Back to (the Team) Work

I’ve come up with the umbrella term of the “Human Debt” (as it pertains to all the things we haven’t -but should have- done for our employees to be happy and productive, the equivalent of “technical debt” in the workplace) a few years ago and my thinking of solutions around it has of course evolved, but at times I’m reminded just how drastically. The other day someone sent me a comment about a Forbes article I had written about Organisational Design nearly two years ago, which bemoaned the lack of design and intentionality in the birth or growth of an organisation. I re-read it and realised I no longer stand by it. At all. 

In essence, it offered that the lack of attention towards how we choose to intentionally design an organisational structure or form a team in terms of finding the best people and matching them, was what was responsible for many (all?) organisational ailments. I now believe that to be wrong. This coincided with a time when PeopleNotTech was just starting out and we were developing a mobile app called Dream Teams. 

This allowed employers to focus on aspects they had never explored before - soft skills, matters of the heart, passion projects, interests, all the knowledge about their employees that companies were missing, and add this new information to their existent data. Using machine learning (or AI in an investment pitch:) our system would essentially then create these perfect teams, offering dynamic teaming based on how this richer data set matched a respective project. This looked on paper as a stupendously better alternative to the way most everyone forms teams today which is let’s face it, mostly by accident. 

So on paper a brilliant idea. In practice, and if you believe Google’s findings in Project Aristotle? Pretty worthless. Because if you spent enough time being honest about the people topics, then you know that far more important than the composition of the team is instead, its dynamic. Once this has dawned on us as an unavoidable and clear fact, we stopped all work on that project, effectively scrapped it and focused solely on what is now our Psychological Safety Works Team Dashboard because we now knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt that if we want to see real change, it has to happen at the level of the team. 

The bubble. The healthy dynamic in the team. More EQed and invested individuals. Team Leaders (whether POs, Scrum Masters or CEOs) that are willing to do the -admittedly hard- people practice work. A willingness to measure so we learn and grow. Those are the only levers for change. 

Not WHOM the team is made up of, but HOW they work together. 

This is undoubtedly a controversial point of view and we realise we aren’t well-loved by the recruitment industry or any other HR discipline that claims they can select a certain type of employee and that by using some proprietary consultancy’s alchemy formula at the intersection of ancient astronomy, tarot and Myers-Briggs, they can create the right team chemistry. Fantasy. 

Of course, a certain level of data is needed to fill in a certain role, but beyond search word terms and a hard-skills and experience match, nothing else ensures the success of a team -and therefore a project or a company- than the way it finds ways to create magic together and the key ingredient in that is whether or not they can create and keep Psychological Safety. The only lever of change that we should focus on for true fast organisational wins bar none. 

That doesn’t absolve individuals from work -far from it, a lot needs to happen on the soft skills side before the bubble can work best- and it doesn’t mean recruitment is worthless -if it had learned how to focus on measuring EQ or good team behaviours-, nor does it render the exploration of organisations futile -if the latter exclusively observed and improved network nodes between healthy, Psychologically Safe teams- but beyond these functions, the artificial, sterile navel-gazing won’t take us far in eradicating the Human Debt and competing with the elite performers.  

That’s if we want to go far and not just endlessly complain and overanalyse. 

Ok, Monday/September/beginning of school year/ end of horrible 2020 - what’s on your next sprint’s people work in progress? Let’s do this, let’s focus on what counts, the team’s Psychological Safety, the real people work and the going far! 

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Don't send your teams home with a laptop, a Jira and Slack account and a prayer!

Get in touch for our Team Psychological Safety Dashboard and our Stay-Connected-When-Remote question pack at www.psychologicalsafety.works/covid-19 or reach out at [email protected] and let's help your team become healthy, happy and highly performant.