At PeopleNotTech we make no secret of the fact that we accuse organisations of having amassed a lot of HumanDebt and part of it is the resistance and lack of support for the human work and their reluctance is the primary culprit as to why employees do not have happier lives and can not perform to the best of their abilities. That said, as we pointed out before, the blame can’t rest solely with the company and we must do our part and examine our own stance towards doing the hard people work before we can see meaningful change.
So, as promised yesterday, in this video we’re coming back with some direct pieces of advice of where to start tackling the resistance teams and individuals may experience around doing the people work.
- First off ensure you have enough awareness of the importance of the human work to have a level of agreement in the team regarding how needed it is. Set up a challenge where everyone brings one article to discuss in a team meeting where you assess if working on your own emotions and the team dynamic by trying to actively change behaviours for the better seems to be directly useful to your work performance. Studies about productivity, articles or even just an outline of the Aristotle project, any of these would help better the team’s understanding.
- The immediate and crucial next step is to check yourself. Have a conversation in which you honestly answer this question:
How much resistance do I personally have to doing this people work whatever it may consist of and why do I have it?
Am I distrustful of the organisation and can’t believe this is for our own good or mandated? Am I really overworked maybe verging on burnout? Do I feel too disengaged to care? Do I feel unequipped to do this work? – No need to communicate your findings, just know where you’re coming from then bring them to the team so you learn/process together.
3. Organise a common learning exercise to eliminate the perceived lack of ability. Start at understanding emotions. It’s a simple -and relatively short- effort that is accessible to anyone. A 101 “What are emotions and how to recognise them in ourselves and others” intro to EQ would suffice.
4. Have someone remove the lack of time and prioritisation blocker – your scrum master or your servant leader if you have one. Make time for the human work.
5. Settle on at least one marker/indicator consisting of polled data that you look at continuously as a habit formation anchor. Once you select one, keep it front of mind and check it as often as you can. Don’t predicate your success with the human work on the yearly survey of the company, find a much more responsive way to measure that you see progress together whether it is a daily check-in or a common feeling you can identify, just keep the feedback loop open and useful. Of course if you already have tools such as our Dashboard ensure you see the progress of the people work you in there.
6. Work on building the habit. This is perhaps the most important part of it all. Since we recognise it is all new, fairly uncomfortable and hard to accomplish, it’s crucial we ensure it becomes a habit. Every study on intentional behavioural modification agrees that regularity, frequency and stacking (habit stacking – attaching the new desired behaviour to one that is already established such as reading after brushing your teeth or in our case, doing the human work before a retro or team meeting) are the elements that will help so decide when you are cultivating this.
Think about this: what if your job had always been predicated on doing the human work only? What if what you were employed for, your actual job description, your mandate was that you understand your feelings and the feelings of others and spend all your time trying things you could do individually and in common to better yourself from exercises to workshops and then one day you were told the organisation wants you to do some delivery, tech or research work as well. You would not take kindly to the latter being added on and it would be an effort to learn the necessary skills and to admit it’s necessary. Same goes for the opposite and the answer is the same – with some effort and goodwill the team and individual level resistance to the human work dissipates.
In fact, the barrier this resistance puts up is much smaller than you may imagine it to be and we have seen tens if not hundreds of teams go from circumspect -or downright hostile- to intensely interested, enthusiastic, passionate, open and applying themselves to it with gusto. What prompted the change? Having done enough of the human work after the steps above that they started seeing the markers and data indicators go up while they are already feeling the effects of working in a tight-knit, free, involved, passionate, joyful, high-performing and happy team.
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This Thursday on the Fundamentals of Psychological Safety Series: “ Individual objections to the Human Work” so make sure to subscribe so you have it in your inbox.
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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
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