INVITATION ONLY
Psychological safety enables people to speak up, ask questions, challenge assumptions, and learn from mistakes - key ingredients for inclusive leadership, innovation, and strong organisational outcomes.
This Community Networking session will explore how psychological safety can be strengthened through individual behaviours and supported through organisational processes.
We will hear from Rob Denman, Director of Safety and Assurance: Technical Services at NATS, the UK’s leading provider of air traffic control services. Rob will share the practical steps taken at NATS to strengthen psychological safety at NATS and the impact this has had on organisational culture, team dynamics, and operational outcomes.
Rob is an alumnus of the Royal Academy of Engineering’s pilot Inclusive Leadership Programme (ILP), an 18-month programme that upskills small teams of early-career, mid-career and senior leaders in engineering companies. The programme focuses on building inclusive leadership mindsets and behaviours in engineering to enable organisational transformation towards improved engineering performance. The programme produces a growing community of leaders who champion inclusive practices and catalyse systemic change towards greater inclusion across the profession.
Following Rob’s presentation, participants will take part in facilitated breakout discussions using guided prompts to reflect on psychological safety within their own organisation and teams. These small group conversations are designed to encourage peer learning and the exchange of practical ideas across sectors and disciplines, enabling awardees to identify approaches they can apply in their own contexts.
Participants will leave with practical insights and peer perspectives on how psychological safety can be strengthened within engineering teams and organisations.
Programme
| 11.30am | Awardee Excellence Community welcome |
| 11.35am |
Speaker talk Rob Denman, NATS |
| 11.50am | Quickfire Q&A |
| 11.55am | Breakout room discussion |
| 12.15pm | Plenary feedback and group discussion |
| 12.25pm | Closing remarks |
| 12.30pm | Close of event |
Recording notice
Please note this event will be recorded and published on the Royal Academy of Engineering website. Please keep your video off and your account will muted until the facilitator invites you to put your camera on and unmute yourself.
Accessibility
It is very important to the Royal Academy of Engineering that our events are accessible to all. If you have any accessibility requirements, please contact Kirsty Chishti at your earliest convenience so that necessary arrangements can be made.
Diversity monitoring form
The Academy is committed to equity, diversity and inclusion and one of our goals is to develop an engineering community fit for the future. To help us achieve this, we would like to collect some basic anonymous data about the event attendees. If you would like to help, please complete the diversity monitoring form by logging into your user account on our website and completing ‘Update my D&I data’.
Rob Denman
Rob Denman is Director of Safety & Assurance: Technical Services at NATS, the UK’s leading provider of air traffic control services. Through his work on the Inclusive Leadership Programme, Rob helped deliver a practical psychological safety initiative at NATS, embedding inclusive behaviours and organisational processes that support speaking up, learning, and continuous improvement in a safety critical environment.
About the series
The Community Networking series gives members a unique opportunity to meet and connect with other awardees from across the Awardee Excellence Community. The purpose is to foster collaboration, knowledge exchange and facilitate networking in a digital environment. Each meeting will focus on a different cross-cutting theme or challenge faced by Community members, relevant across disciplines and career stages.
All attendees will be required to complete their entry into the Awardee Directory so you will easily be able to find and connect with the people you meet before during and after.