Moving Walkways How to Leverage Your Support Staff

Should You Have a Safety Manager on Site? You Are Asking the Wrong Question

There is a debate that keeps surfacing in construction circles. Should a project have a dedicated safety manager on site, or does that position make the rest of the team go soft? Does a quality control role sharpen performance, or does it give everyone else an excuse to stop caring? The argument goes back and forth, and most of the time, it stays stuck at the level of strategy. Add the position or do not add it. That is the wrong question entirely.

Jason Schroeder found the answer in an airport moving walkway, and once you hear the analogy, you will never look at your specialist support roles the same way again.

Three Speeds on the Same Walkway

Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport has a long corridor between gate sets, and it is equipped with the kind of moving walkways that are supposed to make the journey faster. Jason noticed something on a recent trip through that corridor. Some people stepped onto the walkway and kept walking, moving at their normal pace with the mechanical assist beneath them. They flew down the corridor. Others bypassed the walkway entirely and walked alongside it on the regular floor. They moved at a solid, steady pace. And then there was the third group: the ones who stepped onto the walkway, stopped completely, and just stood there, being carried along at a crawl, slower than the people walking on the regular floor next to them.

Three options. Three different results. Same walkway, same corridor, same destination.

Walk without the walkway: you make solid progress at a consistent pace, fully responsible for your own momentum. Walk on the walkway: you add your effort to the mechanical assist and cover ground at roughly double the pace, with less friction and more output. Stand on the walkway and stop: you go slower than if you had never used the walkway at all, and you block everyone behind you in the process.

The Analogy That Changes Everything

Now apply those three modes to a construction project that has a dedicated safety manager, a quality control specialist, a BIM coordinator, or a survey support position.

A project team without any of those support roles is walking on its own. It can be done. The team owns everything, carries everything, and moves at whatever pace their discipline allows. Results depend entirely on the strength and habits of the people in the field.

A project team with a dedicated safety manager, where the superintendent and the project manager stay fully engaged, use the resource, coordinate actively, and treat it as an amplifier: that team is walking on the moving walkway. The support role multiplies the team’s effort. Safety gets sharper. Quality gets tighter. The specialist handles documentation and systems while the leaders stay locked in on culture, behavior, and accountability. The whole team moves faster with less friction.

A project team with a dedicated safety manager, where the superintendent checks the box, delegates ownership, disengages from the work, and assumes the specialist will handle it: that team has stepped onto the walkway and stopped. The support position does not amplify anything because the team stopped adding their own effort. The project becomes slower, less safe, and less accountable than it would have been if the team had simply owned it without any specialist help at all.

This is the insight that reframes the entire debate. The question was never whether to have a safety manager on site. The question is always: what is the culture of the team that will use that resource?

Culture Is the Variable That Controls Everything

Here is the principle that sits underneath the analogy: culture eats strategy for breakfast. Every time.

The strategy is the walkway. The strategy is the safety manager or the quality role or the BIM coordinator. Strategies are tools. They can be excellent tools. But a tool in the hands of the wrong culture produces the wrong result. A walkway designed to accelerate movement becomes an obstacle when the culture of the people using it defaults to passivity. A safety manager designed to elevate a project becomes a liability when the culture around them defaults to delegation and disengagement.

What is culture? It is the common beliefs and actions of a group. It is the story the team tells about who they are and what they do. A culture of ownership says: this help makes us faster, so we will add our effort to it and go. A culture of passivity says: this help is here, so we do not have to go anymore. Both cultures can exist inside the same company, on the same type of project, with access to the same resources. The resource does not determine the result. The culture does.

This is why the debate about whether to add a specialist position never resolves cleanly. Two teams can receive the same resource and produce completely opposite outcomes. The conversation needs to move upstream, past the strategy question, and land on the culture question.

What Cannot Be Delegated

There is an eternal truth that Jason carries into every boot camp and coaching conversation, and it applies directly here: superintendents and project managers do not delegate safety and quality. It does not happen. It cannot work. You can have people help you. You can lead a team. You can use every specialist resource available. But the moment a superintendent points to the safety manager and says that person is in charge of safety on this job, the project is already in trouble.

Safety is not a checklist item to hand off. Quality is not a role to assign and forget. These are leadership responsibilities that sit inside the superintendent and the project manager regardless of who else is on the team. The safety manager exists to amplify and support, not to absorb ownership that belongs to field leadership. When that distinction collapses, the team has stepped off the walkway in the worst possible way.

