Making Dents in the HumanDebt™ is Frustrating AF

This week I wrote about our software -and any other work on Psychological Safety- being essentially the equivalent of CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) but for teams in our other Chasing Psychological Safety newsletter.

In a nutshell, the article postulates that if we can empower teams with enough data on their behaviours and give them the tools to correct the bad ones and encourage the good ones and the strategies to reframe and work on it they will and they’ll succeed. Brace yourselves today as this is an up-in-arms venting article about how it was received. These were the reactions:

Needless to say, the last two reactions make a lot more sense to me and I can deal with them, whereas the first is really playing on my mind because it’s part and parcel of the HumanDebt. For one thing, it highlights the divide - the first one almost exclusively comes from “mandated people leaders” (HR, Leadership) whereas the second two come from “de-facto people leaders” (Agile folks, Tech community).

Then there’s the need to understand why it even comes about and the more I think about it the more I conclude that the first reaction of apparent complete lack of interest, from the “mandated people leaders”, is just an ill-disguised feeling of being threatened . Sheer “throne-clutching” - aka the fear of losing one’s place of importance in the organisation - “If this is true and teams can first see then sort their own negative behaviours and therefore grow their Psychological Safety and become more performant on their own thanks to these CBT-like strategies you’re on about, then what will be the point of us?!?”.

To be very frank, it is bedazzling to me that anyone ever finds us -and by “us” I mean PeopleNotTech but also the progress the DevOps community made on human topic- threatening in general -and they so do- because they weren’t anywhere near doing these jobs themselves anyway. Let’s be honest here. What of their existent measurements of anything ever resulted in any tangible *positive* change in our work lives? Whose L&D is truly driving learning cultures instead of the Tech folks creating DOJOs and blameless spaces? Whose HR comes over once a week to check if the team is Norming or still Storming and help them recognise it? Who ensures there’s an equivalent to the Aristotle score as a KPI? Which people business partner is the Agile coach now? Who helps people understand what Impression Management is and that they need to steer away from it because Psychological Safety is super-needed in particular now?