By Angela Hucker, Founder and CEO, EPIC
There is a sentence I hear on sites across this country, usually said quietly, usually by an experienced leader who has been at it a long time.
You cannot say anything to anyone anymore.
It is normally said with frustration rather than malice. The person saying it usually has real standards, has watched those standards slip, and now believes that any attempt to hold someone to them will come back as a complaint. So they say less, and less, and eventually they say nothing until they say far too much all at once.
I want to take that fear seriously, because dismissing it has not worked. It is widespread, it is sincerely held, and it is doing real damage to accountability on Australian construction sites.
It is also, in the way it is usually understood, wrong. And the reason it is wrong is worth understanding properly, because it turns out that the leaders most likely to end up in front of a formal process are not the firm ones.
1. The fear is real. The premise is not.
The belief goes like this: bullying rules have made ordinary management impossible, so any performance conversation is now a risk to the leader.
Here is what the framework actually says. Under Australia’s national workplace laws, a worker is bullied at work when an individual or group repeatedly behaves unreasonably towards them and that behaviour creates a risk to health and safety. Both parts matter. Repeated, and unreasonable, and creating risk.
And then there is the part almost nobody on site has ever been told. Reasonable management action carried out in a reasonable manner is expressly not bullying. That is not a loophole or a defence you have to argue for afterwards. It is written into the framework. The Fair Work Ombudsman sets out the position plainly, and the Fair Work Commission publishes guidance on how workplace bullying applications are dealt with.
Directing work is management action. Setting a standard is management action. Allocating tasks, correcting quality, raising a performance concern, running a formal process, declining a leave request, restructuring a crew: all management action. Done reasonably, none of it is bullying, and no leader should be governing themselves as though it is.
Managing underperformance sits squarely inside that. Addressing someone whose work is not meeting the standard is not a legal risk you are taking. It is the job you were promoted into.
This is general information rather than legal advice, and every business should take its own advice on a specific matter. But the shape of it is not ambiguous, and the industry deserves to know it.
2. So what actually gets leaders into trouble
In my experience it is almost never firmness. It is four other things, and every one of them is avoidable.
Audience. The same correction delivered privately and delivered in front of eleven people are not the same act. One is management. The other adds humiliation, and humiliation is not a more effective version of accountability. It is a different thing that happens to occur at the same moment.
Personalisation. “This work is not to standard” is management action. “You are useless and you always have been” is a judgement about a person, and it fails the reasonableness test in both content and manner.
Unpredictability. A leader whose response to the same mistake varies with their mood is not setting a standard. They are running a weather system. Workers under unpredictable leaders stop taking initiative, stop reporting problems and start managing the leader, which is where the safety risk enters.
Accumulation. This is the big one, and it connects directly to the previous article in this series. The leader who avoids six small conversations does not avoid the confrontation. They store it. And what eventually comes out is disproportionate, personal, loud and in front of people, because three months of frustration is being delivered in one go over something minor.
The leaders who end up in trouble are rarely the ones who managed too firmly. They are usually the ones who avoided managing at all until it came out sideways.
“Strong leadership is not measured by how forcefully a leader delivers the message. It is measured by whether the message is clear, fair, respectful and acted upon.”
3. Where the line actually sits
Most supervisors have never been given anything concrete to test themselves against. They have been told not to bully, which is not usable guidance, because nobody thinks they are bullying at the time.
So here is a comparison you can actually apply. It is not a legal test and it does not replace advice, but it maps the territory in language that works on a construction site.
Reasonable management action, and what tips it over
The same underlying issue. What separates the columns is manner, not firmness.
| Tips over the line | Reasonable management action | |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | The person. Their character, intelligence, worth or background. | The work, the behaviour, the standard and the impact of the gap. |
| Audience | In front of the crew, other trades, or the client. | Private, or at most with a support person present if it is formal. |
| Consistency | Depends on who it is, and on the leader’s mood that morning. | The same standard applied to the apprentice, the gun tradie and the subcontractor. |
| Frequency | Repeated, sustained, and with no clear end point in sight. | Proportionate to the issue, with a defined expectation and a review point. |
| Purpose | To make a point, to relieve frustration, or to make an example. | To change something specific, and the person knows exactly what. |
| Aftermath | No path back. The person is now marked and everyone knows. | A clear route to being back in good standing, and it is honoured. |
| Record | Nothing written, so it becomes your word against theirs. | Brief factual note of what was discussed and agreed. |
General guidance only, not legal advice. See the Fair Work Ombudsman and your own advisers on any specific matter.
