The Vanishing Superheroes, the Organisation and the HumanDebt?

Like many of us, I’ve had some of my first live engagements in aeons and I must admit the vibe is both eerie and awesome. It did seem to me like there’s a different type of feedback coming from the audience - everyone seems a lot more involved and more willing, to be ultra honest and open. Don’t get me wrong, when you speak about agility, DevOps culture, psychological safety and HumanDebt? to techies like I do, there’s always a presumed level of openness and I’ve been lucky enough to have met supremely honest and courageous people throughout the journey but that seems to be even more the case now that we are coming out on the other side of the pandemic.?

That said, somehow it doesn’t strike me as positive, there’s a desperation quality to it all and not a refreshed and willing to move mountains one. It almost feels like some people feel cornered into calling a spade a spade not that they are doing so because they want to see solutions. Reluctance, a touch of surliness, dejection, maybe even resentment of being left in the same place as the dust settles on the great resignation and all of these feelings on a bedrock of being emotionally and intellectually burnout as we all are.?

Yesterday, during a Q&A someone asked “What are you doing to protect or foster and help your “Superheroes” that are meant to initiate and advocate for the human work?” - My instinctive answer is “Not enough!” because I always want us to do better, but objectively we are one of the software vendors most acutely aware of the risk of burnout and disillusionment that our Superheroes face and we write and speak about it all the time because we are leading this gargantuan fight to get organisations to realise and diminish they HumanDebt and the internal dysfunctions that cause it.

We can’t do much more than come up with tips, communicate what works for others and repeat ad nauseam that we need them to double down on the self-care and self-compassion. We give away content, advice, time, sometimes even licenses, whatever we can do to help, we do but we know full well it’s small in comparison to the fight that’s needed. And we lost so many to this fight.?

A cursory glance over our CRM suggests 80% of the Superheroes we had been counting on that had been instrumental to advance some of our hardest implementation processes and either battled windmills to get pilots and trials in place or even helped build stupendous internal business cases for why all teams need our tool so they can get started on the human work are simply gone.?

In the midst of the #GreatResignation these super valuable and courageous professionals had the option for mobility and found themselves compelled to take it, partly motivated by this big battle they were doing alongside ourselves at PeopleNotTech. You see they had found this super-necessary and useful piece of software that would make their teams much more productive and incomparably happier and instead of the thanks they would have expected for the discovery from the organisation, they were met with distrust and circumspection and quickly found themselves having to battle their own company to save it from its own destructive ways. It can feel shockingly unfair and isolating and it echoes every other time when they had done what’s right only to be faced with resistance and lack of support.

So, of course, they were more open to being lured away from the discomfort than they would have been if they had never had the realisation of the importance of the human work and never tried to help.?

It makes us feel partly guilty, in particular for those who stayed behind and are sometimes left wondering why at the end of a successful trial they still can’t use the tool they had invested emotionally into. We can’t be sorry for the Superheroes themselves simply because if you look at their trajectory, where they went to is always a step-up so for them, the extra added impetus may have been constructive. Without fail, they went to organisations that were a lot lower on HumanDebt and that take the people work seriously, so they are happier buy like we said above, despite working hard to leave us still in play, many of our sales processes abruptly stopped and their successors never matched their gumption and passion so the enterprise itself lost not only talent but an opportunity to audit and decrease their HumanDebt and get started on the human work.

And not just any opportunity either, but perhaps one of the last ones, because irrespective of how in denial they are, many organisations ought to have taken this chance to reboot their people function around the real needs of their people and the human work, or they will be able to have traced the beginning of their decline to this very moment.

This is because the discrepancy between people-centric-tech companies with low HumanDebt and incumbents that are too scared and too paralysed to really transform around the people imperative was great enough as it was before the pandemic but now that gap will have widened to insurmountable levels if they carried on as if nothing changed.

Who should be taking a serious look in the mirror and panic?

• Organisations that lost enough Superheroes to the Great Resignation;
• Organisations where the chatter around the human topics (the work that needs to be done on teams and individuals complete with permission and support) is starting to dial down;
• Organisations that are trying to ignore how their people are feeling right now - be it down, anxious, burnout, etc
• Organisations that are still treating emotional topics as a “nice to have fluffy Friday conversation”
• Organisations that had started with widespread active disengagement before the pandemic
• Organisations that hadn’t fully transformed to agile and hadn’t transcended to servant leadership
• Organisations that are forcing people back into the office however serendipitously they think they are going about that
• Whoever already had a hefty amount of HumanDebt and is now adding to it as we speak

But will they? Of course not. They won’t have woken up until it will have been too late. And who was meant to wake up anyhow since the executives of all these organisations are either completely check-out themselves, or looking to jump on the last train of the Great Resignation express as our Superheroes above have done??

For the ones who stayed, for the ones who care - keep heart, it will get better. It has to, it’s a survival imperative and for our part, we will keep reminding them. We won’t let this entire moment be wasted and stand by idly as we return to the levels of criminal oblivion around our people and their humanity in the workplace that we have started from.

You have our word.?

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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