Experience in Mining Leadership
36:00 – How Becoming an MSHA Inspector Changed Scott’s Perspective
39:15 – Unusual Mining Experiences and Creative Problem-Solving
40:45 – Introducing Lead the Middle and Its Leadership Training Programs
43:30 – Scott’s Upcoming Book, Own the Outcome
44:30 – Expanding The Toolbox Into a Safety and Leadership Podcast
45:30 – Final Thoughts and Where to Connect With Scott
Connect with us on LinkedIn and check out monthly episodes of Ore-atory: Elevating Mining Minds on Apple Podcast or Spotify, where we continue to explore the mining industry workspace.
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