The "Safety Program Trap" and Why It Keeps Winning

Safety performance does not improve through isolated programs. It improves when organizations align strategy, leadership, and culture to build sustainable capacity.

• By Shawn M. Galloway
• Feb 27, 2026

A vice president of operations recently expressed to me something I have heard from hundreds of leaders: "We care deeply about safety. We spend a fortune on it. But I honestly cannot tell you if what we are doing is working or why." This is not a knowledge problem; it is a strategy problem. And it’s more common than most organizations want to admit.

Most companies do not struggle with caring about safety. They struggle with converting that care into repeatable execution. So, what do they do? They aim programs at problems. An increase in hand injuries leads to a new glove policy. A serious near miss triggers a stand down. A string of incidents leads to more observations, more audits, more signs, and more training. None of these responses are wrong, but they are often disconnected from strategy, lack governance, and depend on individual heroics to stay alive. When the hero gets promoted, transferred, or burned out, progress quietly resets.

This is the safety program trap. It keeps winning because it feels like action. But activity is not the same as capacity. And capacity is what separates organizations that sustain excellence from those that cycle through initiatives.

Stop Prescribing Before You Diagnose

If you walked into a doctor’s office and they handed you a prescription before asking a single question, you would walk out. Yet this is exactly how many safety improvements begin. The starting point must be diagnosis, not prescription. That means reviewing your safety management system against your business strategy, analyzing injury and event data, conducting interviews across levels and shifts, and using perception surveys to understand how the work is actually experienced. Replace opinion-driven priorities with data-driven ones. The deliverable should be a prioritized set of opportunities, not a thick report that dies on a shelf.

Design a Strategy, Then Execute It

Once you know where you are, design where you are going. Too many organizations confuse a vision statement with a strategy. A strategy is a framework of choices, trade-offs, and small bets that determines how you capture and deliver value. Effective design translates findings into a three-to-five-year roadmap with clear owners, a governance cadence, and a balanced scorecard. Without this, you could be paddling in circles.

But having a strategy document is meaningless if execution is weak. The organizations I see make the biggest shifts are the ones that change the nature of leadership conversations. Instead of asking, "What are your numbers?" they start asking, "What barriers did you remove? What did you learn? What will you do next?" That shift moves leaders from scorekeepers to problem solvers.

Culture Is Not Posted Values

Here is where most improvement efforts miss the mark entirely. Culture is not what you communicate. Culture is what gets rewarded and what gets tolerated. If your standards only exist when the right leader is watching, you do not have standards - you have moods. Every exception you allow trains the organization on what really matters.

Think of it as broken windows that remain broken, a missing guard that stays missing, a bypassed procedure that gets laughed off, or a near miss that never gets discussed. Those do not stay small. They train the organization on what is tolerated, and tolerance becomes culture. Most serious injuries are not born from one big decision. They come from a series of small permissions that became normal.

And here is the part that frustrates leaders who want fast, enterprise-wide change: you do not have a single culture; you have many subcultures. Two teams can work in the same company, under the same policies, and live in completely different realities. The unit of change is not the company; it is the team. Culture spreads sideways through daily experiences, peer influence, and frontline leader routines, not through corporate rollouts. Start with one team, one supervisor, one set of local norms. Make it real there first. Then scale what works.

This is also why engagement initiatives fail. Leaders say, "We need people to care more." But engagement is rarely a motivation issue; it is a conditional issue. People hold back on discretionary effort when speaking up feels risky, when fixing things feels pointless, or when everyone gets punished for one person’s mistake. Remove fear, remove friction,remove futility, and ownership shows up. Shared ownership is accountability without titles. It is when peers protect the standard and challenge risky shortcuts together, not because they are told to, but because the conditions make it the natural thing to do.

Build Capacity, Not Just Activity

If I could change one thing about how organizations approach safety, it would be this: stop measuring activity and start building capacity. There are five capacities required for sustainable excellence: System capacity to prevent and recover; Leadership capacity to align and learn; Engagement capacity to build participation and ownership; Cultural capacity to normalize the right behaviors; and Strategic capacity to focus effort and measure what matters. Build across all five and you are not running a campaign. You are building an operating model that upgrades how leaders lead, how teams execute, and how the organization learns.

If you stopped pushing tomorrow, what parts of your safety approach would continue with discipline? Where do you have subculture drift across shifts or crews? Stop aiming programs at problems. Build the capacity to not need them.