Organisational Permission and Servant Leadership

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] ?

———————————————————————————————

This week on the Chasing Psychological Safety Newsletter we talked about “data”, “measurements”, “performance” and “productivity” - why they make us uncomfortable and what we can do to change that discomfort before we can hope to create a culture of continuous improvement. In the DevOps community, no one needs selling on the importance of measuring and growth, that’s the essence of it all but some of the attitudes may well be in common so head over there if you wanted to read the arguments we made.

While learning, growing, evolving and bettering are at the very core of anyone who is Agile at heart, nobody is immune from the cognitive dissonance that makes us blind to ways in which we can apply that to our own selves. In other words, no matter how in love with the improvement we may think we are, we still fall into the same mental traps and limitations that hold us back from doing some of the work, in particular the human work.

As a team member, the resistance to human work translates into a sense of doing “extracurricular activities” when we work on bettering either ourselves or the team. It feels frivolous, unmandated,?outside of the day-to-day. Non-priority. Not what they pay us for. Not “the day job”. It’s a pervasive feeling that comes from years of professional environment conditioning around what is and what isn’t expected and desirable and having emotions, being human, needing appreciation, honesty, respect, safety, trust, joy, they are all clearly deemed as undesirable.?

So even if the enterprise now makes timid gestures towards opening up and starting to pay off some of this HumanDebt? - after all a mere few years ago we were counting down the hours in open-plan offices where we were afraid to check messages on our phone and envied friends who got to use Slack or LinkedIn *AT WORK*!-?it’s hard to believe them. So we resist the human work because it feels unfamiliar and a huge departure. When we are no longer in those offices and they now ask us to spend time on self-care or the relationships in the team it almost feels like we’re on hidden camera - what’s the catch? Is it a trap? Why the huge change? There’s no reason to trust this monumental change of heart.?

Hence why we insist on that famous “Organisational Permission”.?

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.?

Of the host of these organisational permission slips, none unnecessary, most with Psychological Safety at the heart (and why they wanted to use our Dashboard to measure if the messaging trickles down in team behaviours) and all showing they amazingly “understood the assignment”.?

They asked if they were missing any - I didn’t think so but I also didn’t think “It is ok to be a servant leader” was going to be good enough. I said to them something I find myself saying often of late: that in the next few years we need to completely rewire our leaders if we want to turn them into true servant leaders.

And that we will need them tremendously because without the new servant leaders none of the permission slips they had devised above is anything other than company-level PR-y empty talk, it’s only if they carry them and undersign them wholeheartedly that they can keep their teams focused on rebuilding the trust.?

This is after all the only remaining role of a servant leader - that they remove blockers and that they bring resources be they time, tools, inspiration, empathy or organisational permission. But it’s hard being that person.?

We spoke about this in this team before - Impression Management is what holds us all back. Fears. The tyranny of being afraid that our image will suffer a loss. This is why we won’t engage, why we’ll remain silent, eschew the human work and also why we hear so much about people brave enough to admit they suffer from imposter syndrome. Leaders, be they CEOs, Team Leaders, Product Owners, Project Managers or Scrum Masters are no exception. Last week I asked us all to do some introspection and that is still undeniable the most important part of it. That said, there are things the organisation can learn to understand and recognise to support that introspection.?

I wrote this in an email to the CTO that was sponsoring the “organisational permission slip” program above asking him to find ways to do intentional and meticulous leaders-rewiring. These are the fears that hold them back from understanding and amplifying the organisational permission:

Lack of a Strong Sense of Agency or Empowerment

This is self-explanatory. Even in the most progressive of shops where structures have been put in place to matrix risk in a sense that allows extreme freedom and where experimentation and innovation are truly possible many leaders do not “feel it” - you can see it in how they are shaky on decision making, hesitant while considering political or hierarchical implications, cautious and measured in committing and so on. Anything that can be done to communicate that they are indeed autonomous and entrusted needs to be done and fast.?

