Organisations typically discuss safety in terms of accident prevention and, increasingly, mental wellbeing. A third dimension is just as consequential: whether people feel able to speak candidly when something is wrong.
For leadership coach and doctoral researcher Lucy Airs, psychological safety is not about removing discomfort from the workplace or insulating people from challenge. It is about creating conditions in which individuals can raise concerns, acknowledge uncertainty and admit mistakes without fearing disproportionate personal consequences.
That distinction is particularly important in construction and other high-risk industries. Minor errors rarely remain minor if they are concealed. Left unaddressed, they can become rework, delay, commercial loss, reputational damage or, in the most serious cases, a threat to life.
A team’s willingness to surface problems early is therefore not a cultural luxury. It is an operational capability.
Why Training Often Fails To Change Behaviour
Airs arrived at the subject through years of work in leadership development, resilience and positive psychology.
She repeatedly encountered organisations making substantial investments in coaching and training, only to see very little change once participants returned to their normal working environment.
“It suddenly struck me,” she explains. “We spend all this time training people, but are we pouring water into a bucket with a hole?”
The issue was not necessarily the quality of the intervention. The problem was often the context into which people returned.
A leader might leave a programme determined to communicate more openly, involve colleagues more effectively or experiment with a different approach. Yet if the prevailing culture treated uncertainty as weakness, interpreted change as threat or punished people for challenging accepted practice, the new behaviour was unlikely to survive.
The environment exerted a stronger influence than the training.
That observation led Airs into doctoral research focused not only on the definition of psychological safety, but on the practical leadership behaviours required to create it.
High-Performing Teams May Report More Errors
Much of the contemporary understanding of psychological safety is associated with the work of Harvard professor Amy Edmondson.
In early research into healthcare teams, Edmondson encountered an apparently contradictory result. The teams rated as most effective were also reporting the greatest number of errors.
Conventional logic suggested that high-performing teams should make fewer mistakes. The data initially appeared to indicate the opposite.
The more significant explanation was that the strongest teams were not necessarily making more errors. They were more willing to report them.
People trusted their colleagues sufficiently to raise concerns, discuss failures and examine what had happened. As a result, those teams learnt faster and were better placed to prevent recurrence.
Lower reporting rates did not automatically indicate higher quality. They could equally indicate that problems were being concealed.
For Airs, psychological safety can be understood as the ability to “express yourself, learn, challenge and innovate effectively”.
That necessarily includes the ability to say, without evasion: “I have made a mistake.”
Why Leaders Cannot Simply Instruct People To Speak Up
Leaders are regularly told that they must create psychological safety. Airs believes this advice often underestimates the difficulty of the task.
“We’re told leadership should just click its fingers and sort this,” she says. “It isn’t that easy.”
The habits that undermine openness are developed long before people enter management or join an organisation.
From an early age, many people learn that mistakes carry social and institutional penalties. Errors affect grades, reputation and status. If a mistake can be hidden without consequence, concealment may appear rational.
“We’ve been taught over and over again,” Airs explains. “If you can get away without being found out, you get away with a lot.”
By the time people enter professional life, the instinct to protect themselves from looking incompetent may be deeply established.
An instruction to “be open” is unlikely to reverse years of conditioning. Employees will assess what happens to people who raise concerns, challenge decisions or admit that something has gone wrong.
The organisation’s response, rather than its stated values, determines whether speaking up feels safe.
An Absence Of Error Reports Is Not Reassuring
One of Airs’ more provocative observations concerns teams that appear to make very few mistakes.
“If you have a team and you are not getting error reports, then they’re lying to you and they don’t trust you.”
The phrasing is deliberately blunt, but the underlying logic is difficult to dismiss.
Human beings make mistakes. Complex systems contain uncertainty. Projects involve incomplete information, changing conditions and multiple interfaces. No credible team operates without error.
The relevant question is whether those errors are visible while they remain manageable.
A defect identified early may require a straightforward correction. The same defect, concealed and later covered by subsequent work, may lead to extensive investigation and rework.
Construction is particularly vulnerable to this dynamic because progress can make earlier decisions increasingly difficult to inspect or reverse. Once work has been enclosed, buried, commissioned or handed over, the cost of correction rises substantially.
A low volume of reported issues may therefore indicate control. It may also indicate silence.
Leaders should understand the difference.
Credibility Does Not Require Infallibility
Many leaders remain uncomfortable acknowledging their own mistakes because they fear doing so will weaken their authority.
Airs argues that the opposite is often true.
When leaders present themselves as consistently correct, they establish an implicit standard that others are expected to imitate. The organisation learns that credibility depends on concealing uncertainty and defending previous decisions.
Leaders can interrupt that pattern by modelling a different response.
A manager might say: “I asked you to take this approach yesterday, but I have since reviewed it and concluded that I was wrong. If you see me making the same mistake again, I want you to challenge me.”
The wording is simple, but the message is significant.
