In 2025, a 19-year-old Italian kid called Kimi Antonelli climbed into a Mercedes Formula 1 car and promptly started crashing it. He crashed in practice sessions. He crashed a rare Mercedes-AMG road car. He made mistakes that, in most high-pressure environments, would have earned him a very public dressing down and a ticket back to the junior series.
What happened instead was more interesting.
Toto Wolff, the Mercedes team principal and one of the most successful leaders in modern sport, responded by doubling down on support. He was candid with Antonelli about what went wrong. Brutally honest, by his own admission. But he also acknowledged something that most leaders in his position would have glossed over: “You remind yourself that you’re not sitting opposite an adult. Kimi’s more kid than an adult. And you have to remind yourself that he’s just 19.”
Wolff did not treat the crashes as a reason to withdraw trust. He treated them as part of the learning process. And by March 2026, Antonelli had won his first Grand Prix.
This did not happen by accident. It happened because Mercedes, under Wolff, operates on a principle that runs through everything the team does: See it. Say it. Fix it.
A culture built on three words
“See it. Say it. Fix it.” is the mantra Wolff established at Mercedes to create what he calls a “no blame culture.” The idea is deceptively simple. If you see a problem, you say it. Then you fix it. You do not hide it, you do not dress it up, and nobody punishes you for raising it. The focus is always on the problem, never on the person.
Wolff has been explicit about why this matters. “I want the organisation to be one in which people feel safe speaking up,” he has said. If leaders are willing to admit their own shortcomings, it creates a culture where everybody can do it better next time. You blame the problem, not the person.
This is not just good management. It is, whether Wolff uses the academic language or not, a textbook example of what Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson calls psychological safety.
What Edmondson actually means by psychological safety
Edmondson coined the term “team psychological safety” in the 1990s to describe work environments where candour is expected and where people can speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes, and challenge ideas without fear of being punished or humiliated for doing so.
It sounds obvious when you put it that way. Of course teams should be able to speak freely. But Edmondson’s research, spanning decades and captured in her book “The Fearless Organization”, shows how rarely it happens in practice. In most workplaces, people self-censor constantly. They do not raise concerns because they are afraid of looking ignorant, incompetent, or negative. They stay quiet because the perceived personal risk of speaking up outweighs the perceived benefit to the team.
The cost of that silence is enormous. Edmondson’s research has linked it to everything from medical errors in hospitals to engineering failures in product development. When people do not feel safe flagging problems, the problems do not go away. They just surface later, when they are bigger, more expensive, and harder to fix.
Her framework for building psychological safety rests on a sequence that leaders can follow. First, set the stage: frame the work honestly, acknowledge the uncertainty and complexity, and make it clear that everyone’s input is needed. Second, invite participation: ask questions, create forums for input, and demonstrate that you genuinely want to hear what people think. Third, respond productively: when someone does speak up, how you react determines whether anyone will ever do it again. Thank them for the candour, engage with the substance of what they said, and never punish honesty. Fourth, create structures that sustain it: build feedback loops, normalise the admission of mistakes, and celebrate learning alongside results.
What Edmondson is describing is not a one-off initiative. It is a climate. And like all climates, it is set by the people at the top.
Why “See it. Say it. Fix it.” works
What Wolff has done at Mercedes is take Edmondson’s academic framework and distil it into something a pitwall engineer or a tyre technician can remember under pressure. Three words. See it. Say it. Fix it.
The beauty of it is that it removes the emotional weight from raising a problem. It turns speaking up from a courageous act into a routine one. You are not whistleblowing or being difficult. You are just doing what the team does. Seeing problems, saying them out loud, and then fixing them together.
And this is where the Antonelli story becomes really instructive. Because psychological safety does not mean softness. Wolff has been publicly critical of Antonelli when he needed to be. During the Chinese Grand Prix, he told him over team radio to “stop with this nonsense.” He has described certain mistakes as “really not good.” He has been, by any measure, demanding.
But demanding and psychologically safe are not opposites. Edmondson is clear on this point. Psychological safety is not about lowering the bar. It is about creating the conditions where people can reach a higher bar because they are not wasting energy managing their fear of being judged.
Wolff sets high standards, gives honest feedback, and makes it clear that mistakes are part of the process. The combination of all three is what allows a teenager to climb into one of the most pressurised environments in sport and, over the course of a season, grow into a Grand Prix winner.
What this means beyond the paddock
You do not need to run a Formula 1 team for this to matter. The same dynamics play out in every organisation where people work in teams, which is to say, everywhere.
Think about what happens in a meeting when someone has a concern but does not raise it. The decision gets made. The concern was valid. Six months later, the project fails for exactly the reason that person was thinking about but did not say. Everyone in the room knew the risk. Nobody spoke up.
Edmondson’s research suggests this happens far more often than most leaders realise. And the reason is almost always the same: people did not feel safe enough to say what they were thinking.
The question for any leader is whether you have created the conditions where your people can see a problem, say it out loud, and trust that the response will be to fix it rather than to blame them for finding it. If the answer is yes, you have something powerful. If the answer is no, you have a team that looks functional but is quietly holding back.
Wolff puts it well: if leaders are able to admit their own shortcomings, it creates a culture where everybody can do it better next time. The admission has to come from the top. The safety has to be felt, not just stated. And the response to honesty has to be consistently, visibly, relentlessly constructive.
See it. Say it. Fix it. Three words. But the culture they describe takes years to build and moments to destroy.
References: Amy C. Edmondson, “The Fearless Organization” (2018); Toto Wolff / Mercedes F1, “See it. Say it. Fix it.” leadership philosophy; Timothy Clark, “The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety” (2020).