Leader Imposter Syndrome

Many tech leaders (and the same is true for some engineers, scientists, etc) have no “formal education” when it comes to leadership. No MBA, no years spent reading the same examples of “inspirational leadership” and being tested on the same business studies data. Instead, they have been promoted in a position to lead people after having been really good at their job. They carry that lack of formal training as a burden and a hidden badge of dishonour when in actuality, the world has moved on so far from the reality of the 90s that created most academic programs on leadership, that having had it would have been a hindrance and not having it, is really a net advantage.?

EQ Whizzkid/Amateur Psychologist Imposter Syndrome?

This is at times, packed in with the above because people who haven’t been to business school assign it mythical qualities and presume that there are courses included in the curriculum to teach ways to speak to direct reports, ways to understand their state of mind, tools to dissolve conflict and ways to help them navigate the humanity of working in a team. There aren’t. No one with an MBA is also a mini-“counsellor-Troy” and if they are, it’s a coincidence, it’s ability augmented by individual learning and never attributable to anything they would have been taught in school. EQ is trainable, understanding human dynamics is learnable and ironically- being new and armed with a thirst for knowledge and a touch of an inferiority complex to power it further, is a distinct advantage over those who have been middle managers their whole careers.?

Needing to Look Hardworking/Productive/Efficient

Most corporate environments instilled a subconscious need to “look busy” as we’ve been measured on the number of hours and perception of effort not outcomes into everyone and this is a hard one to shake. in the case of newly servant leaders who are asked to step down from the day-to-day and no longer do the work that was easily filling up their time, they often struggle even more with everyone’s potential perception of their efficiency and whether or not they are still seen as hard-working. Doing the human work, coaching, guiding, reinforcing messaging, all seem superfluous and they worry they will be seen as working less.?

Pure Impression Management Against Appearing Unprofessional

No one wants to appear “too flower-power” or like they are simply taken with fads. No one wants to look gullible, silly, “soft” or “unserious” and working on the human topics can feel that way because it’s all about the themes previously seen as Friday afternoon- afterthoughts, fluffy concepts that were a distraction at best but a clear break to work progress most of the time.?

Misunderstanding What Servant Leadership Stands For

It takes a secure team leader to confidently say “This is important work and we must shake the excuses and do it” -because so many who are new to the idea regard servant leadership as a potential exercise in cowering and fading quietly in the background in an effort to get away from the former command and control image. As leaders grow, they start inhabiting a place of secure empathy and constant blocker-removal mentality while remaining super meticulous about upholding Project Aristotle’s famous “structure and clarity” and that oftentimes seems difficult at first when assertiveness can be misjudged.

These leaders need another set of permission slips to reverse the above. All of these limitations have to be challenged intellectually, debated and reframed so that leaders can rid themselves of any of them, have none of these fears hold them back and lead their teams into the acceptance that the enterprise really saw the light and is willing to put their people at the centre for everyone’s sake. ?

How fortunate are the people in that company aren’t they? They’re light years ahead of the vast majority of us who deny there’s any HumanDebt, any need to improve the dynamic of teams and any necessity to collectively do the hard people work all the time. They’re sitting pretty indeed, but they are far from done. The A-ha moment is not good enough, it takes a lot of execution to rewire all of the years of their professional lives, rethink leadership, reclaim language, unban emotions and focus on obsessing with the people work alongside the operational work. They have a lot to change ahead of them rolled as their sleeves may be. The good news is that the people work is not only worthwhile but relatively easy and a lot of fun once we allow ourselves to believe that we are okay to do it.?

—————————————————————————

This Thursday on the Fundamentals of Psychological Safety Series: “Good Behaviours/Bad Behaviours of Teams” so subscribe so you have it in your inbox.?

—————————————————————————

The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are:?Understand,?Measure?and?Improve

Read more about our Team Dashboard that measures and improves Psychological Safety at?www.peoplenottech.com?or reach out at?[email protected]?and let's help your teams become Psychologically Safe, healthy, happy and highly performant.

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