Errors are not desirable, but neither are they disqualifying. What matters is how quickly they are recognised, whether they are discussed honestly and what is learnt from them.
Psychological safety is not created through declarations. It develops when people repeatedly observe that candour is received constructively rather than punished.
Consistency is essential. One aggressive response to an unwelcome message can outweigh months of encouragement to speak up.
The Most Junior People May Hold The Most Important Information
A recurring theme in Airs’ work is that those closest to the work often identify emerging problems before senior leaders do.
On a construction site, this may be the operative installing the same detail repeatedly and recognising that something is becoming more difficult, slower or less reliable.
In manufacturing, it may be a machine operator noticing that a process has started to lose a fraction of a second on each cycle.
Individually, such observations can appear inconsequential. Across hundreds or thousands of repetitions, they may indicate a substantial risk or opportunity.
“The people who know how to fix that,” Airs says, “are very, very early in the system.”
The difficulty is rarely whether frontline employees notice. It is whether the organisation has made it worthwhile for them to say something.
People remain silent for many reasons. They may expect to be dismissed, worry that they will be blamed, assume management is not interested or believe that raising an issue will create additional work without producing any change.
Psychological safety does not guarantee that every observation will be correct. It ensures that potentially valuable information is not suppressed before it can be examined.
Psychological Safety Is Compatible With High Standards
One of the most persistent misconceptions is that psychological safety requires leaders to avoid difficult conversations, tolerate weak performance or validate every contribution.
Airs rejects that interpretation.
“It’s not about being nice.”
Poor work remains poor work. Incorrect answers remain incorrect. Professional standards do not become negotiable.
The difference lies in how leaders respond to failure or disagreement.
Airs uses the example of a pupil who gives an incorrect answer in class. An effective teacher does not pretend the answer is right. The error provides information about what the pupil has misunderstood and where further support is required.
The same principle applies in professional settings.
A mistake is valuable only to the extent that it reveals something that can be understood and improved. Psychological safety does not remove accountability; it makes more intelligent accountability possible.
Blame seeks an individual to punish. Learning seeks to understand the conditions that produced the outcome.
Those are not equivalent responses.
An organisation can be exacting about performance while remaining thoughtful about causation.
Trust Is Built Through Repeated, Low-Risk Interactions
Leaders often assume that changing culture requires a major framework or formal programme. Airs recommends beginning with a smaller intervention.
She asks people to discuss, in pairs, the best mistake they have ever made.
The emphasis is not on celebrating the error. It is on examining what the experience taught them, how they recovered and which strengths they drew upon.
Each partner is then asked to identify the qualities they observed in the other person’s account.
The conversation shifts the frame. Individuals are not defined by the mistake itself, but by the honesty, resilience, judgement and learning that followed.
Those are precisely the behaviours organisations need when something goes wrong.
Exercises of this kind are not sufficient on their own, but they create a low-risk opportunity for people to experience a different type of conversation about failure.
Trust is rarely established through one significant gesture. It develops through accumulated evidence that openness will be treated with seriousness and respect.
Behaviour Changes When Purpose Becomes Meaningful
Airs illustrates the relationship between meaning and behaviour with a personal example.
After repeatedly receiving penalty points for minor speeding offences, she attended a mandatory driver awareness course.
The first course concentrated on rules. It had little lasting effect.
Years later, she attended another course led by the same psychologist. This time, the emphasis was different. Participants were asked to think about roads as shared social systems used by children, older people, inexperienced drivers and others whose needs might differ from their own.
Speed limits were reframed not as arbitrary restrictions, but as an expression of care and collective responsibility.
“I haven’t lost any points since,” Airs reflects.
The broader lesson is that people rarely sustain behavioural change simply because they have been instructed to comply.
Rules influence behaviour, but meaning gives those rules durability.
The same principle applies in construction. Operatives are not merely installing walls, services or structural components. They are creating schools, hospitals, homes and public infrastructure that other people will depend upon.
When quality and safety are connected to human consequence, they become more than procedural obligations.
Purpose does not replace standards, supervision or control. It strengthens the reasons people have for applying them conscientiously.
Learning Before Problems Escalate
Psychological safety will not eliminate mistakes, nor should any serious organisation expect it to.
Its value lies in making error visible while there is still time to respond intelligently.
It enables concerns to be raised before they become crises. It allows disagreement to improve decision-making rather than damage relationships. It gives leaders access to information that hierarchy might otherwise suppress.
Most importantly, it allows accountability and learning to coexist.
“We can learn from mistakes,” Airs says. “That’s how we learn.”
In complex projects, perfection is an unrealistic operating assumption. Uncertainty, misjudgement and failure will remain part of the work.
The more useful ambition is to create teams that recognise problems early, discuss them honestly and adapt before the consequences become disproportionate.
Psychological safety is therefore not a softer alternative to performance. It is one of the conditions that makes sustained performance possible.
