Organisational Permission: Revoked

About last year at this time I was telling you guys this:

“One of my happiest moments last week has been speaking to a software house who said they are now taking the organisational permission topic so seriously following “PeopleNotTech ’s incessant persistence” that they have devised a program around it and expect to take 6 months to “rewire our people’s trust in how we care about them, we have 12 distinct “organisational permission slips” and will be emailing and printing them then we will explain why we think they are important over this period”.?

They gave me some examples, they were amazing things such as “As a team member you have permission to feel things” - followed by the science of why we can no longer ignore people’s emotions in a work environment to show they have serious reasoning, followed by suggested team exercises and a list of “unbanned words”; or “It is more than okay, it is needed that you spend time talking to each other about your wellbeing and interactions not only about work things” - equally followed by the science, exercises, etc.”

I caught up with them. It’s not great news.?

They haven’t managed and they have but added to their HumanDebt. Massively. You see shortly after they put the wheels in motion for the above to happen, their head of people left and everything simply halted for a while. They regrouped, they recovered and they continued under the watchful eye of the CTO. For a while, they had a rhythm going in opening up the dialogue and people were starting to understand how this can and will work for them as a human CI/CD pipe. Then, a few months later their CTO got poached by a smaller scale-up that had just gotten overly financed and once they were out everything completely stopped dead.?

They have new execs in those positions but absolutely nothing else has happened. People are asking whatever happened to that program about emotions, empathy, psychological safety and teams that they were hearing so much about and everyone shrugs. It is completely on hold. Stopped. Nowhere to be seen. The damage? Likely monstrous and shudder to think what it will feel like to them when they see the true effects.?

If helping your people do the human work is needed and is basic common business sense, having them start on it and then making them stop is a sure-fire way to burn trust irreparably.?

Maybe most painfully, their stunt would have felt like an even bigger kick in the teeth to their employees whom they coaxed out of their emotional desserts and illusions of the benefits of incessant professional decorum being bandied about at every corner only to then clubber them over the head again with this abandonment. A further enterprise betrayal. What’s one more?

A true pity, no other way to put this. I had been so hopeful they would be one of the good ones and a happy example to report on alongside the guys who did the 4 days weeks, the people who are rethinking servant leadership, those that have programs in place to first audit then lower the overall HumanDebt, the ones who spent time detailing the human work and the importance of emotions, or the ones who are connecting EQ exercises to remuneration. They could have easily paved the way and served as an example of how, organisational permission that is genuine and is believed to be a game-changer when it comes to the human work as people will then take to it and create their own human improvement CI/CD pipeline while the organisation watches them undertake this newly distributed work and that results in lower and lower HumanDebt.?

I had high hopes, as I am sure they had them too. If any other woke CHRO or CTO or COO out there thinks they have a nimbler org with a stronger DevOps ethos and they have thrown all the DOJOs and vulnerability Ted talks at it that they can, it’s now time to do the actual heavy human work in the teams and it seems they are reluctant to do it without this organisational permission -and eventually tools- then come talk to us and we’ll help you replicate the above and do it right if we ever want high performance.?

It’s the need for high performance that makes us take to Agile. This drive to be the best we can be. To be ever better, to improve and develop. Continuously. Our own human version of CI/CD.?

This need for high performance is not as exclusive to some particular segment or type of individual as we like to believe when we listen to team resistance sound bytes. “Sure, but I’m not competitive/a perfectionist/wanting to grow/that passionate/bothered about it all” is a common “Thanks but this human work palaver seems like loads of effort and it’s not for me” excuse.??

Here’s the kicker though - if you were to dig deeper into the psyche of the people who say these things, you’d likely find the disengagement, the fears, the impostor syndrome, the general dissatisfaction if not straight-up depression. And if you were to magically wave those away and have them in a better place where they can afford to mentally and emotionally aspire to be more, they’d be singing a very different tune and be just as eager to better themselves. Because when they can expand that energy humans *do* want to be better if only they feel they are permitted and expected to do so.?

This is why people fall in love with our software -eventually, once their many walls and excuses are broken down- because they want to be better. What our dashboard gives them, is a way to improve their dynamic inside the team and gain -then keep- that addictively blessed Psychological Safety which makes them run faster together. So they keep improving. Like a gym but for the mentality of the team and much as we may moan and dislike it, we know we have to be in the gym.?

This particular company may have let their membership lapse with this extreme Organisational Permission Revoked stunt but hopefully, their people would have had their appetites whetted enough that they’ll do some of the human work on their own and stay while the organisation sorts itself out and hopefully comes to its seses.?a

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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