GE Aerospace’s Greenville Plant Proves Larry Culp’s “Safety First” Wasn’t Just Talk

Three years ago, I wrote about GE CEO Larry Culp's habit of beginning every investor meeting with a safety briefing and his insistence that the company's priorities should be safety, quality, and delivery–before cost. See “GE's CEO Larry Culp on SQDC and Putting Safety First.“

At the time, the story was mostly about tone from the top: how a CEO talks, what he chooses to emphasize in front of Wall Street analysts, and the order in which he names the priorities.

A recent article from GE Aerospace News gives us something more tangible than a statement of intent. It gives us a result.

The company's Greenville, South Carolina, plant, which produces high-pressure turbine blades for GE90, GE9X, and CFM LEAP engines, has:

gone almost four years without a recordable employee injury or incident.

During that period, the site increased its workforce by 35 percent, added more than 150 machines, and increased output by 35 percent from 2024 to 2025 alone.

For context, OSHA records show that the Greenville facility employed an average of 345 people in 2025. The aircraft engine and engine-parts manufacturing industry averaged 1.2 recordable cases per 100 full-time workers. Applied to a workforce of that size, the industry rate would translate to an expectation of about 4.1 recordable cases per year–or roughly 16 over four years.

That does not mean those injuries would have been inevitable. An industry average is a benchmark, not an entitlement to harm. But it helps show just how unusual Greenville's zero-recordable streak is, especially during a period of rapid hiring and production growth.

In many organizations, rapid growth might create additional safety risks. New employees are still learning the work and its hazards. New equipment changes established routines. Production pressure can distort decisions that should be made on safety grounds alone.

Maintaining that safety record through such significant growth does not prove that everything at the plant is perfect. But it tells us more about how the operation is being managed than another slogan or executive speech would.

Turn “Safety First” Into a Management System

What stood out to me in 2023 was the discipline of Culp's sequence: safety, quality, and delivery before cost. SQDC. Read more: GE's CEO Larry Culp on SQDC and Putting Safety First.

Safety was not presented as a slogan attached to a cost-reduction program. It was supposed to be the first filter through which decisions were made. Culp described the mantra directly as

“safety, quality, delivery, before cost,”

while acknowledging that the company was still reducing costs as a result of improving the work.

The Greenville story shows how that sequence can be translated into daily management at the plant level, under real production pressure.

Christopher Ubillus, the Greenville plant leader, described an approach that closely echoes Culp's framing. On the plant's daily management boards, the top-level safety indicator is green only when there are zero recordable incidents and zero past-due safety actions.

That is a more demanding standard than simply saying, “Nobody got hurt yesterday.” It looks proactively at the activity that helps reduce risk and prevent harm.

More importantly, Ubillus was explicit that lagging indicators are not enough:

“We can't just look at ‘did we have an injury or not,' because at that point, it's too late for us to assess what we need to do about it.”

Instead, the team tracks the number of risks identified and removed before anybody is injured. That's being proactive.

That is leading-indicator thinking. It shifts the question from “Did an injury occur?” to “What conditions are we finding and correcting before someone gets hurt?”

Make Gemba Walks Routine, Not Ceremonial

The 2023 investor meeting opened with a safety briefing and a reminder to review safety expectations before a planned gemba visit. For the analysts, that was a special event.

At Greenville, the equivalent practice appears to be part of the regular management system. Leaders go to the shop floor to observe the work directly, ask questions, and address issues with employees before those issues become larger problems.

That distinction matters.

Many organizations can stage an impressive safety moment for investors, executives, or auditors. Far fewer make going to the “gemba” part of how leaders manage every week.

A safety briefing is useful. A management routine is more consequential.

We should be careful not to attribute the plant's entire safety record to gemba walks alone. But nearly four years without a recordable incident suggests that safety is being supported by more than occasional executive messaging or appearances.

Use Standardization to Reduce Safety Risks

One detail in the Greenville story deserves more attention: production lines are intentionally designed to look and operate in similar ways.

Operators are cross-trained to work in different positions and rotate daily. When somebody moves to another line–or when a new employee joins the team–the person does not have to relearn an entirely different layout, visual-management system, and set of routines.

The safe way of working is built into the normal way of working. And I can see where consistency would help.

This is standardized work serving multiple purposes. It is often discussed as a quality and productivity method because reducing unnecessary variation makes abnormalities easier to see. Here, standardization also supports safety.

Reducing avoidable differences between work areas can eliminate hazards that would otherwise have to be controlled through memory, individual vigilance, or repeated warnings.

Standardization does not mean that every situation is identical or that workers should stop thinking. It means designing the work so people do not have to waste attention navigating arbitrary differences.

Build Safety Into Growth Before Growth Arrives

The lesson is not limited to jet-engine manufacturing. The same pattern applies in healthcare and in almost any operation attempting to grow without allowing standards to erode.

A growth period is often when organizations are tempted to treat safety or quality as something to strengthen later, once production stabilizes and the immediate pressure subsides.

But things rarely “settle down” on their own.

The Greenville result suggests the opposite approach: build safety into daily management and standardized work before growth arrives. Then those practices have a chance to scale with the organization instead of being displaced by urgency.

Ubillus also connected physical safety with psychological safety. He said the goal is for people to feel safe both physically and mentally, with safety treated as a shared responsibility.

That connection is important.

A measure such as “risks identified and removed” works only when employees are willing to identify those risks. People must believe that speaking up will not lead to blame, retaliation, or dismissal–and that raising a concern will lead to some reasonable form of response.

A hazard that remains unspoken cannot be investigated or removed.

Physical safety and psychological safety are different concepts, but they reinforce one another. Employees who feel safe raising concerns are more likely to surface a problem while it is still a weak signal or near miss rather than waiting until it becomes an injury.

Keep the Priority Sequence Intact Under Pressure

Reading the Greenville story alongside Culp's 2023 investor-day comments, the throughline is consistency rather than novelty.

Culp told analysts that the sequence was safety, quality, and delivery before cost. Ubillus is describing plant-level practices intended to preserve that sequence in daily operations.

Three years apart, a public statement of intent and a site-level result appear to be pointing in the same direction.

That is worth noting because almost every company says that safety comes first. The real test comes when safety competes with output, deadlines, or cost.

Greenville's nearly four-year record–maintained while increasing headcount and output by 35 percent–is evidence that, at least at this site and during this period, the stated sequence did not immediately collapse when the pressure increased.

Safety first is not merely a message to deliver.

It is the priority you continue to follow when priorities compete.