The Human Work Is Looking for Superheroes

Someone was asking me how many followers we gain a week. For the Wednesday’ The Future is Agile newsletter? Loads. On here? None, on the contrary, we constantly lose followers. Every time we post. It’s not surprising, after all, we keep serving hard truths and uncomfortable realisations on repeat. It’s little wonder people want it out of sight. But unfortunately for all of us, there’s nothing to really unsubscribe from. Our annoyingly honest content will go away but the HumanDebt will stay. Nay, it will grow. The more we swat away the truths.?

Obviously -and sadly- simply subscribing and reading this isn’t going to mean much but the courage to keep hearing it is something because it means all the Superheroes in training that are lurking in the bellies of the HumanDebt riddled beasts are one day going to be able to help to reverse it all and make true change happen for every one of their colleagues.?

They would have read enough, raged enough, learned enough. They would have ultimately had enough because at some point, the indignation of how little human work is being done and how much hypocrisy the corporate world creates around us simply becomes unbearable and yes, most will simply elevate to cut their losses, stop the intellectual and emotional discomfort of observing injustice and human need go unanswered and leave but some will stay and fight and enable real shifts. Next week we will start to feature some of these superheroes on Tuesdays so stay tuned. They have such amazing stories.

https://youtu.be/OA2y8c_mONw

This video repeats what we said yesterday - that there are 5 sine qua non conditions of succeeding in any modern enterprise and sadly for us all, none of them involves simply purchasing another training or giving people one day off - empathy, psychological safety in teams, time and resources, a focus on massive mindset change and true organisational permission to embed and mandate human work at every level of the organisation as a real priority and as the nucleus of the much-needed transformation.?

“Transformation” and “change” have long been buzzwords but they can and should mean so much in the way of practicality - after all, anyone reading this could easily lead a revolutionary people strategy transformation if they were given the keys to the kingdom.

If you woke up tomorrow as the CEO or the People Tsar in your enterprise with lots of power and resources, would you look around and think “Oh yes, thankfully everything in this company is tickety-boo and I just need to keep it up”??

Would you carry on with the L&D initiatives that gently allow and advise that people do continuous learning? No. You’d embed learning through encouraging experimentation.?

Would you carry on with the D&I programs that print yet another poster or organise a round table? No. You’d give everyone a voice, help them know it’s being heard and cared about and you’d rile everyone around purpose and impact so you make a true change in being included and then diversity may follow naturally when you’ll be one of the places that famously respects their people so others want to work there.?

Would you force anyone back to the office? Of course not. Full flexibility, outcomes-based, team-based-hybrid from hereon, perhaps even 4-day-weeks.?

Would you keep rewarding command and control and only pay lip service to servant leadership? No, because that would be disastrous, you’d retrain leaders for being helpful, useful, ever-in-service and obsessed with removing blockers and enabling the human work.?

Would you ignore teams and people and allow them to keep feeling disconnected and undervalued while trying the same employee experience tactics from the 2000s? No. You’d elevate EQ, you’d train and enable teams to autonomously keep polling their state of mind and then take action to improve it.?

You’d establish the foundations of the human work and fund it both with resources and remuneration to ingrain it at an everyday habit level. You’d do the right thing, the decent thing, the important thing, the needed to be sustainable and competitive thing: you’d?ensure every team is happy, that they have that magical feeling that they are safe with each other and that would power their creativity and best work. You’d help people recognise you as an organisation that is now serious about true transformation, a complete change, a new era where their emotions and their wellbeing is no longer second place. You’ve read so much, you’ve learned and distilled so much and you’ve witnessed so much of the HumanDebt that all of the above would be clear and evident to you the first morning on the job. So why doesn’t everyone?

The answer to that lies in a tangled web of toxic corporate culture and fear-based-paralysis unfortunately and dwelling too much on what got us to the point where we collectively are today is irrelevant, what matters, is how we get ourselves out of it, how we build, how we change to make our employees’ lives better and allow them to be the best we hired them for. And we will.

We have to.

—————————————————————————

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?[email protected]??

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