HumanDebt? in Tech Teams

Earlier this week we published the “Let’s Get Real About Fear” play as promised last week and we hope it helps some of you reading this. We’ve already had teams reach out and give us some amazing feedback on how they used it and how needed it was, but, as ever, we’re more than happy to hear negative feedback as well, so if you try it please get back to us with any of the “what didn’t work at all” brutal truths so we better it for the next team.?More importantly, we need to you think about how it makes you feel to be presented with this brutal and cutting of hard topics that will first strike you as wildly unnatural to even bring up at work.

What we were saying is that it is undoubtedly a lot:

“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 faced with this war. 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.”

and we definitely stand behind that, it would be shamefully dramatic if we ended up having more of that famed debt by pretending this is not happening to us all.?

I have had a handful of “sparky” conversations of late when it comes to these wins and the HumanDebt in technology teams. I’m very grateful and appreciative of the luxury of having those. I know not everyone can afford the time or the space for seemingly gratuitous intellectual pursuits with a plate ever so full of tickets.?

You know the kind - where you can’t help but still muse and frown inquisitively days after the talk and you realise you’re considering a new perspective, learned something new and are creating new paths inside your mind and in our case, possibly even inside the product since said mind is so directly connected to designing our software.?

The part I have especially been mulling over thanks to a new client that’s big on EQ and emotional agility and thanks to a few conversations with peeps in the DevOps world including the amazing Tracy Bannon is that we may be dealing with a lot more in the way of near-abuse for our tech people than we like to consider or even admit.?

If we’ll ever be serious about auditing how much HumanDebt we have - and whatever you call it and Tracy calls it “enterprise muscle memory” I believe, we are very serious about interrogating it, we are building a way to start measuring it- then we have to be searingly honest about this part.?

Let’s be clear: everyone in the workplace has been deprived of either the permission or the educational and practical support of examining and expressing their emotions but no one more so than “developers”, for lack of a better term.?

Of course, it isn’t exclusively programmers we fear for here, but mostly everyone else who “is IT” or rather is a technologist.?

So many factors may be contributing to how this is extra problematic as compared to other lines of work:

• Increased likelihood of burnout over other industries or types of occupations due to immense volume of work created by ever-changing ways of work, needs and technology advancements;
• The more pronounced lack of gender diversity in technology jobs;
• The higher likelihood of neurodiversity and the challenges it poses to emotional intelligence;
• A complete lack of permission and focus on speaking about emotions or any of the “fluffy” matters on a bedrock of reinforcing a perceived lack of ability regarding the topics.

These are the reasons why there is even more team resistance when we first put tech teams in front of our Dashboard than there is when those in other occupations start working with our team software solution. This is because doing regular people work is so immensely eerie and has been all but banned for them for the vast majority of their professional lives. Because “they don’t need it” or “they don’t want it” or “that’s not how they are”.

The beauty of starting the human work is that if you furnish these same teams that have this long history of near-abuse from the enterprise in the lack of EQ training or practice with not only ways to easily access the human work, but ways to do it regularly, and most importantly, undeniably clear ways to analyse how it all pans out for them, they swiftly do a full 180 and are unstoppable in their engagement with it.?

So that is the real key to overcoming team resistance and helping people start the healthy habit of bettering themselves through their own actions. Data.?

Anyone that says they have tried to engage tech teams in the human work and failed, has guaranteed not found a way to demonstrate impact with extreme honesty and clarity and in the absence of it the team resistance hasn’t shrunk. More often than not, they did the theory-only type of things - the academic sterile exercises that do not move the needle to either form a habit or demonstrate impact and therefore remain sterile and ineffective.?

We will not be able to distribute the gargantuan task of lowering the HumanDebt to our employees until such a time that we give them the tools, offer the encouragement, support, permission and even compensation to transform the work into a regular -hopefully daily- endeavour, and, most importantly not till when we manage to kit them with the data to show their efforts paid off and their behaviour and consequent outcomes and performance improved.?

As I said, what never fails to amaze us at PeopleNotTech is the gusto with which people throw themselves into the people work once they have seen their own actions translated into team wellbeing. It’s beautiful and it’s humbling to see self-professed “What-do-I-know techies” find the courage and the reserves to notice and speak on their emotions and compassionately seek those of others and then see how that care and that work means they succeed more together.?

There is no passion for continuous improvement like that of “tech people” and that is why I think that ultimately, paradoxically, it will be this community that will pave the way for every other department and function to finally take an honest look at their HumanDebt and start lowering it by doing the people work.?

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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?[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