The Safety in Learning

While in command during a major exercise at the National Training Center in the Mojave Desert, we faced a professional enemy that was not about to cooperate with the plan I had developed. As we approached the critical moment of the battle, my staff could now see what I could not, or perhaps what I refused to see: the opposing force was massing exactly where we had planned to attack. They urged me to adjust the plan and hit the enemy’s weakness instead. I did not listen. I was determined to follow the plan I had built, and I attacked where they were strongest.

We lost the battle. Or more precisely, I lost it for them.

Afterwards, all of us gathered in a large tent for the After-Action Review. We went through the plan, what happened, what went well, and what did not. There was little doubt by the end of it where the failure had originated. I stood up in front of my Soldiers and said what I knew I had to say: “Guys, you were exceptional out there. I let you down because I did not adapt.”

There was silence. They knew I was right. And something happened in the room after those words that I have thought about many times since. People who had been quiet, who had been watching to see how I would handle the moment, began to engage. Honest assessments that had not surfaced earlier came out. Questions that had been held back got asked. The conversation that followed was among the most valuable I have ever been part of in a debrief setting, and I think it happened directly because of my acknowledgment.

Safety Does Not Mean the Absence of Friction

We won every battle that followed during our rotation in the Mojave. I do not think that was a coincidence.

That moment taught me something about psychological safety that no leadership course had ever made quite so clear: it is not created by policy, and it is not created by stating values. It is created by what leaders do when something goes wrong, and especially by what they are willing to say out loud when the failure is theirs.

Psychological safety is the condition where people believe they will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up, asking questions, raising concerns, or making mistakes. Professor Amy Edmondson of Harvard University, whose research is foundational on this subject, describes it as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Research on high-performing teams at Google identified psychological safety as the single most important factor separating their best teams from the rest.

Most leaders say they want honest input. The actual behavior of most organizations tells a different story. When a team member raises a concern and the leader becomes defensive, the next concern never surfaces. When someone admits a mistake and the consequences are disproportionate, everyone watching takes note. When disagreement is frowned upon, agreement becomes the only safe option, and the organization has quietly lost its ability to self-correct. Problems grow in the dark.

There is a distinction worth making here between psychological safety and comfort. A psychologically safe team is not a comfortable one in the sense of being unchallenged or free of tension. In fact, the opposite is often true. Teams with genuine psychological safety tend to have more direct, more substantive, and often tougher conversations than teams where people are carefully managing what they say. Safety is not the absence of friction. It is the presence of enough trust where friction can be productive rather than destructive.

What Building Psychological Safety Requires

The National Training Center story told earlier is not easy for me to tell. That is exactly the point. Leaders who build psychological safety are not the ones who project confidence and competence at all times. They are the ones willing to be seen clearly, including in their failures, and who demonstrate through their own behavior that honesty is fundamental to the learning process.

Several specific behaviors consistently show up in the leaders and organizations that get this right.

The first is replacing blame with curiosity. When something goes wrong and a leader’s first instinct is to find out who is responsible, the team reads that signal immediately. Blame, or even the anticipation of blame, shuts down honest assessment faster than almost anything else. The better move is to approach the situation with a genuine learning orientation: “What happened, why did it happen, and what are we going to do about it?” That is the basic architecture of the After-Action Review, and it works in corporate settings just as well as it does in military scenarios because the underlying dynamic is the same. People need to know that identifying a problem will be treated as a contribution, not a liability.

The second is asking for feedback on your own delivery. This is a behavior that disarms defensiveness in teams. When a leader asks whether their communication landed the way they intended it to be received, they are admitting the possibility of being wrong. They are signaling that imperfection is not only acceptable but quite possible, even at the top. That message travels through an organization with lightning speed.

The third is speaking human to human. Underlying most conflict in organizations are universal needs: respect, understanding, recognition, autonomy. When leaders engage those underlying needs rather than just the surface-level disagreement, conversations that would otherwise become defensive become collaborative. The question shifts from who is right to how we get to a better outcome together.

The fourth is being consistent about where credit and accountability land. In the battle at the National Training Center, I told my Soldiers they were exceptional and that the failure was mine. I meant it, and they knew I meant it, because the facts supported it. Leaders who take credit publicly and distribute blame arbitrarily destroy psychological safety faster than almost any other behavior. The inverse, distributing credit publicly and owning accountability at the top, builds it. People watch how leaders behave in the hard moments, and those moments define whether honesty is actually safe or only theoretically welcome.

Finally, measure it. Some of the best-performing teams at Google used survey questions as straightforward as this one: “How confident are you that you will not receive retaliation or criticism if you admit an error or make a mistake?” The answer to that question tells you more about your culture than most engagement surveys ever will.

None of this is easy for leaders who were developed in cultures where strength meant certainty and vulnerability reflected weakness. The military taught me many things that served me well over thirty-plus years. The pressure to project confidence at all times was not among them, or at least it took me a long time and more than one tent in the Mojave to understand that the leaders whose teams follow them most completely are not the ones who seem invincible. They are the ones whose people believe in them because they know them. They are authentic leaders. All-In adaptive leaders.

That is the foundation on which psychological safety is built. Not perfection. Credibility. And credibility is earned one honest moment at a time. Remember the importance of persistence in building and sustaining safety. If we conduct AARs only once or twice and then move on, the process will never become habitual, and the culture of commitment will not survive. Stay the course, and it will stick.

I’d love to hear what psychological safety looks like in your organization right now, and what you think it would take to strengthen it. Leave a comment below and let’s talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!