Why psychological safety matters

A healthy project culture depends on people being willing to raise risks, challenge assumptions and deliver uncomfortable truths. But in high-pressure environments, speaking up can feel risky. Dave Waller explores how project professionals can do it effectively – and why it matters. 

Image credit: Shutterstock

In 2005, Elaine Bromiley, a healthy mother of two, went into hospital for a routine sinus operation. During anaesthetic induction, the consultant anaesthetists realised her airway had obstructed and tried a range of techniques to stabilise it, continuing their efforts even as Elaine’s oxygen level fell to just 40%. It remained there for more than 20 minutes. 

Despite their experience levels, the consultants seemed to lose awareness of the crisis that was unfolding. One nurse who attended the scene told the consultants that she had fetched a tracheotomy set, only to be met with silence. Another saw Elaine’s vital signs and the fact she’d turned blue, and went to call intensive care to check they had a free bed. When she informed the consultants, their response suggested to her that she was over-reacting, so she left and cancelled the request.  

Elaine suffered catastrophic brain damage. Thirteen days later, her husband made the call to switch off her life support. At the subsequent inquest, two nurses said they’d known exactly what needed to happen, but didn’t know how to broach the subject effectively.  

It’s scary to raise mistakes 

While the personal tragedy of Elaine’s case may be extreme, the communication issues at its root are commonplace. New research from Mental Health First Aid England (MHFA England) has found that 45% of UK employees feel unable to raise mistakes or risks at work, which has a host of other negative implications. 

“When people don’t feel safe flagging a risk or asking a question, mistakes slip through, quality suffers, and the bottom line and wellbeing take a hit,” said Sarah McIntosh, Chief Executive of MHFA England and the Association of Mental Health First Aiders, at the release of the research. “In an era of rapid AI adoption, we can’t afford employees who are too afraid to speak up when they spot errors.” 

James Evans is a PMO Lead and Programme Manager at NHS Wales Joint Commissioning Committee, and an advocate and researcher around psychological safety. When he first heard Elaine Bromiley’s story, he was quick to draw parallels with what he was seeing in the day-to-day project environment. He began to focus on the human factors that prevented people speaking up, and he made it the subject of his master’s dissertation.  

In his research, Evans has encountered a range of reasons why it may be difficult for individuals to flag that a project is going off the rails, especially if the issue lies beyond their level of authority and they’re delivering a hard truth to senior figures who are invested in a specific requirement. Those factors include a fear of ridicule or repercussions from busy senior project leaders, who may be quick to criticise or judge; the difficulty of facing off against authoritative artificial intelligence tools; and the fact that projects are often under pressure to appear successful.  

“There’s a fear that if you raise a risk, the project’s going to fail,” says Evans. “And because you’ve been given x amount of money to deliver it, you can’t be seen to be failing. In a culture like that, everything has to be good; everything has to be green.” 

The watermelon effect 

There’s an issue with dashboards that appear a uniform green: in what’s known as the ‘watermelon effect’, a project may be blood red beneath the surface. A perfect example is the failed launch of healthcare.gov, the US federal health insurance marketplace website, in 2013. In this highly siloed project, the contractors building the front-end couldn't properly test integration with the database teams. In the run-up to launch, everyone was reporting their own individual status as green, even though nobody had successfully run a full end-to-end test. No one wanted to be the single red block on the dashboard. The site crashed on day one, and the eventual cost of the project has been estimated at over $1.7bn. 

Evans shares how he has witnessed things going south just as disastrously on lower-stakes projects, too.  

“I saw first-hand, even at the smallest level, a risk being buried out of fear of raising it,” he says. “About six months later, that risk was no longer a risk; it had become a significant issue that had almost caused the project to fail, through reputation damage and financial implications.  

“It’s a bit like a dam. If we’d fixed the crack at the risk stage, it would have been sorted. But the dam completely cracked and the water was flowing through. We could no longer patch it; we had to build a whole new dam to fix the issue.” 

