In 23,595 survey responses across eleven industries, recognition is the leadership behaviour teams see least, just as it was nine years ago. The reason has more to do with how brains pay attention than with how much leaders care.
In short | 7-minute read
- Recognising is the leadership behaviour teams rate lowest, in every industry, region and level, just as it was in 2017.
- The cause is attention, not care. Our brains and our safety systems both steer leaders towards what’s going wrong.
- Three quick moves help: walk out with a list, open the pre-start with yesterday’s good work and debrief a job that went well.
Picture a crew that worked safely for the whole shift. The permits were right, isolations were checked, someone paused a lift when the load shifted and nobody got hurt. Now ask what their leader saw.
Probably not much. A safe shift looks like a quiet one, and quiet doesn't register. Their leader most likely walked past the safest work of the day without noticing it. That says less about the leader than about how attention works, and it happens to almost everyone.
We know this because teams keep telling us. The State of Safety Leadership, Revisited draws on 23,595 responses from people rating the safety leadership of the person they report to, across eleven industries and six regions. Of the eight leadership behaviours we measure, Recognising comes last in every one of those industries and regions, and at every level from frontline to executive. It came last in our 2017 report too.
Recognising rates last of the eight behaviours
Average team rating of their leader on our eight leadership competencies, on a seven-point scale.
- Actively caring5.5
- Collaborating5.5
- Supporting5.4
- Vision5.3
- Role modelling5.3
- Inspiring5.2
- Challenging5.2
- Recognising4.8
The wiring works against it
Three forces make recognition hard, and none of them has anything to do with effort or how much a leader cares. Two of them live in the brain, and the third lives in the systems leaders work inside.
The brain looks for danger first
It's an old survival mechanism, and on a high-risk site it earns its keep, because a leader's eye goes straight to the unclipped lanyard or the person standing inside the exclusion zone. One well-known study found that negative words grab our attention automatically, even when they have nothing to do with the task at hand (Pratto and John, 1991). Safe work gives the brain nothing to grab, and repetition makes it even harder to see. The first week a crew does the pre-task check properly, their leader notices. By the tenth week it's background, like the hum of the ventilation fans. Unless a leader has trained their attention on specific positive behaviours, they'll spot the three things wrong on a site and miss the thirty things done right.
Bad outweighs good
Negativity bias also decides how much something counts once we've noticed it. Baumeister and colleagues' 2001 review, Bad Is Stronger Than Good, found that negative events, feedback and information carry more weight than positive ones of the same size, across almost every area they examined. On site, one missed step can overshadow months of the same job done reliably well. The more consistent a crew becomes, the less their good work registers against a single slip, so the habits a leader most wants repeated are often the ones that get the least attention.
The systems point at failure
The same bias is built into how organisations manage safety. Audits, investigations and incident reports all exist to catch what went wrong, work out why and stop it happening again, and that work matters. We rarely give the same scrutiny to the jobs that went well, though, so we seldom learn what made them work or how to get more of it. A leader who spends most of their safety week inside that paperwork learns to look the same way.
Put all three together and it's easy to see why recognition feels harder than it should. It's rarely that we don't appreciate our people. Our brains and our safety systems keep pulling our eyes towards what's going wrong, so what's going right slips past before we've had a chance to notice it.
What the research shows
Safety researcher Dov Zohar (2002) showed what that looks like in practice. Line supervisors received weekly feedback on how often their conversations with workers were about safety. Those conversations became more frequent, and minor-injury rates, earplug use and safety climate scores all improved over the following months. Supervisors who got no feedback stayed where they were. The work itself stayed the same, and what shifted was where the supervisors pointed their attention.
What you recognise, you reinforce
Where a leader's attention goes also shapes what their crew does. Our 2017 report drew on an idea Jeffrey Schwartz and David Rock call attention density: the more often and more deliberately attention goes to a behaviour, the stronger that behaviour becomes, until people do it without being asked.
That cuts both ways. Say a crew gets the plant back online by lunchtime using a workaround and a tool that wasn't designed for the job. Nobody was hurt, and their leader, relieved and under pressure, thanks them for being resourceful. What the crew has just learned is that shortcuts get noticed.
What gets praised gets repeated, including the corner that got cut.
