Telling the boss bad news twice.

Telling the boss bad news twice.

Soon after I graduated from university with my degree in ecology, I got a job as an Experimentalist at Jealott’s Hill Research Station, Berkshire. I worked in a department called “Weed Science” (yes, it does sound like an 80’s teen movie), and we worked at the discovery end of the research process to find novel methods for weed control in crops. After a year or so in first-stage glasshouse trials, I moved into late-stage field trials, which involved proper farm work. After a while doing that, I moved back up north to the University of Nottingham, managing research trials at the university farm, Sutton Bonington. Incidentally, some of the fields we worked were under the flight path for East Midlands airport, and every now and then, we’d find a piece of the 737 engine from the Kegworth air disaster in the soil.

It was an awesome job: I was effectively part farmer, part research scientist. One day I could be driving tractors – ploughing, harrowing, mowing, or drilling, and the next I could be in the lab, analysing soil and plant samples. Such is the nature of farm work that some days were very long, particularly at harvest time: 16 hour days starting at dawn were common. Farm work is also amongst the most dangerous and unsafe of all industries, due to factors including the highly physical nature of the job, the use of heavy machinery, working with animals, and the fact that you’re often completely alone, working a long way from help, potentially without even a mobile phone signal. For most of my farm work life, I was usually carrying at least one minor injury at any time. This was also the point in my career when I got interested in the theory and practice of safety itself – studying for NEBOSH (the UK health and safety board) qualifications whilst I worked.

I remember one particular day that has stayed with me when I think about safe work; I was mowing a field of clover, about an hour’s drive away from the farmyard, when the mower clogged up and jammed. To unjam it, all I needed to do was pull a load of wet clover out of the mower mechanism. Obviously I’d disconnect the PTO (Power Take-Off) and turn off the engine first, but the mower weighed a few hundred kilos, and climbing underneath it without something supporting it securely would be a very bad idea. It’s highly unlikely that it could drop on me, but I knew that if it did, I’d be crushed. Not only that, but nobody would even know until I didn’t turn up at the farm office in the evening. Without anything around to support it safely, I decided I had no real option but to drive back to the farm, which cost me the rest of the day. My biggest worry at the time was that I’d get into trouble for not finishing the job.

My main workhorse, a JD6100

Another day, we were driving back from harvesting a crop of barley. I was driving the tractor and hauling a 10-12 tonne trailer of grain, behind my boss who was driving the combine harvester. My tractor was a well-worked but reliable John Deere 6100, but this was the first trailer pull of the year and I hadn’t realised how worn the brakes had become. As we came up to the first junction, my boss stopped. I braked, and quickly realised I had a problem – in desperation, I had to literally stand up in the cab, put all my weight on the brake pedals, and pull on the steering wheel to brake harder. It still wasn’t enough and I drove straight into the back of him.

Harvesting a wheat crop trial

I told my boss that the brakes had failed, but he didn’t believe me. He thought I hadn’t been paying enough attention, as it had been a long, hot and tiring day. He told me to be more careful and we drove back to the farm; with me making sure I gave a large stopping distance between us, and using engine braking to slow down. Here’s an important sidenote: in fairness to my boss, I very much had form for crashing things: I’d already gently crashed a tractor into the side of a lorry and caused rather a lot of damage, twice got a tractor deeply stuck in a muddy field, and tipped a van sideways into a ditch that was covered by long grass…

Back at the yard, my boss tested the brakes, crucially without pulling a trailer full of grain. Stating that they were working to his satisfaction, he told me to get on with my work. From then on, I drove that tractor like I was driving on ice, giving myself loads of distance to stop, and largely using the engine to brake, as well as the brakes themselves.

A couple of weeks later, my boss came into our field office, white as a sheet, having very nearly driven the tractor straight into (and potentially *through*) the farm manager’s front room whilst towing a trailer. He apologised for not believing me before, and we serviced the tractor brakes the following day.

It’s worth making explicit the direct link here between psychological safety and physical safety. Psychological safety isn’t just about innovation. Those failing brakes could have caused a much worse incident resulting in serious injury or death. Had I felt psychologically safer, I may have been more insistent, and I may have spoken up about the failing brakes not just once, but twice, and more boldly. As a result we could have serviced them before anything bad could happen. I didn’t, although I certainly should have – but by this point I was also doubting myself; my boss was far more experienced than me, he was the expert, and after all, I did have a history of crashing things…

Reflecting on this recently, I realised this important aspect to psychological safety that I hadn’t fully considered before. Psychological safety is not just about telling your boss bad news, it’s also about being able to tell them *twice*. 

