Taking Breaks from Superheroing

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] ?

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Team - I have’t written anything last week because 1. Vacation - Disneyland FTW; 2. Unwell - Covid FTL -AGAIN!:(- and 3. How do you top the 14th principle??

You don’t, which is both depressing and encouraging as most of the human work always is. Repeating the same common sense principles ad nausea is soul-sapping without a doubt, but accepting the need for the ennui is unfortunately part of the purpose.?

I was musing about techies come people-people and how they experience the push and pull of doing something to better the lives of their colleagues when that was not meant to be their job description.?

The Superheroes I keep harping on about who started on the 1s and 0s side, the programming side, the technical side where you’re implicitly promised the least interaction possible with the rest of humanity as long as you keep in the zone, head down and keyboard pounded. The coders that worked out understanding the intricacies of the humanity in the team is unavoidable. The product managers or owners who would have gladly never picked up a call but now realised they have to facilitate and probe and ask and pull at the least agreeable of team members to be truly present and engaged before anything will move. The developers come team leads and then multiple team leads or even CTOs and with them the next level from the “organising stuff and architecting only” CTOs to the “damn, my job is figuring out these people, everything else can wait” CTOs.?

That journey fascinates me. When did it first dawn on them that what really matters, what makes the difference between success and subsistence is intangible, hard to work on, fraught with variables, human? Did they know for a while but were in denial for as long as they could? When did they first “see” the HumanDebt? around them in the team and the organisation? And when did they realise they could never un-see it again??

How they reluctantly put on the cape and started sharing what they now knew to be true - that there’s work to be done on the “fluffy bits”. How they kept doing it despite how monumentally hard it is.?

While I feel for them as we share so much of that journey I find myself being envious too.?

Of the Superheroes that are of the tech-come-leader or rather tech-come-people-person variety, when it’s not a full transition but a “on the side” gig from the goodness of their hearts and the imperatives of their sense of morals and kindness, not a mandated job description (aka when they still have a tech “day job” and haven’t transitioned into full time leadership, transformation, change, Agile, HR, ops or such) they get to take a break from the fight at times.?

When it comes to the people work, the Superheroes cape fatigue often translates into a retreat to comfort to where they bury themselves in code or planning or other dailies and attempt to “forget about” the hard graft human bits.?

But it doesn’t last them. It’s not them fully burning-out, the beauty of the HumanDebt-light-seeing exercise is that while it is undoubtedly a curse because everything moves maddeningly slow and feels rife with despair, it’s also the blessing of knowing it’s extraordinarily valuable and worthwhile and it can not be ignored if we care about humans and that knowing is a powerful dynamo that gives ample burnout protection whether we know it or not. Almost as if having dipped into the human work offers further invincibility, it becomes a lot more of a calling than a job. ?

We often see Superheroes on a fight break. They go to war hard on behalf of their teams and Psychological Safety and then at some point, they seem to pick up something else apparently shiny but typically a concept that’s slightly less Sisyphean and seems easier to move the needle on, such as something to do with process or the way they do retros or organise the pipe or such.?

But it’s temporary, they never stay in “how we organise a stand-up is no.1 predictor of whether we succeed” or “let’s just change cloud providers then we’ll be high performing” la la land, they always come back to the fight for happy teams and the admission that they need to get back to the battle.?

Unfortunately and soul-snappingly for them, the battle is often internal more than anything. Some times they have to battle tone-deaf leaders, completely disengaged admin-only HR-types and even their own teams who are too rife with team-level HumanDebt to take to the people-work with glee.?

That’s a lot of battles and I’m sure they’d happily shake their opponent and yell “FFS this is for your own good, I just want us all to be our best, happy and killing it, why are you not helping me help you?!?” - God knows I some times have to stop myself from doing that myself- but unfortunately sincere outbursts are not what will allow for transformation.?

For the Superheroes-in-training that haven’t yet had a chance to collect a survival bag of tricks come talk to us at PeopleNotTech because we’re incessantly collating things that help. Plays to increase resilience and regain courage, exercises to combat burnout, data to do more efficient battles, ways to really show change through the human work and a big dose of “I know, rite?!?” shared reality compassion.?

For everyone else, hang in there, you’re doing super valuable work, happy to listen if you have ideas on how we can make it easier for everyone else - BTW, how’s that common Backlog with HR and that Measuring of HumanDebt coming along and have they forced you back into the office yet?

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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