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Safety VIEWS Safety CUES now available!

The most dangerous part of a workplace is often what no one notices.

Small shortcuts, accepted workarounds, and repeated behaviors slowly blend into the background until they become “the way we do things here.” Safety VIEWS Safety CUES reveals how these patterns form—and how leaders can interrupt them before they lead to harm./

Building on the leadership principles introduced in Safety WALK Safety TALK, the book explores why people follow certain behaviors in the first place. Through practical examples, stories, and behavioral science, he introduces the Views → Cues Loop™—a framework showing how workplace culture is shaped through what people see, how they interpret it, what gets reinforced, and what eventually becomes accepted as normal.

Inside the book, you’ll discover:

  • Why shortcuts gradually become normal
  • How trusted employees influence group behavior
  • How pressure changes decision-making
  • Why people follow cues over procedures
  • What leaders can do to intentionally shape safer work

Readers also receive access to a free downloadable Companion Workbook filled with field tools, observation worksheets, facilitator guides, and team exercises designed for real-world application on the shop floor or in the field.

Practical, thought-provoking, and highly relatable, Safety VIEWS Safety CUES challenges leaders to look beyond policies and procedures—and start paying attention to the signals that are truly shaping the work.

Because if you don’t intentionally shape the cues surrounding the work, the work will shape your culture on its own.

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Safety WALK Safety TALK

Creating an injury-free workplace is not about slogans, blame, or more rules.

It is about leadership.

In Safety WALK Safety TALK, bestselling author David Allan Galloway explores the human side of workplace safety and explains why culture is shaped far more by everyday conversations, behaviors, and perceptions than by policies alone. Drawing from decades of manufacturing and leadership experience, Galloway introduces a practical, people-centered approach to building trust, reducing risk-taking, and strengthening employee commitment to safety.

Inside the book, you’ll discover:
• Why compliance alone never creates lasting safety excellence
• The difference between managing for safety and leading for safety
• How error traps and risk-taking factors influence decisions
• Why proactive conversations matter more than reactive correction
• Practical coaching tools leaders can use immediately
• How caring, coaching, and collaboration shape workplace culture

Each chapter includes a SAFETY LEADER’S TOOLBOX™ featuring more than 70 practical tools and leadership strategies that can be applied immediately in the field.

Blending behavioral science, real-world examples, leadership strategies, and practical field tools, Safety WALK Safety TALK challenges leaders to rethink how safety culture is truly created—one interaction at a time.

This groundbreaking book laid the foundation for the concepts later expanded in Safety VIEWS Safety CUES, including the idea that what people repeatedly experience in the workplace ultimately shapes what becomes normal.

Because the future of safety is not built through enforcement alone. It is built through the conversations leaders choose to have every day.

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Safety WALK Safety TALK online!

What if… employees were compliant with all safety rules and policies even when no one was watching?

What if… employees looked for ways to reduce risks and eliminate hazards, and they were actively engaged in implementing solutions?

What if… you could facilitate safety conversations that identified true root causes of incidents or near misses – and these led to permanent improvements?

What if… you could go months or years without a recordable injury?

All over the world, managers, supervisors, and team leaders seek to engage employees in safety discussions in a way that fosters commitment.

The problem is… many supervisors are frustrated because they can’t truly connect to workers. They spend more time policing safety violations than making improvements.

Most plans are developed to reduce incidents AFTER they happen. Employees continue to make mistakes or take risks that lead to injuries, despite a growing list of safety action items.

Managers and supervisors secretly cross their fingers and hope they don’t receive a phone call or text message about the next safety incident.

To achieve sustainable safety excellence, you need a simple set of leadership skills and strategies that successful and safe organizations use every day.

Included with the Safety WALK Safety TALK online course:

  • One year access to the 2.5 hour, 7-module online course
  • Monthly “Live” Community Learning Sessions with author and coach David Galloway
  • e-copy of the companion book
  • PDF of Pocket Guide for a Safety Conversation
  • Safety Conversation mobile app
  • Certificate of Completion
  • Available in English, Español, and Français
  • Bonus Lesson on Mistake Proofing
Click here to learn more about the course

Why is personal change so hard? Consider the Endowment Effect

Humans are complicated.  While some of our base emotions and behaviors are easy to understand, there are times when we appear to make irrational decisions when faced with personal change.  For example, behavioral economists have identified a specific instance when we apparently place a very different value on something depending upon whether we own it or not.  Consider the following scenario.

Imagine a team performed an analysis on the layout of a work area.  The team concluded that a significant amount of waste of motion and waste of transportation would be removed if the work stations in the cell are re-arranged.  With a proposed new floor layout, each of the operators would walk shorter distances as they moved among the stations.  It would make it easier for them to accomplish their work each day. The location of the new work stations would be comparable in every way to the existing workstations – tools, space, lighting, climate, proximity to the work. This sounds like a positive outcome for everyone!

