Distributing the Work to Lower Your HumanDebt™

Back at it team! Or are we…?

It’s a weird one this year start, isn’t it? It feels like we should have so much more oomph. It feels like we ought to be brimming with gumption. That everyone should be “up and at it”. Like we are long overdue for an enthusiastic fresh start but also like we don’t quite have the energy or the heart for it. Except for a lucky few that is. 

I think the reason why is very different for everyone and fiercely complex as our individual threads intertwine with the collective Covid moment -some just entering the eye of a new storm, some believing it’s all over and all not knowing what’s next- but I also know we are immensely more resilient and better equipped to deal with adversity of all types be it in the shape of being disappointingly un-oomph-y. So I’m not worried about us as individual people. We’ve learned the harsh lesson of having to care for ourselves truly -pace ourselves, treat ourselves, believe ourselves and give ourselves what we need- at the altar of extreme survival so we’ll all find ways. In a sense, even the Great Resignation itself is an expression of self-care as well. 

What I am worried about is how this all translates into even more HumanDebt by the day. How I see several enterprises a week where superheroes moved on and the superheroes-in-training left behind haven’t found their feet yet so there’s no one to watch over the debt and ensure no more is accrued. How I see teams in less tight of emotionally-bond spots. How there’s more resignation than indignation towards the “come back to the office or else” rhetorics. How there are countless places where there’s no mention of servant leadership, leave alone any kind of program in place to arrive at it. 

On our first sprint at PeopleNotTech this month - a whole lot of work on our value proposition to help organisations take honest stock of where they are with - a HumanDebt™ Audit method we’re creating- and boy oh boy does it throw up all the big questions. Who should even care? What have these enterprises managed this far? What is undone? How far are they from the agility mindsets we so desperately need? How heavy is the politics? What is the “vibe”/culture? How do we take the true measure of whether there has been enough D&I or engagement work? How much politics needs to be navigated before we even start being honest? Are we all speaking the same language? Do we agree on all definitions? Is there enough structure and clarity to support this, the most honest of explorations? How embedded is command and control? How much “couching” (equivalent to “coaching” but more like a therapists’ -listening-only role) do its leaders need before they can become part of any team? How do we depart from the sterile employee surveys and how do we make an honest dent in understanding how everyone truly feels? 

More importantly: how emotionally invested in each other are their teams? How much trust is there? Who feels valued and like they belong and who doesn’t? How Psychologically Safe are they?

And ultimately: how big is the divide between HR and Tech and how do we show it and then urgently bridge it?

Big, heavy themes. A monumental retro of all their efforts with their people and a clear indication of how much HumanDebt they currently have if you wish. 

Then what? What happens once they know. Once the big questions above have been answered? When they can tell how having this HumanDebt is now the biggest risk they carry? Then they need to do something about it. Make a dent. Lower it. Excruciatingly hard as it may be. 

And it is hard, we don’t presume to claim it isn’t, that any one company could just wake up one day and say “Oh hell we have been letting our people down and they are now checked out and zombie-like and nowhere as productive and high performing as the people in enterprises where they uphold and respect them - we’re changing that as of today” and then it will all happen. No one would even know where to start.

Let’s face it, doing the work to change the amount of HumanDebt we have is huge. 

Apocalyptically monumental to be exact. Most of the time, we don’t even have a clue how much of it there is until we start working on it.

What’s the answer then? Too big a task and we should just drop it and carry on burying our heads in the sand and planting our collective feet firmly in survivalist denial? Of course not. The answer is to split it and decentralise it. Break up the monolith of what all went wrong and caused our people to not be their best and rethink. We can reinvent the solution, it doesn’t need to be a big strategic push or a restructure or some other phantasmagorical large scale programme to change things top-down. 

Instead, a distributed healing effort to lower the HumanDebt that we can “outsource” to our teams themselves with the right tools. 

Of course, we can only do said outsourcing towards smart and people-work-enthusiastic teams but never to disengaged, disenfranchised and powerless teams. Never to the ones resisting. Not the ones who have too many formerly mistreated people who are just instinctively knowing that any people work is practically part of this distributed effort to self-heal and self-improve and therefore help the organisation from the bottom up and in pockets of excellence when they wish nothing good for it. Not the ones where the team leader is too meek to insist on the human work. Not when they don’t feel entitled/able/strong enough to do the work and keep their teams doing it as well. Where they impression-manage instead and avoid looking negative or disruptive or “unprofessional” by insisting on the “fluffy” people-work when there are “real” tickets they could be grabbing. 

There’s so much more to unpack here but I don’t want us all getting even less enthusiastic and willing because it feels insurmountable and depressive but instead I’d like us all to remember: there is a lot that is rotten in the Denmark of our enterprises when it comes to our employees, yes. It is what keeps us all from delivering on the promise of agility and DevOps and such. The people bit. The HumanDebt. To change that we need to count on our own teams. Kit them with the right tools such as ours and they’ll make a dent themselves. We see teams doing this every day and it’s nothing short of extraordinary. 

So irrespective of how much or how little of this debt that you think you have, start fixing it by distributing the work, spreading the ability to engage in some cognitive behaviour therapy, learning and growth at the team level, shifting the focus from a central malevolent entity to the powerful and effective unit of change that the team can become and then watch them soar. 

May 2022 be the year where you understand your HumanDebt and split it into tickets your teams will be grabbing with -eventual- glee!

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This Thursday on the Fundamentals of Psychological Safety Series: “The HumanDebt™ - organisational level and team level” so make sure to subscribe so you have it in your inbox. 

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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 contact@peoplenottech.com  

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