Organisational Permission and Servant Leadership

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

This week on the Chasing Psychological Safety Newsletter we talked about “data”, “measurements”, “performance” and “productivity” - why they make us uncomfortable and what we can do to change that discomfort before we can hope to create a culture of continuous improvement. In the DevOps community, no one needs selling on the importance of measuring and growth, that’s the essence of it all but some of the attitudes may well be in common so head over there if you wanted to read the arguments we made.

While learning, growing, evolving and bettering are at the very core of anyone who is Agile at heart, nobody is immune from the cognitive dissonance that makes us blind to ways in which we can apply that to our own selves. In other words, no matter how in love with the improvement we may think we are, we still fall into the same mental traps and limitations that hold us back from doing some of the work, in particular the human work.

As a team member, the resistance to human work translates into a sense of doing “extracurricular activities” when we work on bettering either ourselves or the team. It feels frivolous, unmandated, outside of the day-to-day. Non-priority. Not what they pay us for. Not “the day job”. It’s a pervasive feeling that comes from years of professional environment conditioning around what is and what isn’t expected and desirable and having emotions, being human, needing appreciation, honesty, respect, safety, trust, joy, they are all clearly deemed as undesirable.

So even if the enterprise now makes timid gestures towards opening up and starting to pay off some of this HumanDebt™ - after all a mere few years ago we were counting down the hours in open-plan offices where we were afraid to check messages on our phone and envied friends who got to use Slack or LinkedIn *AT WORK*!- it’s hard to believe them. So we resist the human work because it feels unfamiliar and a huge departure. When we are no longer in those offices and they now ask us to spend time on self-care or the relationships in the team it almost feels like we’re on hidden camera - what’s the catch? Is it a trap? Why the huge change? There’s no reason to trust this monumental change of heart.