New Crusade - “PAY YOUR PEOPLE FOR THE HUMAN WORK FFS!”

We have to be honest - we know we have asked for a lot. We spent the last few years saying to you:

“We have oodles of HumanDebt™and the only way to clear -or at least make a dent in it-, is to distribute it to the team level and let you do masses of “human work” to better yourselves, so here we are everyone, this is what needs to happen - we need you to accept that the work you used to do is not enough, what we need now is extremely heavy lifting on the people side - we need you to: quickly increase your EQ; employ empathy; hold the space for the real conversations; learn and care about your team mates; block the time; have consistency; do your part in self-care; be courageous; be flexible; be super open; never stop being curious; never lose heart or dip in passion; always be willing to be uncomfortable; always withstand uncertainty and remain positive and connected; never impression manage; help each other; learn to change behaviours, replace bad habits, be intentional about candour, conflict and collaboration; be unprecedentedly “team-y”; and bring all your colleagues along the way too”.

Simples, eh? No it isn't. And understandably, people rolled their eyes and sighed heavily or glared - aka “team resistance”.

We then acknowledged that between the team resistance and the resistance of the organisation, it’s the former that needs challenging as the latter is nearly immutable, so we’ve asked everyone to check their impostor syndrome regarding the human work and apply themselves to it without excuses such as “but I can’t/don’t know how/ am too busy/etc”.

We built a library of articles and videos to help and more importantly, we built a software product to further help with this gargantuan task by holding the space, exposing the data and guiding the human work for our clients’ teams.