Lowering the Team-Level Resistance to the Human Work

One of the most ironic things about the much-needed people work is that it’s hard for everyone to get started and there’s a lot of “human resistance” to doing it. We talk a lot about ways to reduce some of the HumanDebt™and how, on a quest to do so, most enterprises have to overcome immense amounts of resistance.

Most of this resistance is organisational - an effect of the HumanDebt itself, it’s hard for any organisation to see themselves from the helicopter view that is needed to rightfully remark on all the convoluted elements that have led it to a place of a toxic culture and quiet discontent but some of this resistance, as we said before, is at the teams level. Team-level human resistance. It’s one that dismays the Superheroes the most.

Typically, by the time they get to us at PeopleNotTech, they would have fought the good battle for so long and have advocated for their people’s need to have enough respect, support and resources to do the human work for aeons and so when they bring a tool to facilitate this work such as ours they feel as if they have at long last arrived and are delivering their colleagues from their long-suffering so they are stunned to see them not always jumping for joy.

Don’t get me wrong, many do. Most teams will have 2-3 people who will immediately sense that the time to do something about the human work has come at long last and this will mean a better work-life so they take to the work with gusto. They are the ones answering many (and at times too many) questions, they are the ones enjoying the team actions and asking for the next occasions when the team is together so they do more, and they spend time pouring over the data in the dashboard and they change behaviours extraordinarily fast. It’s a joy to see them take to the human work.

Then, for the most part, the teams consist of those on the fence about doing the human work. They’re approaching it tentatively and with caution and frankly, that’s a very normal and understandable reaction when they’ve spent most of their professional lives doing none of it. Never have they previously been called to be amateur psychologists, never has their EQ been seen as needed and helpful, and never have they been asked to think of their own emotions leave alone those of others and the interaction that results. What they believed the norm was, the so-called “professionalism” that covered us all as an armour keeping us safe from having to do any of the thinking and feeling around emotions and humanity is no longer valued and we are instead telling them that what we need them to do is the opposite: be human, have emotions, express them, care about themselves and others and spend time bettering habits, and improving their team dynamics.