In her speech, Dr Sabrina Cohen- Hatton presented a poignant case study at the CIPD National Conference which illustrated the importance of psychological safety in the workplace and how it can reduce risk and save lives, as Marianne Curphey reports.
H
aving left home at 15 and left school at 16 and having slept rough on the streets of Newport in South Wales, she admitted that she had often felt like an outsider.
Although she was grateful for the opportunities she received as a trainee firefighter, she also encountered resistance from some colleagues who resented her being there. “When you are so very different to everybody else
around you, it can take a while to feel comfortable in your own skin, and that was definitely my experience,” she said. “But when you realise that you can’t conform to the stereotype, it’s really empowering, because you realise you’re no longer constrained by them either and that can be incredibly freeing. Sometimes that freedom, that real value in being different, can be a superpower. It can help you to see and take the opportunities that might feel like a really difficult challenge.” Her interest in workplace safety, both physical and
psychological, was born out of a serious incident involving her husband while they were both on duty as firefighters and this drove her to investigate why accidents happen. “I found that the majority of injuries happen as a result
of human error, not a problem with a piece of equipment or a policy, but a human mistake,” she said. “Someone somewhere would make the wrong choice in the wrong place at the wrong time, but that meant people would get hurt. I thought, maybe we can understand it a little better, then there’s something that we can do to reduce it.” She didn’t have any qualifications, so she went back to
night school and studied psychology all the way through to a PhD, learning about how people make decisions under pressure.
“After my PhD, I started to co-supervise a small research
group at Cardiff University,” she explained. “We’ve had a programme of research now since 2013 looking at how firefighters make decisions and training them to make better decisions. As a result of our research, we completely changed the way that we deal with incidents. Now in the UK, we changed our national policy and we’ve got new training methods.” She also does a lot of work now on creating
an environment where people have a sense of psychological safety. “It is not just about people coming to work and feeling
happy all the time,” she explained. “Psychological safety is hard. It means that you’re prepared to have a difficult conversation. It means knowing as a worker that you’re not going to be personally blamed or reprimanded and you can figure out what went wrong in the system so that you can fail fast and succeed even faster next time around. Psychological safety for me has been the key in leadership.”
Left: Dr Sabrina Cohen-Hatton speaking at the 2025 CIPD Annual Conference.
21
GLOBAL LEADERSHIP
RISK & PS YCHOLOGIC AL SAFETY
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