The 3 key habits that separate the best from the rest 

If the safety world has household names, Shawn Galloway is one of them. He has spent decades advising organizations on their safety culture, and he was hosting one of the industry’s first safety podcasts back in 2008, long before most people thought safety was a subject you could build a following around. A career like that means he has sat across from more organizations, and on more of their worst days, than almost anyone you could find. So it tells you something that when I asked how his thinking had changed over the years, the story he reached for wasn’t a worksite disaster at all. It was a man named Henry. 

Early in Shawn’s consulting career, Henry was the head of operations at a company in California, and he cared deeply about safety. Back then, Shawn believed caring was the whole game: get people to care, and the rest takes care of itself. Then one night Henry got up to use the bathroom, didn’t see a magazine lying on his bedroom carpet, slipped, and hit his head on the nightstand. He went back to bed, not knowing he was bleeding internally, and he died before morning. 

Shawn calls the belief he held back then naive, and Henry is the reason why. Here was a man who cared a lot about safety, and caring did not save him. That story has stayed with me since he told it, because it cuts against the thing most of us quietly assume, which is that good intentions are enough. They aren’t. Caring is the price of admission. What you do with it is what separates the people who are good at this from the ones who are extraordinary. 

It might seem strange to open a piece about workplace safety with a man who died at home, far from any job site. But that is the point: if caring could not protect Henry in his own bedroom, it was never going to be the only thing standing between a crew and the hazards of a real job site. Something sturdier has to carry the weight, and that is what the best safety professionals build. 

I’m not a safety expert myself. What I am is the person who gets to sit across from a long list of world-class safety professionals and ask them how they actually work, and the longer I do it, the more I notice the same three habits surfacing, in their own words, from people who have never met each other and work in completely different corners of the industry. Here they are. 

1. They get close to the work

Matt Stark has spent close to thirty-seven years in safety, and he’s overseen some of the most demanding projects you can name, including one of the largest federal energy contracts in US history, which he brought in with a near-zero incident record. A résumé like that earns a person the right to run things from a comfortable office. Matt wants nothing to do with it. When his crews are out in the rain or the snow or the wind, that’s where he is too, standing next to them. You can write policies all day from a corporate office and call yourself a safety professional, he told me, and somebody needs to, but safety itself lives where your boots get in the mud. 

He’s blunt about the alternative, because he’s watched plenty of people do the job badly. There are the ones he calls safety cops, who hide in the weeds, snap photos, and write up everything they catch so they can pat themselves on the back. There are the ones who do nothing at all and exist only because somebody needed a safety title filled on a form. And then there are the ones who actually get their boots dirty. His favorite way to explain the difference is to picture an NFL coach: nobody would respect one who watched the game from the press box instead of from the sideline with his players. Matt doesn’t even put himself on the sideline. He says he’s just one of the players, the kind who likes to serve the other players. 

What turns that from a folksy attitude into something real is where it comes from. Matt told me, flat out, that he cares so much about his crews he would rather be the one who gets hurt than watch it happen to one of them. Once you’ve heard someone say that and mean it, the boots-in-the-mud habit stops looking like a personal style and starts looking like the only thing that makes any sense, because you cannot feel that way about people you only ever see from across a parking lot. 

He isn’t alone in landing here. Erin Heimbecker has spent her career across mine sites, grain facilities, and healthcare, and is now a workplace safety specialist with the Saskatchewan Association for Safe Workplaces in Health. She reaches for the very same image Matt does. There’s plenty of office work in safety, she told me, but “that’s not where it starts. It starts with us, boots on the ground, getting to know the field.” The payoff is trust: take the time to know people and say hi to them on the floor, and they respect what you bring back. 

Great safety professionals close the distance between themselves and the people they’re there to protect. 

2. They build the program with the frontline

The best safety professionals don’t hand the frontline a finished program and tell them to follow it. They build it with them, because the people doing the work know things no policy ever will. 

Ashley McKie leads safety at Inland Truck & Equipment, an equipment company with technicians and parts drivers spread across many locations and regions, which means she is responsible for a lot of people she can’t physically stand next to, doing risky work far from any office. She operates on the conviction that those workers are the experts, and that her job is to design around what they actually need rather than dictate to them from a distance. 

What stuck with me was how she handles a worker who’s flat wrong about something. One of her people once explained, with complete confidence, that his respirator was still ninety-five percent effective with his beard grown back. The easy move, the one most of us make, is to correct him and move on, maybe with a flicker of irritation. Ashley got curious instead. Where did that number come from? That’s genuinely interesting, let’s dig into it. She treated his belief as a real thing worth understanding, and only after that did she walk him through why it wasn’t true. 

It matters because safety depends on workers telling you what they see. Talk down to someone and they stop telling you things, and the next hazard they notice, they keep to themselves. Take them seriously and they keep talking, and sooner or later what they say is the one problem nobody else had caught. 

That same respect runs through how she builds a program. She starts with the problems workers actually have and solves those first, because, in her words, solve the real problem and the buy-in takes care of itself. When she rolls out a new tool, she tells them plainly, if you hate this, please tell me, and she means it, because the honest reaction is the whole point. And she insists the workers hold the one piece of authority that matters most on a dangerous job, which is the power to stop. Not get it done now and we’ll sort out safety later, but a real, no-questions right to say, I cannot do this safely, not like this. A program built that way isn’t something done to the frontline. It’s something they helped write, and people protect what they helped write. 

This isn’t only how Ashley sees it. When OSHA reviewed the research on what actually makes safety programs work, the recurring finding was that programs reduce injuries when they combine real management commitment with active worker participation, while the “paper” programs that have neither do not. 