10 years previously, in the sky above the fields I worked in, after the alarm was raised that the left engine was on fire, the flight crew shut down the right (i.e. wrong) engine. Despite being able to see the engines and being concerned that it looked like the wrong one had been shut down, the cabin crew didn’t inform the flight deck, partly because they didn’t want to interrupt them during an emergency and tell them, again, that it looked like the engine was on fire.

A very effective way to silence someone is to disregard their concerns or fail to act on them properly. And even if the thing they’re raising isn’t that critical, the next thing might be. If we speak up to authority, sometimes they might not believe us the first time, they might misunderstand what we’ve said, or they might disregard what we’ve said as unimportant or unnecessary. Psychological safety means being able to say, even to someone superior to us “No, I really mean it. Listen to what I’m saying.” As leaders, managers, colleagues and peers, we must make sure that we’re creating environments where people can tell us something twice.

Further Reading:

The Kegworth Disaster, Human Factors 101

Farming is the most dangerous profession


Related articles:Verbally speaking up at work

Psychological Safety in Aviation

Types of Human Error

Safety Work vs the Safety of Work

Guardrails and Failure

Safety I & Safety II

Psychological Safety Workshops

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Psychological Safety at Work

This article from BCG is well timed and well written, and begins by addressing some common misconceptions about psychological safety, such as that it means avoiding conflict and coddling people. Psychological Safety Levels the Playing Field for Employees. The research discussed in this article shows that PS is also particularly effective at improving the workplace and reducing attrition for women, people of colour, LGBTQ+ employees, people with disabilities, and people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. As Amy Edmondson says, “leaders who care about diversity must care about psychological safety, just as those who care about psychological safety must also care about diversity, inclusion, and belonging.“

Steve Ingham was kind enough to invite me onto his podcast “Supporting Champions” back in 2022, and here he’s joined by Amy, discussing the right kind of wrong. I like Amy’s point about, when working in new territory, changing the phrasing of “trial and error” to “trial and failure” because error can imply that there was some way to know in advance what the “right” thing was. 


The language we use matters.

This is interesting: research on the use of the word “confederate” in simulations, which is often used in research literature to describe an individual allied with the research team. Of course, confederate can also mean the Confederate States of America and has connotations of racial injustice and slavery, so there may be utility in using an alternative term. In other domains, such as technology, there are increasing efforts to change the language we use in order to make sure people don’t feel attacked or excluded, such as changing language from “master and slave” components, to “primary and subordinate” or similar.

Likewise, a move away from militaristic terms such as “DMZ” (from the military term “demilitarised zone”, used in tech to describe a network zone that bridges a private network to an untrusted or public network), or describing successful sales people as “Top Guns”, is I believe, overdue. Personally, I also avoid the term “post-mortem” (literally meaning “after death”) in most cases, preferring “retrospective”, “lessons learned” or similar. In most retrospectives, nobody died, and using language that suggests such gravity to a situation can diminish our inclination to candour. Language matters.


Psychological safety in the military

I’ve spoken and worked with many folks in military organisations about psychological safety, ranging from the the UK MOD and the Royal Navy, to the US Army and the US Air Force. One of the programmes at the MOD focusses on measuring and enhancing psychological safety in major defence projects, using the associated Psychological Safety Assessment Service. Here’s a great article, “How the MOD is creating Psychologically Safe environments to enable project success” that reflects on some of the success and findings so far, and where the programme is hoped to go next.


Psychological safety includes the safety to psychology

Here’s a great piece by psychological safety community member Dan Rust “Less with more. A call to action for the new year.” Dan describes how institutional pressures can create a harmful environments, likening it to a pressure cooker. He references the institutional dynamics of scarcity and competition that led in part to the Challenger disaster that we covered in a previous issue. Dan goes on to state that we should demand that we do “less with more” and resist the relentless march of doing more with less”. I love this excellent point on mental health too: “Psychological safety includes the safety to psychology. People who feel safe to seek psychological care for their psychological needs feel psychologically safe!”

This week’s poem:

Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, by W. B. Yeats

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.