Launchpad: A Poor Attitude Can Be Contagious

After years of feeling invisible as a trainee, I was not fully prepared for how substantially my role would shift once I became the doctor. I knew the team would look to me for answers. I was not ready for how closely my actions—and inactions—would affect the team around me.

When patient care did not meet my standards, I got quiet, clipped, and focused. I told myself I was being professional. What I was actually doing was broadcasting frustration and judgment to everyone in the room.

The technician who made the mistake heard: You are beyond addressing.

The student nearby heard: It is not safe to ask questions.

The room heard: Something is wrong, and I am the only one who knows it.

It took longer than I care to admit, but it clicked for me when I learned the concept of psychological safety: the shared belief that a team can speak up, raise concerns, and name what they see without fear of humiliation or punishment. I was not building that environment. I was doing the opposite. Anxious teams have a narrowed cognitive bandwidth. They second-guess themselves, hesitate to flag concerns, and make more errors, not fewer. My frustration, worn silently on my face and in my body language, was curating an environment of fear and increasing the risk of the very errors I was trying to prevent.

Psychological safety is not about being nice or lowering your standards. It is patient safety infrastructure. Errors almost never result from one person's knowledge gap in isolation. They result from information that existed somewhere in the room and never reached the person who needed it. When you make the room tense, you become the reason that information never moves.

This is the part they do not teach you in school: as the doctor, you set the emotional temperature of the room. Your team is already reading you, calibrating, and deciding what is safe based on you. Recognizing that is the first step toward making it work for your patients instead of against them.

Here is what I learned to do differently:

Meet mistakes with gratitude. "I'm so glad you brought that to my attention. Let’s work together to fix the problem and prevent it from happening in the future." Every error is an opportunity to learn, review workflows, and build systems that prevent recurrence.

Lead with curiosity, not judgment. "Tell me your thought process" opens a conversation. "Why did you do that?" puts people on the defensive. Silence puts them in fear. Curiosity puts them in learning mode.

Name what you are feeling and ask for your team's help. "I'm not sure of the best way to navigate this. What ideas do you have?" This humanizes you and reframes the situation as a shared challenge rather than someone's failure.

You will not get this right every day. But awareness is where it starts, and it matters most right now, when your habits are forming. The environment you create is not just about your team. It is part of how you care for your patients.