Your safety messaging is failing because you're committing marketing's biggest sin: trying to talk to "everyone." When you aim for everyone, you reach no one. The solution? Identify the critical 10% who actually influence your safety culture, and it's not who most safety departments think it is.
Your safety culture will never take hold if you're trying to talk to "everyone."
That statement makes safety departments uncomfortable. After all, isn't safety for everyone? Don't we need everyone on board?
Well, yes and no.
Here's what I learned selling radio advertising 30+ years ago: When business owners believed that their ideal customer was "everyone," I knew we had a problem. You can't appeal to everyone. If you're trying to talk to everyone, you're talking to no one in particular. The message becomes so generic and watered down that it misses the mark completely.
The same principle destroys safety messaging.
Modern marketing operates on a simple truth: you must create an ideal avatar of your target market. That means ignoring a lot of traits, characteristics, sometimes gender, age, position, and years of experience to zero in on one segment. You identify the ONE target client you want.
This feels wrong to many people. It feels like you're excluding others, like you're ignoring the majority. But here's what actually happens: when you speak directly to one specific person, others who share similar needs listen too. Your message becomes clear and powerful instead of vague and forgettable.
Safety departments miss this completely. They create programs and messaging aimed at "everyone" in the organization. Except not everyone is paying attention. Not everyone is in a position to influence others' behaviors. Not everyone has built the trust and respect where their advice is actually welcomed.
Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations research shows that not everyone makes their decision to get on board at the same time. You have innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Each group needs different messaging at different times.
But safety departments treat everyone like they're all ready to change simultaneously. They blast the same message to the entire company and wonder why adoption is slow.
You need to ask yourself: who do you really need to get buy-in from first?
It's not "everyone."
Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point referenced research from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute that identified something remarkable. Only 10% of a group needed to have an unshakeable belief in any one thing before that minority belief became the majority opinion.
Let that sink in. You don't need everyone. You need the right 10%.
Who is that 10% in your organization?
It's your frontline supervisors.
You can't build a safety culture without your frontline supervisors.
Supervisors are the only group of employees positioned to lead safety meetings effectively. They're the ones who care for the members of their teams day in and day out. They engage team members and keep them engaged through the daily grind of production pressures and schedule demands.
Supervisors transfer and translate corporate values to the frontline in a way that those values become the frontline team members' own values. As I wrote in The CareFull Supervisor, "The supervisor is the culture for their crew." Not the safety manager. Not senior leadership. The supervisor creates the day-to-day experience that defines culture.
Most importantly, supervisors are best positioned to make the members of their teams feel valued. When team members feel valued, they feel valuable—in their work, their contributions, and their ideas. Those teams look out for each other. They watch each other's backs. They speak up when something isn't right.
That's safety culture. And it doesn't come from safety posters or corporate messaging aimed at "everyone."
When safety departments try to build culture by talking to everyone, their messaging scatters. Senior leaders interpret it one way. Middle managers interpret it another. Frontline supervisors get confused about their role. And then frontline team members tune out because the message doesn't feel relevant to their daily reality.
Nobody owns the culture. Nobody takes clear responsibility. And "everyone" assumes someone else is handling it.
But when you target supervisors, when you invest in developing their leadership capabilities, everything changes. Supervisors own the culture for their crews. They translate safety values into daily actions. They build the relationships that make all your other safety programs actually work.
Focusing on supervisors means investing in their comprehensive leadership development. Not just surface-level safety leadership training. Not just technical skills. Real, deep, meaningful leadership development that includes coaching, communication, listening, and connecting with people.
It means equipping supervisors with the skills to build genuine relationships with their team members. As I've seen with over 1,000 graduates of our PeopleWork Supervisor Academy, when supervisors develop these relationship skills, safety culture follows naturally. Team members follow procedures not because they have to, but because they trust and respect their supervisor's leadership.
Here's what makes this approach powerful: there are 12 different operational metrics that improve when supervisors develop strong leadership skills. Safety is just one of them. Quality improves. Productivity increases. Turnover drops. Absenteeism falls. Training effectiveness goes up. When you invest in supervisor leadership development, you're not just fixing safety—you're solving the relationship problems that create all your operational headaches.
It means stopping the scattered approach where you're trying to get everyone excited about safety at once. Instead, you focus your energy, your budget, and your time on the 10% who will influence the other 90%.
You don't need everyone to believe in your safety vision on day one. You need your frontline supervisors to believe in it. You need them to be equipped with the skills to lead their teams. You need them to be confident in their ability to build relationships that make team members feel valued.
When supervisors have an unshakeable belief in creating a culture where people look out for each other, that belief spreads. The 10% becomes the majority opinion. The tipping point happens.
But it starts with a clear target audience. Not everyone. Supervisors.
Your safety culture is struggling because your messaging is muddy and directed at the wrong people. You're sending mixed signals that confuse everyone and inspire no one.
You're telling supervisors they can't build a safety culture without the blessing of senior managers, so why even bother trying? You're telling team members that safety is everyone's responsibility, but giving them no actual authority to change anything. You're telling senior leaders that if they just show commitment, the culture will follow. You're telling safety professionals to keep layering on more programs and systems because eventually one of them will stick.
None of it works. These beliefs get passed around the industry and the social media message boards, and "everyone" accepts them as truth. But walk into any facility where supervisors actually know how to build relationships and lead their teams, and you'll see all of those empty beliefs fall apart.
The truth is simpler: you need your frontline supervisors equipped with leadership skills. That's your target. That's your 10%.
Identify your 10%. Focus on your frontline supervisors. Invest in their frontline leadership development. Give them the relationship skills they need to build genuine connections with their teams.
When supervisors feel valued, confident and supported to lead, they make their team members feel valued. When team members feel valued, they act like valuable contributors who look out for each other.
That's how safety culture actually spreads. Not through messages aimed at "everyone," but through the focused development of the 10% who influence everyone else.
Your supervisors are that 10%. The question is: are you giving them what they need to influence the other 90%, or are you still wasting resources trying to motivate "everyone?"