Playbooks for Teams

As you may have noticed we are nothing but data and action obsessed when it comes to reducing the HumanDebt? and bettering team dynamics through Psychological Safety at PeopleNotTech. We hate nothing more than empty rhetoric or sterile surveys and not a preachy word comes our mouths highlighting a people problem before we feel we have a clear suggestion of what can be done to solve it. To bring the maximum amount of value in the hands of the teams themselves, often away from corporate, or even coaches, we compiled a Playbook of all the human interventions we did with teams that worked to better each element of Psychological Safety in our Dashboard over the last year.

One of the companies we most look up to is Atlassian. A familiar name to all of us reading this, not only do they do well internally with their own people but they practically hold the keys to modern project management tooling and with it, any hope of successful Agile transformations if we’re honest. So much of what they do is deeply insightful and they are one of the few companies out there happy to show all they learn from teams to help other teams. In case anyone needs to hear the obvious disclaimer that is not to say that all one needs to do to become and stay Agile is buy all that Atlassian has made and implement their tools and process advice, far from it, nothing they ever made replaces the need for a deep mindset change.

When we created our “Psychological Safety Team Dashboard” Playbook feature at PeopleNotTech we, of course, looked to brush up our knowledge of the Atlassian playbooks as, aside from the documents Google puts out and as of late, research and resources from GitHub, Microsoft and a handful of others, there’s precious little out there to even acknowledge the people work, in particular in an Agile context. Their playbooks, at a very minimum those around Retros are hopefully in the hands of most coaches and facilitators, be they internal reformed PRINCE certificate holders or freshly minted Scrum masters. Aside from those, they have a bevvy of others which they’ve built on practices they have seen thousands of teams benefit from so they are a wealth of information and a precious resource for many.

To understand the playbook format that works best for tech minds, we went straight to my favourite one that they put out - the Team Health Check Monitor. For anyone unfamiliar with it, it asks the team to spend some of their regular meetings to vote with a simple thumbs up or thumbs down on how some of the team attributes have gone in the last work sprint and come up with some ideas on improvement.

 It aims to be a manual version of our data-and-action solution, I would have thought. In terms of what the monitor really is, while I won’t go into the side-by-side detailed comparison as it would be comparing apples and oranges, suffice it to say some elements are needed and useful and should be quantified, discussed and feedback is needed and yet disappointingly, it appears on closer examination that it misses the greatest lever of team performance - Psychological Safety and it doesn’t even ask people to self-assess their levels or attempt to unpack it for the respective team. 

In fact, most of the elements it asks people to poll on, are firmly operational (POC, One-pager, managed dependencies and Velocity); one is reflecting leadership styles (Full-time owner) and the remaining ones (Balanced Team, Shared Understanding and Metrics and Value) map directly to Google’s findings in Project Aristotle in terms of Dependability, Structure and Clarity and Meaning and Impact. But while they cover 4 of the 5 Google sine qua non-conditions for having a high performing team, not one of the maps directly to the most important element - Psychological Safety.

We live in a world where the HumanDebt? is so great that language has become muddled, terms are accidentally or even intentionally left open to interpretation and words are promiscuously interchangeable. This is especially bad when it comes to the people work we are SO behind on and it causes even the best-intentioned of us to miss important elements. For a good example of this, I’m willing to put my hand up and say that while I used this specific Playbook with my own product teams over the years and then live and breathe Psychological Safety I hadn’t realised that none of the elements of the Health Check actually cover it myself. After all, some were about fluffy human topics and Atlassian is who it is so “woke” on people topics, so surely it was covered! It isn’t at all. Not even a cursory and nebulous “Happiness” generic category.

There is as I said, no comparison between this manual template of asking for feedback on these attributes and our algorithm that measures the elements of Psychological Safety and shows the team when their dynamic is mostly positive and encourages performance or if negative behaviours slipped in. With that said, even as a manual self-reporting framework, it is rather startling that they leave the most important lever of performance out and not even ask team members how they think they are doing on important topics such as Courage, Speaking up, Avoiding Impression Management, Flexibility, Resilience, Learning and yes, Morale. How would they be able to accurately say how their team is doing in the absence of those? And then it hit me, Atlassian isn’t laying this out so you find out about the health of the team at all but to express an opinion on the health of the project! 

From that perspective, Spotify’s Squad Health Check model is a lot more comprehensive in attempting to quantify Psychological Safety as it also looks at “Teamwork”, “Learning” and “Fun” in addition to all the other practical indicators you can see reflected in Agile KPIs or smart companies’ OKRs. It isn’t exhaustive either as it leaves out some important data sets and they are both simply focused questionnaires so neither have an algorithm behind them or attempt to measure not only declaratively but also behaviourally as we do but if you had to choose one of them to really find out about the dynamic of the team and the behaviours you have to focus on to improve their health and get them Psychologically Safe consider adding some of the components we measure in your 1-on-1s or as additional questions to the Spotify Quad model for a makeshift manual “pen-and-paper” check. Or of course, if you’re of the lucky ones reading this who will continue working remotely even part-time, come talk to us as you don’t need to do any of it yourself and we can help. 

But whatever you do, however, you do it, with whichever Playbook in hand, re-focus on the team health, ask all the probing questions, come up with solutions together, obsess with how safe you are to stay resilient and performant through what looks like a long, dark winter ahead.  

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Don't send your teams home with a laptop, a Jira and Slack account and a prayer!

 THE NEW REALITY OF WORK OFFER

If you work in a company which has announced a move to Permanent Remote or Permanent Hybrid get in touch as these are the hands-on pieces of support we are offering to remove some of the mental and practical blockers that stop team productivity and performance: 

?           3 months use of our Psychological Safety Team Dashboard software license free that comes with

?           A Playbook containing examples of people interventions and team actions that any team can use to see better data in their team dashboard;

?           1 x free “What is Psychological Safety and Impression Management?” live cross-company webinar/training course;

?           Free buy-in help: if you’re a team leader - help to map and present it to the organisation- if you’re HR, L&D, Tech, Ops, etc - help to present it to the leadership team and building a business case

?           Free Certification/course for Coaches

Get in touch at www.psychologicalsafety.works or reach out at [email protected] and let's help your teams become healthy, happy and highly performant.