Emotional Cheat Sheet for Techies

Last week’s article about the acute need for cultural change seems to have resonated tremendously with a lot of people. That’s great news actually, it means we can all sense the urgency and that makes me hopeful for eventual momentum. Hopeful that eventually, we would have all agreed we have to do a lot more about humans, that we would have started to tackle the HumanDebt in earnest and that it will have meant we are dissecting what all needs to happen in terms of organisational mindset and processes to enable and support the only thing that will make a difference - the human work.?

While we keep advocating for this basal level change and we keep shaking execs into the realisation that something serious needs to be done, truths need to be spoken, people need to be respected and cared for and the?way we acknowledge and reward them has to change to support their new needs or else they won’t see true agility and they won’t be able to tackle the mental health and post-Covid-trauma crisis in the workplace, we also have to stay granular. Stay focused on the team and the individual and remove as many of the blockers that exist at that level as we can.?

So if “Kit, support and empower your teams then pay them for the human work FFS!” is the message to the enterprise, the message to our users has to be “We get how hard this is, here’s how we can make it easier.” and that’s what drives our product development at all times. As part of this, as announced in the other newsletter, this week we introduced the “EQ Quick Wins” Series.?

One of these is already live to our existent clients in the Playbook, they are plays that are aimed at attenuating some of the impostor syndromes we noticed techies have when it comes to “fluffy” topics.?

- An educational injection - Knowledge delivered as clearly as possible to empower the team with basic definitions, clarity and a shared vocabulary around emotions, body language, reactions, triggers, etc

- A hands-on section - Tips, tricks, ideas, and suggestions of things to experiment with to quickly bring you up to the emotional guru level.?

In the first play of its sort, they learn the definitions of the basic emotions sets then they do exercises around social mirroring and are given a few actionable tips for an action that comes easy and naturally to some and is debilitatingly hard for others: looking into each other’s eyes.

The ones coming next will cover topics such as: Recognising internal triggers and increasing self-awareness; Naming emotions; Understanding body language and vocabulary usage online; Recognising emotions in others; Increasing our capacity for compassion; Expressing Empathy; Moving from self-awareness to team awareness; Conversational turn-taking; Encouraging relating; Creating a gratitude pathway; Collectively reaffirming purpose; Understanding and sensing the emotional bond; Recognising team dynamics; Breathing and mindfulness; Learning how to assess intentionality and apply that; A view of impression management against looking “too emotional”; “Put yourself in my shoes” exercises; Vulnerability practice; etc.?

The goal of the entire “EQ Quick Wins” Series of plays is to make the human work more accessible and easier to engage with on a regular basis by removing some of the fear and reservations that exist around the formerly taboo topic of emotions at work when technologists believe they are not sufficiently equipped with knowledge and skill to tackle it.

I think of it as an “Emotions Cheat Sheet for Techies” - it ought to make the vast amount of unknown feel less ample.

The beauty of learning about these things together is that doing it as a joint team action will actually result in higher Psychological Safety in the team and it will let people engage a lot more honestly and freely once they trust definitions, terms and understanding are all common. ?

We want people to feel equipped enough to enter these talks with glee not dread. We want devs who spent a lifetime thinking they are emotionally stunted, non-neurotypical, unable to express emotion and not skilled in being interested in others to feel like they can and should apply themselves to the human work. Not feel less than any other profession or line of work because they aren’t, we’ve seen technologists capable of much more humanity and depth when it comes to the emotional realm than many other of their counterparts once they got the needed vocabulary and confidence.?

So if you’re an existent client reading this look out for the play under the Engagement tab of the Playbook, if you aren’t, come speak to us and we’ll see about helping you advocate internally in your own enterprise why is it that people need the human work if they are to be delivering any quality technical work.

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At?PeopleNotTech?we make?software?that measures and improves the wellbeing and Psychological Safety of teams, come see a DEMO.

“Nothing other than sustained, habitual, EQed people work at the team level aka “the human work” done BY THE TEAM will improve any organisation’s level of Psychological Safety and therefore drop their levels of HumanDebt?.”

To order the "People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age" book go to this Amazon?link