Read down the right-hand column and notice something. Not one of those entries requires you to be softer. Several of them require you to be more precise, more consistent and more willing to act early. That is a higher standard of leadership than shouting, not a lower one.
4. Direct is not the same as aggressive
Construction values directness, and it should. Nobody wants a supervisor who buries the message in three layers of padding. On a site where a misunderstanding can hurt someone, plain speech is a virtue.
But directness and aggression get treated as the same trait, and they are not related at all. Directness is about how clear the message is. Aggression is about how much force is attached to it. You can be extremely direct with no aggression whatsoever, and this is what the best leaders I have worked with all have in common.
“That is not acceptable, it has to be fixed today, and here is exactly what I need” is about as direct as language gets. It contains no aggression at all. Adding volume to it does not increase the clarity of the message by a single percentage point. It only adds fear.
And fear does not improve the work. It improves the reporting of the work, which on a construction site is considerably more dangerous than poor work you can see. People who are afraid of their supervisor do not raise the near miss, the defect they caused, or the thing they do not understand. That is how a behavioural problem becomes a safety problem.
5. Why public humiliation is not accountability
There is an old belief in this industry that making an example of someone sets the standard for everyone. Deal with one person publicly and the rest will lift.
It does set a standard. Just not the one intended.
What the crew learns from a public dressing down is not “the standard is high here.” It is “getting it wrong here is dangerous.” Those are completely different lessons and they produce opposite behaviours. The first produces care. The second produces concealment.
I have never met a crew who worked harder because someone was humiliated in front of them. I have met plenty who got quieter, more careful about what they reported, and more inclined to let the supervisor find out the hard way.
Correct in private. Recognise in public. It is a very old rule and it holds up because it is about where information flows afterwards.
6. Power changes what people hear
This is the part that experienced leaders most often miss, and they miss it honestly.
When you hold someone’s roster, their hours, their next start and the reference that gets them the job after this one, your ordinary comment is not received as an ordinary comment. A throwaway line from you carries weight that the identical line from a peer does not.
Most supervisors do not feel powerful. They feel squeezed from above, pulled at from below, and personally responsible for a program they do not fully control. So when someone suggests they have power over their crew, it does not match their experience, and they dismiss it.
But power is not about how you feel. It is about what you control on someone else’s behalf. And the gap between those two things is where a great deal of unintended harm happens on Australian construction sites. Understanding how hierarchy shapes what people hear, and how bias shapes who gets spoken to that way in the first place, is core to EPIC RISE and to unconscious bias in leadership decisions.
Support: if this article raises something difficult for you or someone on your crew, MATES in Construction is available on 1300 642 111 and Lifeline on 13 11 14, both 24 hours a day.
7. Consistency is the whole game
If there is one thing that determines whether your crew experiences you as firm or as unfair, it is not how hard you come down. It is whether you come down the same way on everyone.
Three consistency tests are worth running on yourself, honestly, this week.
The high performer test. Would you have this conversation with your best tradesperson, in the same terms, about the same behaviour? If the answer is no, you do not have a standard. You have a hierarchy of who is allowed to breach it, and the crew worked that out long before you did.
The subcontractor test. Do the behavioural expectations on your site apply to people who are not on your payroll? You may not be able to performance manage them, but the standard of conduct on your work front is yours to set and yours to escalate.
The swap test. If the same mistake had been made by a different person, of a different age, gender or background, would you have used the same words, the same volume and the same location? This is uncomfortable to answer truthfully. It is also the fastest audit of your own fairness available.
