Short answer. Safety culture is set by what leaders do, not by what they sign off. HSE's guidance on leading health and safety at work says leaders need to show visible commitment, involve the workforce, and treat safety as a core value rather than hand it to a policy document. Get that right and safe behaviour tends to follow; get it wrong and no procedure fixes it on its own.
Leadership and Management Are Not Rivals
It is tempting to draw a sharp line between "safety management", enforcing rules, and "safety leadership", inspiring people. In practice the two overlap. HSE's own model for managing health and safety, the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle set out in HSG65, treats leadership and worker involvement as the foundation the rest of the system sits on, not an alternative to it.
HSE's guidance on leading health and safety at work (INDG417) is specific about what that looks like: visible, active commitment from the top, and genuine worker involvement rather than consultation on paper. Neither replaces the other. A manager who never appears on site undermines the policy they signed; a policy that is never followed up undermines the leader who champions it.
What Leaders Do Differently
Leaders who get safety right tend to share a few habits. They turn up: they walk the site, ask questions, and are seen taking safety seriously rather than delegating it entirely to a safety officer. They involve the people doing the work in decisions that affect them, because the person operating a machine or driving a van usually understands its risks better than anyone reviewing a policy at a desk. And they treat a near miss as information worth acting on, not an embarrassment to quietly close out.
None of this is about relaxing controls. Employers still carry legal duties under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, and safe systems of work still have to be followed. Good leadership changes how people engage with those systems. It does not replace them.
Deference to Expertise
One idea worth borrowing from high-hazard industries is "deference to expertise": when something looks wrong, the person who understands it best should have the loudest voice, whatever their position in the hierarchy. Organisational researchers Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe, who studied how high-reliability organisations such as nuclear plants and aircraft carriers avoid serious failures, identified deference to expertise as one of five habits these organisations share. The others are a preoccupation with failure, treating every near miss as a warning worth investigating; a reluctance to simplify explanations for why something went wrong; sensitivity to day-to-day operations; and a commitment to building resilience so the organisation can absorb a problem when one does occur.
You do not need to run a nuclear plant to use this. A supervisor who asks the team operating a piece of equipment what could go wrong, before deciding how to guard against it, is applying the same principle. It surfaces risks a desk-based review would miss and gives the people closest to the work a stake in the answer.
Building It Into Your Organisation
Making this stick takes more than a memo. Three things help: leaders who are visibly present on the shop floor or site rather than only in the boardroom; a genuine channel for workers to raise concerns without it counting against them; and training that gives supervisors and managers the tools to lead on safety, not just administer it. A recognised course such as the IOSH Managing Safely course gives managers a working grounding in the legal framework and in running risk assessments, which makes the conversations described above easier to have with confidence.
Review what you build. Learning from near misses and previous incidents, and adjusting how the organisation works in response, is what keeps a safety culture from becoming a slogan on the wall rather than a description of how people actually work.
For related reading, see why safety training matters.