After publishing the “Let’s Get Real About Fear” play yesterday we had so much amazing feedback. There are so many different situations out there… so many teams that are silently wrestling with this. The fact that you don’t hear about the internal turmoil as a team leader should worry you. Your urgent job is to create and uphold the space for these hard conversations. The play that we created may help frame the hard talks but it won’t avoid them.
This video continues to speak about holding the space:
Because of the nature of this war, Ukraine-only teams may be faring better in terms of their feelings anchored firmly in their own reality and (hopefully) not working or having to interact with western, safe, colleagues. It is the split reality between the lived atrocity of war with death happening everywhere around and the fact that our support system, the humans we normally work with, are not in the same danger that is the hardest to come to terms with.
The cognitive dissonance needed to take care of everyday tasks while carrying this heavy burden. The “survivor’s guilt” feelings those who have safety may harbour. The feelings of impotency and of being insufficient. The absurdity and unfairness of it all. All of these are valid sentiments for everyone in distributed teams. And they are but a few, there is a constellation more of variations of these. Some may even be good ones. Hope, inspiration, being grateful – they too need a space to be discussed and shared.
We can’t squander the wins of the pandemic and create even more HumanDebt by ignoring this moment where we are first called upon to have humanity in the face of extreme external hardship.
If you’re a team leader of ANY team in any industry, whether or not they have any direct ties with the o a real emotional check-in, have a meeting where it is not at all about the day-to-day but it is instead to discuss all this. Even if you won’t use our play, at very minimum hold the space. Stop functioning in virtue of inertia and uphold the artificial personal versus professional boundary when it comes to life.
If you are going to use our play be gentle and compassionate. It’s a really hard one. Be sensitive. Let people engage with as much or as little of it as they like. Let them just listen if nothing else. Before any of the space-holding tell your teammates that you will hold the space. Appeal to the fact that if there’s only one person in the team that will see the benefit of opening up together on this then that’s still absolutely worth it to everyone.
We have had a few new teams do the play yesterday and our initial findings held – people already felt better for having breached the topic and they will undoubtedly feel the benefits in the days to come. Let us know how it works out for you and how your teams are braving this.
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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