Organisational Permission: Revoked

About last year at this time I was telling you guys this:

“One of my happiest moments last week has been speaking to a software house who said they are now taking the organisational permission topic so seriously following “PeopleNotTech’s incessant persistence” that they have devised a program around it and expect to take 6 months to “rewire our people’s trust in how we care about them, we have 12 distinct “organisational permission slips” and will be emailing and printing them then we will explain why we think they are important over this period”.

They gave me some examples, they were amazing things such as “As a team member you have permission to feel things” - followed by the science of why we can no longer ignore people’s emotions in a work environment to show they have serious reasoning, followed by suggested team exercises and a list of “unbanned words”; or “It is more than okay, it is needed that you spend time talking to each other about your wellbeing and interactions not only about work things” - equally followed by the science, exercises, etc.”

They haven’t managed and they have but added to their HumanDebt. Massively. You see shortly after they put the wheels in motion for the above to happen, their head of people left and everything simply halted for a while. They regrouped, they recovered and they continued under the watchful eye of the CTO. For a while, they had a rhythm going in opening up the dialogue and people were starting to understand how this can and will work for them as a human CI/CD pipe. Then, a few months later their CTO got poached by a smaller scale-up that had just gotten overly financed and once they were out everything completely stopped dead.

They have new execs in those positions but absolutely nothing else has happened. People are asking whatever happened to that program about emotions, empathy, psychological safety and teams that they were hearing so much about and everyone shrugs. It is completely on hold. Stopped. Nowhere to be seen. The damage? Likely monstrous and shudder to think what it will feel like to them when they see the true effects.