These Leadership Behaviors Make Safety Culture Stronger

How to identify the trust gap in safety leadership, and strategies on how to close it.

On the floor, credibility is built one response at a time. People decide what they believe about you by watching how you handle concerns, how quickly you act, and what keeps showing up week after week. Those everyday cues add up fast, determining whether safety feels like a shared effort or a program.

For Brian Biancavilla, Director of EHS at Trelleborg Engineered Coated Fabrics in Rutherford, NC, that lesson has been reinforced over a 35+ year career. His work has ranged from hazardous materials response and emergency operations to refinery environments and manufacturing EHS leadership. Over time, he’s learned that people speak up sooner—and more honestly—when they believe their input will lead to action. 

“If you follow through, your people will respect you,” he says. “And they will bring you the problems because they know you’re going to address them.”

Here are four lessons Biancavilla has learned the hard way—practical, floor-tested ways to bring the real issues to light sooner, build trust faster, and strengthen participation in safety.

Lesson 1: The Early Warnings Come Disguised as Small Talk

Frontline employees sense friction long before it turns into an incident, a near miss, or a formal escalation. They feel it in the pace of the work, the shift handoffs, and the equipment quirks everyone has adapted around. Most of the time, what surfaces first is casual—a quick comment that carries more truth than it sounds like it does.

“The hourly people that are on the floor, they will bring you the issues and the problems,” Biancavilla explains. “But they may not bring it to you in the mechanism in which you want it delivered.”

What to tune into early:

• Offhand comments during walkthroughs that repeat across weeks.
• “Normal” workarounds people mention without thinking twice.
• Quick observations shared at shift change, when routines get compared.

One detail that reveals where safe work feels harder than it should. 

Lesson 2: Real Listening Starts with What People Don’t Formalize

Biancavilla treats listening like an operating skill. It takes attention in environments where people learn by doing, and where nobody has time to craft the perfect explanation in the middle of production. The most useful insights often arrive in fragments. The leader’s job is to catch them early and pull the thread.

“Pay attention,” he says. “A lot of the subtleties get overlooked, and then those employees feel like they weren’t heard.”

He built familiarity deliberately by showing up consistently until people felt comfortable bringing things directly to him. That kind of rapport changes what people share and when they share it.

Early indicators worth a second look:

• Hesitation and understatement: “It’s probably fine, but…” often points to exposure.
• The gap between procedure language and task language.
• Humor, resignation, or “we’ve always done it this way” masking frustration.

Patterns that emerge only when you compare stories across shifts.