What 100,000 Superheroes Taught Us

I’m celebrating a very humbling milestone today. Between this newsletter and the Chasing Psychological Safety one, there are now 100,000 subscribers. At the risk of dropping some simply by mentioning it, I have to admit I am tremendously grateful and that it has made me once again, reflect on the type of people who I am lucky enough to have as readers and dialogue partners and of all the lessons they’ve taught us on our journey.

So thank you. 

Irrespective of what side of the business you come from, irrespective of the industry or how long you’ve been doing your job, the one thing you have in common with everyone else reading this, is that, whether you’re aware of it or not, you’re one of the people who help reduce the HumanDebt? (akin to “technical debt”, it consists of all the moments when fundamental people topics have been disregarded or neglected). 

Maybe not by leading a transformative change process or by captaining your ship but by caring about these topics enough to read these -and undoubtedly many others, my subscribers are often times voracious curators of amazing content-. That curiosity and thirst for consideration and knowledge are what your respective teams -and organisations- will rely on to create a better reality where the HumanDebt? is reduced every day. 

Your courage and willingness to face the possible put-downs, the mistrust, the doubt, when you learn and think and do the human work, can not be overestimated. We know most of you face everyday battles -whether with the organisation, old mindsets or your own self- and that the amount of resilience that takes, is colossal and admirable. 

It is thanks to you that we’ve come to understand and fight for these truths:

“People Before Anything” - All the technology, the process and the strategy PowerPoint in the world can never be enough if anyone ignores what matters most. 

“You can’t have the WoW without the WoT” - Agile is a mindset and one that requires intentional work to comprehend at first but then sips its way into our veins and there is no turning back to a sequential way of thinking. Agile isn’t about the process or some consultancy’s deck, but about rewiring our understanding of projects and technology to define a personal journey and a process that allows us to do things better and faster with team and customers that are happy. 

“Do the Human Work!” -Psychological Safety is measurable, improvable and sine qua non to team performance. With software like ours and others, and with proven methods to dissect and change every type of negative behaviour that can make team dynamics unhealthy, there are no more excuses for putting the human work off. The time is now.

“Protect the Bubble” - Obsessing about the team as the one unit where true organisational change can happen is paramount and any other focus is a distraction. 

“Psychological Safety is not binary, nebulous or fixed” - It is a living measurement that can be shown in concrete data and that changes over time and depending on projects and it is made up of various positive speaking up behaviours from teams that are flexible, resilient, continuously learning, engaged and very courageous. These can and should be improved with “human interventions” that teams work on if they are given the space and permission. 

“The Organisation” is as real as Santa” - it is a mythical structure. While we may need the word to describe what we see happening in a workplace we certainly have no use for it if our goal is to really affect change. A healthy organisation with little to no HumanDebt? isn’t so by design but one where there’s a collection of happy and healthy teams.

“Team Equals Family” - Despite the myriad of rolled eyes when we say this, most of us, even if we come from families that are no episode of “7th Heaven”, can relate. Not perfect, not necessarily happy, or even functional, but having each other’s backs, focusing on a common goal and propping each other up. 

“A Team is a Team, is a Team” - Much as we intuitively may believe that our particular industry, line of work or cultural background affect the type of team we are part of, in a defining way, none of our data supports that assumption. If anything, having worked with tens of organisations and hundreds of teams, we’ve seen many more commonalities than differences when we strip down the pointless rhetorics to the behaviours that resonate with everyone and every team has the potential and ability to grown when they are offered the space. 

“DevOps is Where Culture Lives” - For Agile businesses, the DevOps people are the keepers of the humans’ best interest, their work, oftentimes under-appreciated and overlooked is the bulk of the effort to reduce the HumanDebt?. We met far more “people-woke” CTOs/CIOs/COOs than CHROs. 

“Authentic and actionable live feedback is essential” Dialogue, data, and an action loop with evident results work wonders on teams that had been starved of having “been heard” through the sterile 360s, yearly or NPS surveys and who crave the connection and practical to-do’s.

“Question everything” - Having the space to open wide topics such as “impact”; “purpose” and the very concept of work and how it translates in client-loved outcomes is essential. In particular after the pandemic, with all we knew thrown up in the air, it is high time we questioned every fixed concept and preconceived idea. 

“Teams are Self-Healing” - With the right tools, data and guidance any team can improve their performance and apply strategies to better their wellbeing as a group. 

“It’s worth it to be fearless” - the sense of joy we get when we’re brave enough to be honest, forthcoming and create magic with our teams, is one of the best things about our work and always a worthwhile investment.

“EQ can be trained” - As can empathy, positivity, servant leadership, strategies for wellness, and more to make both leaders and teams better humans that have the emotional intelligence to understand and relate to each other. The only part that can’t, is goodwill. 

“Impression Management is Deadly” - When we fear appearing in a negative light to our teammates, whether we’re afraid of looking incompetent, ignorant, negative, disruptive or unprofessional, we bite our lips, we stop ourselves from offering an opinion, observation or ideas, we hide, we aren’t open and authentic and in doing so we hurt both the dynamic of the team, the progress of the work and our own ability to stay emotionally connected. Left unchallenged, this collection of closed off and fearful behaviours eventually sinks Psychological Safety and when it goes, there is no way a team can compete. 

“Agile and Psychological Safety need Superheroes” - Take any business you admire from the digitally native to horses who have achieved lasting change and you can always trace these back to a few extraordinary individuals who have moved mountains. 

“The HumanDebt? can no longer wait” - For years the organisation has let it pile up and the toxic, political and fearful culture it has today but we’ve also all contributed to it by not demanding more permission, blockers removal and resources to fix basic human issues we have in the workplace. All the rhetoric remained at PR-theatre level or at Friday-afternoon-“fluffy”-talk-navel-gazing level, and in the VUCA on steroids world of work we live in, only organisations who truly changed into Agile to the bone and obsessed with people from the heart will remain standing. 

Since we have “met” - all of these learnings and realisations meant PeopleNotTech grew, we built a software solution with so much impact on people’s daily lives that we are bawled over every day, I wrote the “People Before Tech: The Importance of Teams in the Digital Age” book and more importantly, we had the fortune to meet and work with so many of you for whom most of the above hold true and important and we can not thank you enough for the lasting lessons, the endurance and the passion. 

We feel strongly that we are soon collectively stepping into a time where all the hard toil will start materialising in a vastly different human experience at work, and for that, you should pat yourselves on the back. 

Thank you and well done!

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

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.