Most leaders would never praise a shortcut on purpose. It happens because we tend to recognise results, like a deadline met or a plant back online, without stopping to think about the behaviours that got us there. Praising the result on its own can quietly reinforce the unsafe way it was achieved. The fix is to decide in advance which attitudes and behaviours you want more of, and to recognise those rather than the result alone.
Reporting is a safety behaviour too
Reporting an incident is a safety behaviour in its own right, and it's easy to forget that. Someone has chosen to speak up about a near miss, a hazard or even their own mistake. That takes some courage, and it's exactly the kind of behaviour a leader wants to see more of.
Our data shows how much the leader matters here. Where teams rate their safety leadership as poor, a third of incidents (33.3%) go unreported. Where they rate it as good, it's fewer than one in five (18.3%). That's nearly twice as many incidents going unspoken under poor leadership.
33.3%
Poor leadership: about 1 in 3
18.3%
Good leadership: fewer than 1 in 5
Share of incidents that go unreported, by how teams rate their safety leadership.
Source: The State of Safety Leadership, Revisited (2026).
Every incident reported becomes a learning moment. People either learn that it's safe to report, or they learn to keep quiet.
Organisations usually treat underreporting as a systems problem, so they shorten the form or retrain people on the process. Those fixes matter, but our data points at the leader, and in particular, at what happens in the thirty seconds after someone reports. A sigh, or a question about why they didn't catch it sooner, tells them to think twice next time. A specific thank-you, followed later by an update on what changed, tells them the report was worth making. That thirty seconds is coachable, and it costs nothing.
Want to hear what else 23,595 people told us? Dr Amy Hawkes and Tia Armit are unpacking the data at our live webinar on Thursday 26 November, 12pm AEDT.
Three moves for a week that's already full
The State of Safety Leadership, Revisited sets out five steps for building recognition as a leadership skill. The three ideas below are quicker wins, each aimed at one of the blind spots above.
Walk out with a list
Before your next site walk, write down three behaviours you want to see more of, such as a hazard raised early, a job paused to reassess or a near miss reported. Then go looking for them. Your brain will catch the faults without any help, so the list is there to give the good work a fair chance of being noticed.
Open the pre-start with yesterday's good work
Spend the first sixty seconds of your pre-start naming something specific that went well on the last shift, and who did it. It might be the operator who stopped a lift when the load shifted, or the apprentice who asked the question that changed the plan. Naming it puts some weight on the good side of the scales and shows the whole crew what good looks like. It also keeps your own attention on those behaviours before they fade into the background.
Debrief a job that went well
Once a week, pick a job that ran smoothly and give it the questions you'd normally save for an incident. What made it work, and what did people do that we'd want repeated?
Whichever move you pick, it has to be real. Crews can tell the difference between a leader who saw something and a leader working through a quota. Genuine recognition builds trust over time. Forced recognition spends it, and faster than most leaders realise.
The quiet shift
Go back to the crew from the start. Nothing happened on their shift, and that was the achievement. Somewhere in it were moments worth naming: a check done properly, a job paused, a clear handover, a workmate quietly pulling someone up when they missed a step. Their leader walked past all of it because nothing was on fire.
Nine years of data says that walk-past is one of the most consistent patterns in high-risk work. The same data shows teams rate their leader's care for them highest of all eight behaviours, so care was never the missing piece. What's usually missing is a deliberate decision about where to point attention.
So, one question for your next site walk: what did you see go right, and did anyone hear about it?
Curious where your leaders sit on all eight behaviours?
The Safety Climate Survey measures them from the team's side, against the 23,595-response benchmark behind the report. We're happy to talk it through, whether or not it goes anywhere.
Sources
Sentis, The State of Safety Leadership, Revisited (2026). All figures in this article come from the report’s dataset: 2026 Safety Climate Survey responses across organisations at every stage of their safety journey, including many Sentis hasn’t worked with.
Sentis, The State of Safety Leadership (2017), for attention density (p. 22).
Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C. and Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323–370. doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.4.323
Pratto, F. and John, O. P. (1991). Automatic vigilance: The attention-grabbing power of negative social information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61(3), 380–391. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.61.3.380
Rock, D. and Schwartz, J. (2006). The neuroscience of leadership. strategy+business, 43. www.strategy-business.com/article/06207
Zohar, D. (2002). Modifying supervisory practices to improve subunit safety: A leadership-based intervention model. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(1), 156–163. doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.87.1.156
