I was twelve years old when I got my first leadership role as a bus monitor on a new school bus in Queenstown, New Zealand. In my head, it was going to be a mobile learning environment, a quiet, orderly space where we'd all do our homework on the way home from school. My vision of successfully stepping into my first leadership role was filled with eager anticipation, however, the first day and most days thereafter were chaos. Nothing about that bus resembled a quiet learning environment. It's fair to say that at that time I had no idea what I was doing!
And so began my appreciation for learning from experience, maybe not in the moment but certainly on reflection. A vision without a thread of likely reality is just a nice idea, and the only way to find that thread is to get it wrong first.
There's a version of the same lesson in Andy Weir's The Martian. Stranded alone on Mars, Mark Watney sums up his entire survival strategy in one line: "I'm going to have to science the shit out of this." What follows is failure after failure, an airlock that blows, a batch of crops that dies. Nobody beams him the answer. He gets it wrong, then less wrong, then well enough to stay alive one more day.
Somewhere on the way to adulthood, most of us unlearn that. We spent our childhoods falling off bikes and failing tests and getting back up. Walk into most workplaces, though, and the safest thing to do with a mistake is bury it.
Across more than 2,000 employees surveyed in our GYST CultureSurvey dataset, Mistake Management has never once scored as a top-three dimension out of the eight we measure. Baseline scores cluster tightly between 3.1 and 3.8 (out of 5), while other dimensions in the same surveys (Support from Team, Speaking Up, and Inclusion) routinely reach 4.0 to 4.3 in the same organisations. The pattern holds across sectors, organisation sizes and geographies. That tells us this isn't a problem unique to one type of culture. Something more fundamental is going on in how workplaces build trust around mistakes.
Across organisations we've measured more than once, Mistake Management is consistently the dimension most resistant to change even when Trust and Psychological Safety improve elsewhere. At GYST, we've learned not to treat Mistake Management as something that improves on its own timeline alongside everything else. Every organisation's path to shifting it looks different, because the reasons behind it, whether it's leadership habit, history, or how errors have been handled in the past, are never quite the same from one workplace to the next.
There's a newer version of this fear showing up now, and it doesn't need a bad boss to produce it. Picture a team member who's drafted something rough, still working it out in their own head. Before they send it, they run it past an AI tool that hands back three polished paragraphs. More often than not the polished version gets sent. The rough one, the one that showed their thinking, disappears. Nobody told them not to submit their own attempt. The thing that gets lost in that moment isn't quality. It's the willingness to have a go, which happens to be the one ingredient every leader I know needs from their people. If someone had handed twelve-year-old me a finished, working bus system on day one, I'd probably have run it. I'd also never have learned what I needed to lead anything afterwards.
The organisations that climb our ladder do it by deliberately reframing what a mistake means, AI-assisted or not. Mistake Management is one of the dimensions we track directly, and it's often the hardest to shift. It asks people to believe a mistake will be met with curiosity rather than consequence, before they've had any chance to test whether that's true. When a leader reframes a mistake from failing to providing information, the conversation changes. The mistake stops being the wrong answer and starts being an early version of the right one. Doesn't matter if it came from a junior engineer, a seasoned manager, or someone who trusted an AI response a little too far.
Next time someone brings you something unfinished, a rough draft, a half-formed idea, an honest "I got this wrong" (perhaps more colourfully positioned…), resist the instinct to reach for the polished version instead. Ask what they tried, and what they'd try next. That single response, repeated often enough, is how you build a team that still trusts its own first attempt.
At twelve, on that bus, I had no idea. Many years and a lot more chaos later, I still don't have a better way to get good at something than trying it badly first, whether that's leading a team, surviving on Mars, or building an environment where people feel safe enough to admit what didn't work today.
Steve Pettit is the Managing Director of GYST, working with leaders across 25 countries to build cultures where psychological safety is the foundation of how work actually gets done, not just a compliance checkbox. With a background spanning education, health, and executive leadership, Steve brings a rare combination of emotional intelligence, strategic thinking, and real-world experience facilitating cultural transformation in high-risk environments. His leadership philosophy is simple: great leadership isn't about having all the answers, it's about creating the conditions where others can find them.