Where Do People Run When Things Go Wrong?

By Samuel Roy

Several years ago, an employee walked into my office looking visibly uncomfortable. After closing the door and sitting down, they explained that they had made a mistake. It was not a catastrophic mistake and it was certainly not the first mistake I had seen during my career. The issue was significant enough that it would require attention, some additional work, and a few difficult conversations, but what stayed with me afterward had very little to do with the mistake itself. What I remember most clearly was the fact that their first instinct had been to come directly to me.

There had been no attempt to hide the issue, no effort to quietly solve the problem before anyone noticed, and no carefully constructed explanation designed to minimize responsibility. They simply came forward, explained what had happened, and asked for help. At the time, I appreciated the honesty. Looking back, however, I have come to realize that the interaction revealed something much more important than honesty alone.

It revealed trust.

The longer I work in leadership, the more I have come to believe that moments like these tell us far more about organizational culture than many of the metrics and assessments we commonly use to evaluate it. They reveal what employees genuinely believe will happen when something goes wrong. They reveal whether people feel safe enough to raise concerns quickly, whether they trust leadership to respond constructively, and whether the culture encourages learning or quietly encourages self-protection.

What Employees Do After a Mistake Matters

Psychological safety has become one of the most widely discussed leadership concepts in recent years. Researchers have connected it to innovation, collaboration, learning, engagement, and organizational performance. Leadership teams frequently talk about creating environments where employees feel comfortable speaking openly, raising concerns, challenging assumptions, and asking for help when they need it.

Those conversations are important, but I sometimes think psychological safety becomes easier to understand when we move away from theory and focus on what employees actually experience during ordinary moments at work.

Particularly when mistakes happen.

Mistakes create a unique moment inside every organization because they introduce vulnerability. Whether the issue is large or small, employees are suddenly faced with a choice. They can raise the concern immediately, seek support, and work collaboratively toward a solution, or they can attempt to manage the situation themselves while they evaluate the potential consequences of bringing the issue forward. That decision often happens quickly, but it is rarely random. It is usually shaped by previous experiences and by what employees have learned about how leadership responds when circumstances become difficult.

People remember those experiences more than many leaders realize. They remember whether concerns were met with curiosity or frustration. They remember whether difficult conversations focused on learning or blame. They remember whether leaders remained calm under pressure or became reactive when things did not go according to plan. Over time, those experiences quietly teach employees what is safe and what is not.

The Real Risk Is Often the Delay

One of the lessons leadership has reinforced for me repeatedly is that mistakes themselves are rarely the greatest risk facing an organization. Most mistakes can be corrected, most problems can be solved, and most operational issues remain manageable when they are identified early enough. What often creates larger challenges is the delay that occurs when people hesitate to bring those issues forward.

When employees become concerned about embarrassment, criticism, or disproportionate reactions, they often spend valuable time trying to solve problems alone before involving others. Sometimes they succeed. Often they do not. In either case, leaders lose visibility into issues while they are still small, and organizations lose opportunities to respond before consequences begin to grow. By the time the situation finally reaches the surface, the organization may be dealing with the effects of silence as much as the effects of the original mistake.

I have seen the opposite happen as well. I have seen employees raise concerns immediately, acknowledge mistakes openly, and seek support before issues had time to expand. In almost every case, the outcome was better. Problems were addressed more quickly, learning happened more effectively, and trust was strengthened rather than weakened. The difference was not the quality of the employees involved. The difference was the environment they were operating within and their confidence that honesty would be met with support rather than punishment.

Every Leadership Reaction Teaches Something

As leaders, I think we sometimes underestimate how much influence our reactions have during these moments. Employees pay close attention to what happens when things go wrong because those situations reveal organizational priorities more clearly than many formal messages ever could.

When a mistake is brought forward, people are watching to see whether leadership focuses first on solving the problem or assigning blame. They are watching to see whether accountability is approached as a learning opportunity or as a search for fault. They are watching to see whether difficult conversations remain respectful and constructive even when the circumstances are uncomfortable.

This does not mean accountability becomes less important. Organizations need standards. They need ownership. They need learning and continuous improvement. Employees should still be expected to perform, meet expectations, and take responsibility for their actions when mistakes occur. Psychological safety does not remove accountability. If anything, it makes accountability easier because people are more willing to acknowledge problems honestly and engage in finding solutions.

What I have come to believe, however, is that the sequence matters. The first responsibility is understanding the situation and addressing the immediate issue. Once the problem has been stabilized, leaders can focus on understanding what happened, identifying lessons learned, and exploring how similar situations can be prevented in the future.

When leaders reverse that sequence and focus primarily on blame, people naturally become more cautious. The organization may believe it is reinforcing accountability, but it is often reinforcing silence. Over time, employees learn that protecting themselves is safer than bringing forward difficult realities, and that lesson can become deeply embedded within the culture.

Trust Is Built Through Repeated Experiences

One of the themes that continues to emerge throughout my leadership experience is that trust is rarely built through large symbolic gestures. More often, it is built quietly through repeated experiences over time. It develops through consistency, follow-through, honesty, and the countless small interactions that shape how people experience leadership every day.

The way leaders respond to mistakes is one of those interactions.

Employees remember whether leaders listened before reacting. They remember whether they felt respected during difficult conversations. They remember whether support was available when challenges emerged unexpectedly. Individually, these moments may appear relatively small. Collectively, however, they shape culture in powerful ways because they influence whether employees feel safe enough to bring forward reality when reality becomes uncomfortable.

In many ways, psychological safety is less about comfort than it is about honesty. It is about creating conditions where people can speak openly, raise concerns early, ask for help when needed, and acknowledge mistakes without fearing that a difficult situation will immediately become worse.

My Measure of Leadership Success

The longer I work in leadership, the more I find myself returning to a surprisingly simple question: when someone on my team makes a mistake, am I the first person they come to?

Not because I have all the answers. Not because they need permission to act. But because they trust that I will help them solve the problem calmly, support them through the consequences, and then work with them to understand how similar situations can be avoided in the future.

For me, that has become one of the clearest indicators of psychological safety.

Not because it appears on a dashboard or because it can be measured through a survey, but because it reflects something deeper about the relationship between leaders and their teams. When employees bring mistakes forward quickly, they are demonstrating trust. They are demonstrating confidence that honesty will be met with support, that difficult conversations can happen constructively, and that learning matters more than blame. They are also demonstrating confidence that accountability will be fair, proportionate, and focused on improvement rather than punishment.

The longer I observe organizations, the more convinced I become that people are generally willing to tell the truth when they believe it is safe to do so. The responsibility of leadership is creating the conditions that make that choice easier. When people run toward leadership instead of away from it after making a mistake, they are revealing something important about the culture they experience every day.

And in many ways, that may be one of the strongest indicators that psychological safety truly exists.

Samuel Roy is the founder of Noreki and the author of The Coherence Gap™: Closing the Distance Between Aspiration and Experience. His work focuses on helping leaders build organizations where purpose, strategy, leadership, operations, culture, and human energy reinforce one another.