Over the last couple of weeks, I have delivered keynotes for a banking event, an HR events and I was a guest on a couple of leadership podcasts and I have to admit that I am re-energised and hopeful! There’s hope for humanity in the workplace! There’s swell in the “woke HR/people” movement. There’s mass, people are resolute to see lasting change. So many people with their hearts in the right place that I can’t begin to name them all or give you examples but overall, the sheer quantity of people who were saying the right things was overwhelming. I genuinely have renewed hope in spite of the absurd rhetorics in the UK that sees the government have ideas about the value of working from home.
Said rhetorics, if you missed it, sees the Prime Minister of the country have a stance on productivity to the sound of collective eye rolls. In what could forever be linked to his name as his contribution to the momentous world of work change moment that he missed, he offers an illustrious example where, when he was working from home himself, his sense of urgency seems to have been sorely missing and as a result, his actions were slow and he was less scintillating than his usual scintillating self:
“My experience of working from home is you spend an awful lot of time making another cup of coffee and then, you know, getting up, walking very slowly to the fridge, hacking off a small piece of cheese, then walking very slowly back to your laptop and then forgetting what it was you’re doing.” -said Boris Johnson having clear decided to risk being confined to history as the purveyor of office work productivity advice despite his propensity for distracting cheese.
So the fact that there are people out there who take the topics of human work seriously despite misguided and irresponsible “leadership signals” in chatter such as this one, is really good news. There are people out there who are concerned with the right topics:
What are real outcomes for us? When and where should work best happen so we accomplish those?
How should we work so we get more and better of those?
How can we bring emotions back into the workplace? How do we invest in lowering the HumanDebt?
How do we build a culture of data gathering and true feedback loops so we know what our people feel and think at all times and they know we understand, care and will do something about it?
What does “a good life” mean for our people and what can we do to give it to them?
What role do fun and joy play in being into the flow or in the zone and therefore highly productive?
How do we get the teams we have to love what they do and each other?
How do we truly eliminate command and control?
How do we eradicate fear from our shop entirely?
This last one is a stupendous one and it means so much. If it were possible it will pay off oodles of HumanDebt in its wake. If we were to use all our goodwill and find, methodically, all the points where people are afraid, where they dread something; where they don’t engage because of fear; where they hold their tongue not to sound critical; where they ashore retros or times when there’s an opportunity for blame assignment, etc. If we could find all the painful interactions and remove those ones first we’d have a transformed “employee experience” program. Forget about making employees happy and creating moments of joy for them, start at making them less unhappy and vow to never let them feel fear.
In every Q&A over these events someone asked one version of the following questions:
- “But what about leadership? Their own lack of Psychological Safety, lack of teaming, lack of understanding, what do we do with that? That’s where the real problem is” – First of all no, that’s not “THE” problem but it obviously is one of them. That said, the “us vs. them” mentality has to go for all of us including those asking because it’s not helpful. We have problems at all levels, there’s no enterprise that only has a leadership problem that hasn’t bled into every other aspect of the HumanDebt. The answer is the same: create teams with high psychological safety – If you’re HR reading this or even if you are the leaders in question themselves – create teams at the top. Benchmark against super effective product teams and aim to become as good as them. Rally around a common goal – even better make that goal getting your employees to do Human Work too aside from their usual tasks. Once that’s in place and supported with some team building and a common backlog then we can start seeing leadership teams that are tight-knit and want everyone else to have the same magic.
- “What about that one bad rotten apple who is always finding flaws and is negative and disruptive to the team. Are they Psychologically Safe? They sure always speak up” – No. If the need to always object doesn’t come from a good, constructive, collaborative place then no, they aren’t safe at all, Psychological Safety is a GROUP DYNAMIC where each team member feels safe to express anything as long as it comes from a positive impetus where they want to accomplish something with their teammates not moan for the sake of it or point fingers for the sake of negative gratification.
- “Surely the health of the team and the way people interact is different in different cultures and we have teams all over the world so we can’t measure all of them the same way and show them the same data and ask them to do the same exercises together as a team as they wouldn’t be applicable” – Poppycock. Of course, you can and they are. Humans are humans are humans. Spend less time thinking of the differences and more time underlining the similarities and those commonalities will shine through in good team behaviours that are universal. Do people from some countries not understand the meaning of learning with a team? Do contractors behave differently when they fear blame than your own employees? Do women tend to read a certain word to have different connotations than men? All of the possible differences are irrelevant and a red herring if you have instead spent time ensuring that the concepts and measurements you have in place have been agreed upon with everyone and are universal and unifying. It’s your opportunity to restart your D&I efforts by taking a new tac: use the common level of human emotions and behaviours as the equalising foundation to underpin all human work and you’ll start seeing leaps and growing true empathy at every level.
We all want to believe we are special and different and of course, we are but not in the way we interact with our teams in the office, when it comes to that there’s solid scope in believing we can and should analyse each behaviour and improve it, there are no unknowns, the only thing stopping us aside from the lack of organisational permission and support is our own limitations and resistance to the human work.
As ever: ignore the “yes but…” even if it contains Boris-level absurdities from “the top” and instead distribute the human work to the team level with the help of tools like ours that help them improve their own behaviours and build the Psychological Safety they need.
It’s as easy (or as impossible) as that.
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The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are: Understand, Measure and Improve
At PeopleNotTech we make software that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams. If you care about it- talk to us about a demo at contact@peoplenottech.com
To order the “People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age” book go to this Amazon link