8. Maintaining standards while protecting dignity
Four checks before you deliver it
Ten seconds of self-audit that keeps firm leadership on the right side of the line
-
1
Where am I standing?
Is anyone else within earshot who does not need to be? If yes, move. Nothing you gain from an audience is worth what it costs you. -
2
Am I describing the work or the person?
If your sentence contains a conclusion about who they are rather than what they did, rewrite it before you open your mouth. -
3
What am I actually trying to change?
If you cannot name the specific change you want by a specific time, you are venting rather than managing. Both are human. Only one is your job. -
4
Is there a way back?
The person should leave knowing exactly what good looks like and that meeting it restores them fully. Accountability without a route back is punishment.
Run these in your head while you walk over. That walk is usually long enough.
What should change
1. Teach leaders what reasonable management action means. Most supervisors have been told what not to do and never told what they are entitled to do. That asymmetry produces paralysis, and paralysis produces the accumulation that ends badly.
2. Stop treating this as an HR topic. Bullying, intimidation and harassment are psychosocial hazards under work health and safety law, with model guidance from Safe Work Australia, which also publishes specific guidance on sexual and gender-based harassment as a work health and safety hazard. It belongs in the safety conversation, delivered to leaders, not in an annual module nobody remembers.
3. Make early management the norm. Every avoided conversation is stored aggression waiting for a trigger. The best protection a business has against an aggressive incident is a culture of small, early, unremarkable corrections.
4. Write two lines afterwards. Not a file, not a process. Date, what was discussed, what was agreed. It protects the worker as much as the leader, and it turns a memory into a record.
5. Give people the words. Supervisors do not resist this because they want to be aggressive. They resist because nobody has ever handed them a way to be firm that they can actually use. That is what EPIC Elevate and EPIC RISE exist to do, from opposite ends of the same problem.
Accountability and respect are not in tension
The whole debate in this industry is built on a false trade off: that you can either hold a hard line or treat people well, and that the rules have forced us toward the second at the cost of the first.
That trade off does not exist. The most respected leaders I have worked alongside in thirty years were also the most demanding. Their crews knew exactly where the line was, knew it applied to everyone, knew they would be told early and told privately, and knew there was always a way back.
Nobody ever described those leaders as soft. Nobody ever lodged a complaint about them either.
Build accountability your leaders can actually use
Explore EPIC RISE to build behavioural and psychosocial safety capability across your workforce, from apprentices to senior leaders. If the gap is frontline leadership capability specifically, start with EPIC Elevate or talk to us.
Be Kind Always.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is performance managing someone bullying?
No. Under Australia’s national workplace laws, reasonable management action carried out in a reasonable manner is expressly not workplace bullying. Directing work, setting standards, correcting quality, raising a performance concern and running a formal process are all management action. The Fair Work Ombudsman sets out the position. This is general information and not legal advice.
Where is the line between firm leadership and bullying?
Firmness is not the variable. What tips management action over the line is manner: focusing on the person rather than the work, correcting in front of an audience, applying the standard inconsistently, repeating it with no end point, and leaving no route back into good standing. A leader can be extremely demanding while staying well inside reasonable management action.
What is the difference between direct and aggressive leadership?
Directness is about how clear the message is. Aggression is about how much force is attached to it. The two are unrelated. Adding volume to a direct instruction does not make it clearer, it only adds fear, and fear improves the reporting of the work rather than the work itself. That is a safety problem, not just a culture problem.
Why is public humiliation not an effective way to set standards?
Because the crew does not learn that the standard is high. They learn that getting it wrong is dangerous. Those lessons produce opposite behaviours: the first produces care, the second produces concealment. Correct in private and recognise in public, because the rule is really about where information flows afterwards.
Do behavioural standards apply to subcontractors on my site?
You may not be able to performance manage someone who is not on your payroll, but the standard of conduct on your work front is yours to set and yours to escalate to whoever can act. Inconsistency between direct employees and subcontractors is one of the fastest ways to lose the crew’s confidence that the standard is real.