Here is what that looks like in practice:

• A superintendent who conducts their own daily site walks and uses the safety manager to sharpen the system is walking on the walkway
•  A superintendent who waits for the safety manager to flag a hazard before acting is standing still and hoping the walkway carries them 
• A project manager who integrates quality ownership into every schedule conversation is walking on the walkway 
• A project manager who signs off on a quality report without reading it because there is a QC manager on site has stepped on and stopped

The distinction is not subtle once you see it. And the results are not subtle either.

Building the Right Culture First

If your project needs superintendent coaching, project support, or leadership development, Elevate Construction can help your field teams stabilize, schedule, and flow. The teams that get the most out of specialist support positions are the ones that already carry a culture of ownership. They use the resource as an accelerant, not a substitute.

The diagnostic question for any leader adding a support role to a project is not: will this position help? Of course it will help, if the culture uses it correctly. The question is: does our team understand that this resource is meant to multiply their effort, not replace it? Have we made that expectation explicit? Do we hold people accountable to it?

If the answer to those questions is yes, add the resource and watch the project accelerate. If the answer is uncertain, the work to do first is cultural. Get the team clear on their identity. Build shared expectations around ownership. Establish that every specialist resource on the project exists to help the team go faster together, not to take something off anyone’s plate.

The Challenge This Week

Look at the specialist support positions on your current project. Safety, quality, BIM, survey, field engineering, whatever they are. Now be honest about which of the three modes your team is operating in. Are you walking alongside the walkway, fully capable but not using the resource fully? Are you walking on it and amplifying your effort? Or have you stepped on and stopped, delegating ownership and losing ground?

The process is not the problem. The walkway is not the problem. The question is always the same: is the culture of the people using it one of adding their efforts, or subtracting them?

As W. Edwards Deming wrote, “Quality is everyone’s responsibility.” Not the quality manager’s. Not the safety manager’s. Everyone’s. Every superintendent. Every project manager. Every foreman on the crew. The specialist supports that responsibility. It does not replace it.

On we go.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you know if your team has the right culture to benefit from a specialist support role?

Watch what happens when a problem surfaces. In a culture of ownership, the superintendent and the project manager are already aware of the problem before the specialist flags it, and they are working the solution together. In a culture of delegation, the specialist becomes the primary source of awareness, and the leaders respond reactively rather than proactively. The culture shows itself in how quickly field leadership notices problems and how directly they engage with solving them.

What if I inherited a project team with a passive culture? Can it be corrected?

Yes, but it requires explicit language and visible behavior from leadership. The first step is naming the expectation clearly: the safety manager, quality position, or support role is here to make us faster, not to take ownership away from the team. Follow that statement with accountability. Conduct your own walks. Ask your own questions. Show the team what engaged ownership looks like, and hold people to that standard consistently. Culture shifts when behavior shifts, and behavior shifts when leadership models and enforces the change.

Should every project have a dedicated safety manager, or only certain size projects?

The analogy points to culture as the determining variable, not project size. A large project with a passive culture will be less safe with a dedicated safety manager than a smaller project with a culture of ownership and no dedicated position. That said, project scale, complexity, trade count, and regulatory environment all affect the practical need for specialist support. The decision should factor in both the operational need and an honest assessment of whether the team culture is prepared to use the resource as an amplifier rather than a substitute.

How do you explain this principle to a team that has been operating in delegation mode for a long time?

Use the walkway analogy directly. It is concrete, visual, and easy to remember. Walk the team through the three modes. Show them where the project currently sits. Then paint a clear picture of what operating in walk on the walkway mode looks like in practice on your specific project. People generally do not resist ownership when they understand what is expected and when the leader models it alongside them. The problem in delegation cultures is usually that no one ever made the expectation clear.

Can a team start in walk alongside mode and move to walk on the walkway mode over time?

Absolutely, and this is often the healthiest progression. A team that builds strong ownership habits without specialist support has already developed the cultural foundation needed to amplify those habits with a dedicated resource. When the specialist position is added later, the team knows exactly how to use it because they already carry the identity of full ownership. The risk runs the other way: adding specialist support before ownership culture is established can interrupt the development of that culture entirely.