However, when the proposed plan is shared with the crew, it is met with surprising resistance by some of the operators.  This would seem to be an illogical decision.  These operators would rather walk further (and therefore work harder) than accept these minor personal changes to their work flow!  How can this be?

Continue Reading

Leverage opinion leaders to make change happen

Many people believe you must persuade the majority in order for change to occur. This is a myth. Instead, leaders should focus their efforts on a small but influential subgroup known as opinion leaders to get a new idea adopted.

[The post below is an excerpt from my book, Safety WALK Safety TALK ].

We accept change at different rates

opinion leaders

Everett Rogers originally published his theory on the Diffusion of Innovations in 1962. It is a theory that seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread through cultures. The book (now in its fifth edition) says diffusion is the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system. The innovation or idea must be widely adopted in order to self-sustain.

In his book, Dr. Rogers tells a fascinating story of how he was prompted very early in his career to study how new ideas were adopted by the masses.

Immediately after graduating with a Ph.D. in sociology, Dr. Rogers accepted a job working with an agricultural extension service in Iowa. His primary responsibility was to work with the local farmers and encourage them to use newly developed varieties of corn which were proven in field tests to produce crops with higher yields, as well as being more disease-resistant. As a result, these strains of corn were more profitable than the current varieties.

Unfortunately, Dr. Rogers quickly learned he couldn’t connect with the farmers. He was a college-educated young man who had never plowed a field or planted corn. All his academic knowledge didn’t mean anything to the farmers. He lacked credibility.

He realized he needed to convince at least one farmer to try one of the new strains. That way, he reasoned, once this crop was proven to have higher yields, all the other farmers would follow suit and adopt the new innovation in corn seed.

Continue Reading

How Locus of Control Can Impact Injury Rate

Perhaps you know of someone who considers that most things that happen are caused by chance. Or they seem to accept that whatever significant events occur in their life, it was fate or luck that determined the outcome.

On the other hand, some people clearly believe that they control their own destiny. Their belief is that whatever happens to them is mostly due to the choices they make or the actions they take.

These disparate belief systems represent opposite ends of a continuum that social scientists refer to as Locus of Control. A person’s Locus of Control is where someone places the primary causation of events in his life. Those who believe their life is largely controlled by outside forces (externals) are on one end of the spectrum. Those who believe they control their own lives (internals) are on the other end of the spectrum.

Locus of Control is a psychological construct. This simply means that it is an instrument that can be used to describe a group of attitudes or behaviors.

Julian Rotter is credited with introducing the concept of Locus of Control. He based much of his research on the work of Albert Bandura, who developed social learning theory. In his seminal paper published in 1966, Rotter explains that people can interpret events as being either a result of one’s own actions or external factors. Rotter developed a scale to assess whether a person has a tendency to think that situations and events are under their own control (internal influences) or under the control of someone or something beyond their control (external influences).

Listed below are a few of the paired statements from the original Rotter Internal-External Locus of Control Scale:

1a. Becoming a success is a matter of hard work; luck has little or nothing to do with it.
1b. Getting a good job depends mainly on being in the right place at the right time.

2a. Many of the unhappy things in people’s lives are partly due to bad luck.
2b. People’s misfortunes result from the mistakes they make.

3a. One of the major reasons why we have wars is because people don’t take enough interest in politics.
3b. There will always be wars, no matter how hard people try to prevent them.

5a. Many times I feel that I have little influence over the things that happen to me.
5b. It is impossible for me to believe that chance or luck plays an important role in my life.

4a. In the long run, people get the respect they deserve in this world.
4b. An individual’s worth often passes unrecognized no matter how hard he tries.

Since Rotter’s original work, many other researchers have studied Locus of Control, often seeking to determine if it can be used to predict outcomes in more targeted domains. Here are a few examples of Locus of Control scales that were developed for specific purposes:

• The Multidimensional Health Locus of Control Scale is used to assess an individual’s belief in what influences their health.
• The Drinking Locus of Control Scale is focused on alcoholics and those who regularly consume alcohol to assess whether the person believes they can control their drinking.
• The Headache Specific Locus of Control Scale targets chronic headache sufferers and whether they seek treatment or not.
• The Parental Health Belief Scales are used to assess the extent to which a parent believes they have control over their child’s health.
• The Economic Locus of Control Scale is used to assess an individual’s belief in how much control they have over the work and money-related aspects of their lives.
• The Traffic Locus of Control Scale was developed to investigate possible links between driver Locus of Control and risky or unsafe driving behavior.

John Jones and Lisa Wuebker co-developed the Safety Locus of Control Scale. Let’s describe some of their research and summarize the important findings. Continue Reading

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