Evans’s team was able to discern that the risk had been spotted up to nine months before, but it hadn’t been flagged at the project board because the junior members of the team who’d found it didn’t feel safe to speak up. Other members within that organisation had made them feel uncomfortable.  

Learn to override your tribal feelings 

So, what can project professionals do to become better at speaking up? In part, it’s about shifting one’s psychology.  

In its research into psychological safety across its project portfolio, the Ministry of Defence found that project leaders often absorb massive amounts of budget and timeline pressure without speaking up about the toll it takes on the project’s viability in order to keep morale high and satisfy senior stakeholders. 

As project leadership author Susanne Madsen points out, we’re hard-wired from our “caveman days” to ensure we don’t fall out with our tribe. We need to bypass that circuitry. 

“I always tell people not to see themselves as below the sponsor or client,” she says. “Yes, they may have more experience than you. Yes, they may be more senior and be earning more money, but you’re the expert in managing projects, and when something is not right you have an obligation to raise it to them.” 

That sounds simple enough, but even Madsen concedes that acting with authenticity can be painfully hard in a working environment that is not built for psychological safety. 

“If I’ve been criticised five times before for putting my head above the parapet, I’m not going to do it again,” she says. “Employees don’t bother to come forward with things they think are wrong because last time nothing happened, or it was pushed back to them to do something about it, instead of someone higher up taking ownership.” 

How to get vital messages through 

Professor Megan Reitz, co-author of Speak Up, echoes the idea that raising issues is a relational act – its outcome depends heavily on how the person in power responds to bad news. Yet she suggests even leaders who believe they have an open door may fail to see how intimidating it is for a subordinate to walk through. These leaders may be inadvertently creating a culture of silence, while also misinterpreting a quiet meeting or a lack of objections as agreement. 

Given the challenges stacked against speaking up, it’s crucial to go in armed with tools and techniques to improve the chances of vital messages getting through.  

When Dave Corbin ChPP, Chief Project Delivery Officer at Gleeds, appeared on a recent episode of the APM Podcast, he urged project professionals to pick their moment well.  

“You have to respect people’s roles, positions and responsibilities,” he said. “If I disagreed with what my boss or my client was saying, I wouldn't disagree with them in front of a bunch of other people in a room or on a call. The most success I’ve had in those situations is where I’ve done it quietly afterwards.” 

It’s also important to avoid emotional terms, criticism or sensational expressions of panic. Stick to the language of risk management, and enter any conversation with an inquisitive, collaborative air, framing your insights as a shared puzzle to be solved. This allows senior leaders to engage without feeling attacked.  

Three steps to success 

For Evans, there are three clear steps to effective intervention. First, find allies – the people who will give you the strongest support, and therefore the confidence, to raise the issue. In locating your people, you go from feeling alone to becoming the voice of a team.  

“When you go into these project boards, you already know all these people will have your back, because they’re on the same wavelength,” he says.  

The second step is to be pre-emptive. If you know you have a project board coming up, gather your evidence, study the agenda in advance and spot your opportunity to get your point across.  

Finally, Evans says, it’s important to be unflinching – as well as clear. You need to convey the concise, undeniable thread linking the root cause of the issue to the ultimate fallout, whether that’s commercial or operational.  

“When you’re dealing with more senior stakeholders, they don’t have time for line after line of information,” he says. “They want to get straight to the point: the issue, the impact and how they can fix it. One of the greatest things I've learned is that you have to be brutally honest.” 

True project leadership is not about maintaining a uniform green status on a dashboard. It’s about having the integrity and courage to speak up when a project is off course, even when facing pressure from above. By standing their ground, project professionals can stop being passive observers of unfolding failure and start building resilience – for themselves, their project and the organisation. 

As Corbin stressed on the APM Podcast, your instinct to speak truth to power may be more finely tuned than you think. 

“Always make sure you speak up, because you might be right,” he said. “They might have overseen something. And you might just change something for the good.” 

Listen to James Evans discussing psychological safety on the Project Podcast