Travis Irving is the director of environmental health and safety for Trifecta Services Company, based in Charlotte, North Carolina. The opinions are the author’s own.
I’ve been in demolition long enough to know that the worst day at any workplace isn’t the day someone stops working because something doesn’t feel right. The worst day is when someone saw a problem, stood still, and we all paid the price.
That’s why at our company, everyone from the newest employee to the project manager has the authority to stop working. Not as a courtesy. Not as a suggestion. As a fundamental operating principle.
Some may think that’s a horrible idea, but here’s what I’ve learned: Chaos doesn’t come from empowering people to stop working. It comes from creating a culture that they fear, even if they see something that looks wrong.
the reality
Let me be clear: I know mistakes will happen. Fatigue, distractions and simple oversights are inevitable in any workplace, no matter how skilled the team. In demolition, we are often working on compromised, poorly documented or decades-old buildings. We’re dealing with utilities that vary widely from structure to structure, with labels that have faded or were never accurate to begin with. We operate heavy equipment in tight spaces under pressure to stay on schedule.
We could pretend that perfection is possible if people try harder. We could blame an individual worker for not properly identifying utility disconnections and hope they never make that mistake again. But that ignores reality. Even experienced workers can miss something when they’re tired, when conditions change, or when they’re under pressure to keep moving.
A leader’s reaction is important
Whenever something goes wrong, leadership is faced with a choice: learn and improve or blame and punish. This choice determines whether your next incident is reported and prevented or hidden and repeated.
Here’s what I know about people: They achieve high levels of performance largely because of the encouragement and reinforcement they receive from leaders, peers, and subordinates. When someone feels supported, when they know their judgment is trusted, they bring their best to work. When they feel they are one mistake away from being thrown under the bus, they bring their fear.
How you respond to failure matters more than almost anything else you do as a leader. Blame doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t repair equipment, it doesn’t prevent the next incident, and it doesn’t strengthen your equipment. While the incidents themselves are often preventable, how leaders respond when they occur is absolutely critical to building a culture of safety or a culture of silence.
The general authority to stop work makes workplaces safer
Culture determines whether workers feel empowered to prevent mistakes or pressured to hide them. When only supervisors have the authority to stop work, you’re essentially telling everyone else that their judgment doesn’t matter. You’re saying, “I trust you to operate a 50-ton excavator, but I don’t trust you to recognize when something isn’t safe.”
This doesn’t make sense.
The truth is that no one in our company knows everything: not the workers, not the supervisors, not the management. The cockpit operator has a view that the ground crew does not. The worker who just entered a space might notice something that the foreman passed three times. Security cannot be the responsibility of one person or one role. It must be the responsibility of all, supported by the authority of all.
The enemy of learning
There is a phrase I come back to often: the enemy of learning is knowing. When we assume we already have the answers, we stop listening. We stop seeing what is really in front of us.
I’ve seen this play too many times. A supervisor who has done a certain type of demonstration 100 times stops asking questions. A crew that has been working together for years stops checking in on each other. Management assumes that since we haven’t had an incident in months, our systems must be working perfectly.
The authority to stop work disturbs this complacency. When someone makes a stop, it forces all of us, regardless of experience or position, to pause and look again. To question our assumptions. Consider that we may have missed something or that conditions have changed in a way we did not anticipate.
Sometimes the person who quits is wrong. Sometimes it’s a false alarm. And you know what? That’s perfectly fine. I’d rather miss work a dozen times unnecessarily than miss the one time that really mattered.
What it means in practice
Giving everyone the authority to stop work isn’t just about meetings and safety signs. It’s about what happens when a new hire raises his hand on the third day and says, “This doesn’t feel right.” do you listen Do you research? Or do you dismiss them because they are new?
It’s about what happens when someone quits a job and it turns out they were being too cautious. Do you appreciate them taking care of the crew and using it as a learning opportunity? Or do you shame them into slowing things down? These moments define your culture more than any politics.
I’m not going to tell you that the authority to stop work solves everything. We still make mistakes. But let’s learn from them, talk about them openly, and work to create an environment where mistakes don’t lead to catastrophic events. And when something goes wrong, we focus our energy on understanding what happened and preventing it next time, not on finding someone to blame.
If you’re in charge of construction and you haven’t empowered your entire team to stop working, I’d challenge you to ask yourself why. What are you afraid of? What’s the worst that could happen if you trusted your people’s judgment?
Because I can tell you the worst thing that will happen if you don’t.