Great safety professionals treat the frontline as the authors of the program, not its audience. 

3. They fix the system, not the person

When something goes wrong, the easy instinct is to find who screwed up. The best professionals have trained themselves out of it. Tom Krause, a behavioral scientist who has spent his career on exactly this question, doesn’t soften it. A worker’s behavior, he told me, never occurs out of nowhere. “It occurs out of a context. And that context is created by leadership.” He learned that at the highest-stakes scale imaginable. 

After the space shuttle Columbia broke apart, Krause was brought in to help rebuild NASA’s safety culture. The investigation had found a technical cause, the foam that came off the external fuel tank, but it also found something harder to fix: a broken safety culture. The official accident board concluded that NASA’s organizational culture was as responsible for the disaster as the foam itself. 

When Krause’s team surveyed the agency, NASA scored in the 80th and 90th percentiles on nearly every measure. It was a celebrated place to work. But on two measures it scored low, and it had no idea it did. One was upward communication. The other was whether people believed the organization had their back. 

You could see the cost of that in how NASA ran a meeting. Picture a hundred people in a room, a dozen of the biggest names in the center around a table, everyone else ringed around the edges, and a culture that prized being first to land on the right answer. Now imagine you’re a junior engineer against the wall, and you want to point out that the foam you flagged as a no-fly risk a year ago still hasn’t been fixed. In that room, with your career on the line, most people swallow it. 

The danger was never that NASA was full of people who didn’t care. It was a system that made the truth expensive to say. Krause’s fix wasn’t to find someone to blame. It was to teach the leaders who ran those rooms to stop and ask the one question that changes everything: is there another opinion here, another view we haven’t heard yet? 

And it isn’t only the famous disasters that work this way. Krause’s team has gone back through four hundred fatal incidents and traced them the same way. Take a worker who gets hurt because he didn’t lock out a machine. The easy version stops right there: we trained him, he had everything he needed, why didn’t he do it right. But follow it back far enough and you find a decision, made years earlier, to buy cheaper equipment that broke constantly. A full lockout every single time would have put the crew hopelessly behind, so over time, not locking it out quietly became the way the job got done. Blame the worker and you learn nothing. 

Michael Bassey, a process safety leader at Chevron who wrote a book called Beyond Blame: A Human and Organizational Performance Approach to Incident Investigation, Learning, and Leadership, gets at the same truth two ways. Blame is a dead end, he says, because the moment you go looking for someone to fault, you stop learning, and what you needed to learn was about the system. The deeper version is one of my favorite lines from any of these conversations: “culture is like the soil that helps behaviors to germinate.” Change the soil, and the behavior changes with it. 

When was the last time something went wrong on your site and your honest first reaction wasn’t to figure out who screwed up? 

Great safety professionals treat the system as the thing that’s broken, and the worker as the person who can help them find where. 

The thread that ties them together 

Get close to the work, build the program with the frontline, and fix the system instead of the person. They’re three different habits, but the same belief sits underneath all of them. Every leader in this piece started out caring, the way Shawn said Henry did, and caring turned out to be the easy part, the price of admission rather than the thing that set them apart. What set them apart was where that care pointed, which was always back toward the people doing the work, treated as the reason the whole program exists rather than the part of it most likely to fail. 

Darren Varga puts it more plainly than anyone I spoke to. Darren has spent his career in construction safety, and on one project he built a mental health ambassador program, training frontline tradespeople in mental health first aid, because the most dangerous hazards on a site aren’t always the ones you can see. And the data backs him up. Construction has one of the highest suicide rates of any industry in the country, and according to the CDC, construction workers die by suicide at several times the rate they die from the physical hazards of the job. He refuses the usual phrasing. Not “safety first,” he told me, but “people first, safety always.” If you’re not doing it for the people, you’ve missed the mark completely. 

And whether you’ve hit that mark was never yours to decide. It’s the crew’s. So what would they say if you asked them? 

Picture the worksite that actually runs on these three habits. A leader who’s out in the mud and known by name. A crew that helped shape the rules they work under, and knows it can stop a job the moment something doesn’t feel right. A culture where the first question after something goes wrong is what about the system let this happen, not whose fault is it, and where the people closest to the work are trusted as the ones most likely to see trouble coming. 

None of these insights are mine, and that’s exactly the point. The people in this piece have spent entire careers learning how to keep others alive, and they earned what they know in places I’ve only ever heard about. What I do is ask the questions that get them past the slogans, and listen across dozens of these conversations until the patterns start to surface. Noticing those threads and bringing them into the open, where the rest of us can actually use them, is where the real value is. 

Sources 

• OSHA, Injury and Illness Prevention Programs White Paper (2012): https://www.osha.gov/sites/default/files/OSHAwhite-paper-january2012sm.pdf 

• Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, Vol. 1 (2003), pp. 9 and 97 (“the NASA organizational culture had as much to do with this accident as the foam”); conclusion documented by AIChE’s Center for Chemical Process Safety: https://www.aiche.org/ccps/self-evaluation-tool-key-lessons-columbia-shuttle-disaster 

• Construction among the highest-suicide-rate industries: CDC / National Center for Health Statistics, Suicide Rates by Industry and Occupation — National Vital Statistics System, United States, 2021 (MMWR, 2023): https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7250a2.htm. The suicide-versus-fatal-injury comparison: NIOSH (part of the CDC), Suicide in Construction (2020), which reports the male construction suicide rate (49.4 per 100,000 in 2016) as roughly 5 times the rate of all fatal work-related injuries in construction (9.5 per 100,000 in 2018): https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/bulletin/2020/preventing-suicide-construction.html 

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