No team can work without ever making mistakes. The more a team has to deal with new tasks, new technology, or unfamiliar ways of working, the more likely mistakes are to happen. What is more concerning, therefore, may not be that the team “makes mistakes,” but that when mistakes happen, no one feels safe enough to talk about them.
Research by Amy Edmondson of Harvard University, which studied 51 work teams, found that Psychological Safety, or the feeling of interpersonal safety within a team, is associated with learning behaviors such as asking for feedback, sharing information, seeking help, discussing mistakes, and experimenting with new approaches. These behaviors help teams learn and improve the way they work.
A team that develops does not need to get everything right the first time. It needs to be able to recognize mistakes, learn from them, and prevent the same problems from happening again.
Mistakes Are Not as Dangerous as a Team Choosing to Stay Silent
Imagine an employee sends incorrect information to a customer and later realizes the mistake. If the first thought is, “Will my manager blame me if I say something?” that employee may try to solve the problem alone or choose not to mention it at all. A problem that could have been identified early may then become much more serious.
The concept of Psychological Safety explains that people are more likely to ask questions, seek help, share ideas, or admit mistakes when they feel that speaking up will not lead to embarrassment or make others see them as incompetent. Edmondson’s research also found a clear connection between Psychological Safety and team learning behaviors.
Google later explored this concept through Project Aristotle and found that team effectiveness does not depend only on “who is on the team,” but also on “how the team works together.” Psychological Safety was identified as the first and most important of the five key factors highlighted by Google.
Therefore, when a mistake happens, a leader should not ask only, “Who did this?” but also, “What happened, and how can we prevent it from happening again?”
Shift from Finding Who Is Wrong to Finding What the Team Can Learn
When every mistake ends with blame, teams gradually learn that the safest approach is “do not make mistakes” and “if you do, do not talk about them.”
Building a Learning Culture, however, requires shifting the focus from “who made the mistake” to what the team can learn from the situation.
For example, if a customer receives the wrong product, instead of stopping at finding out who entered the incorrect information, the team could review the entire process:
- Where was the information lost?
- Which step created confusion?
- What should be checked more carefully next time?
This way of thinking does not mean avoiding responsibility for mistakes. It means taking greater responsibility by solving the immediate problem and finding ways to prevent it from happening again.
Feedback Turns Mistakes into Lessons That Can Be Applied
Saying “Do not make the same mistake next time” may make someone more careful, but it does not help them understand what they should do differently.
Good feedback should therefore help the team see what happened, what impact it had, and what should be adjusted.
For example, instead of saying:
“Why did you send the wrong work again? You need to be more careful.”
A leader could say:
“Some customer information was missing this time, which meant the next team had to redo part of the work. Let’s look at which step caused the information to be missed and how we can check it next time.”
The second statement still addresses the mistake directly, but it gives the person an opportunity to think and find a solution instead of simply feeling blamed.
Edmondson’s research explains that behaviors such as asking for feedback, discussing mistakes, experimenting, and seeking help are all part of Team Learning Behavior—behaviors that help teams learn from real work experiences.
Create Space for Teams to Try, Make Mistakes, and Learn Together
Building a team that learns from mistakes should not begin only after a major problem occurs. It can be practised through Training, Workshops, or Team Building.
Activities can be designed around challenges with no single correct answer, requiring teams to plan, experiment, and adjust along the way. Afterward, a Reflection session can invite the team to discuss:
- What did we do that worked?
- What did not go according to plan?
- If we could try again, what would we do differently?
- How does what happened connect to our real work?
The heart of the activity is therefore not which team “wins” or “gets everything right,” but whether the team can look back and recognize its thinking patterns, communication style, and areas for improvement.
This idea aligns with Google’s findings, which showed that teams with higher Psychological Safety not only welcomed a wider range of ideas, but were also twice as likely to be rated as effective by executives compared with teams with lower Psychological Safety.
Conclusion
Mistakes do not need to be something organizations try to hide. They should be treated as information that helps teams see what can still be improved.
Leaders play an important role in creating an environment where teams feel safe to speak up when problems occur, explore the causes together, give constructive feedback, and create opportunities for everyone to try new approaches.
Because a team that grows is not a team that never makes mistakes, but a team that can learn, adapt, and come back stronger after making them.
