Playbooks for Teams
As you may have noticed we are nothing but data and action obsessed when it comes to reducing the HumanDebt™ and bettering team dynamics through Psychological Safety at PeopleNotTech. We hate nothing more than empty rhetoric or sterile surveys and not a preachy word comes our mouths highlighting a people problem before we feel we have a clear suggestion of what can be done to solve it. To bring the maximum amount of value in the hands of the teams themselves, often away from corporate, or even coaches, we compiled a Playbook of all the human interventions we did with teams that worked to better each element of Psychological Safety in our Dashboard over the last year.
One of the companies we most look up to is Atlassian. A familiar name to all of us reading this, not only do they do well internally with their own people but they practically hold the keys to modern project management tooling and with it, any hope of successful Agile transformations if we’re honest. So much of what they do is deeply insightful and they are one of the few companies out there happy to show all they learn from teams to help other teams. In case anyone needs to hear the obvious disclaimer that is not to say that all one needs to do to become and stay Agile is buy all that Atlassian has made and implement their tools and process advice, far from it, nothing they ever made replaces the need for a deep mindset change.
When we created our “Psychological Safety Team Dashboard” Playbook feature at PeopleNotTech we, of course, looked to brush up our knowledge of the Atlassian playbooks as, aside from the documents Google puts out and as of late, research and resources from GitHub, Microsoft and a handful of others, there’s precious little out there to even acknowledge the people work, in particular in an Agile context. Their playbooks, at a very minimum those around Retros are hopefully in the hands of most coaches and facilitators, be they internal reformed PRINCE certificate holders or freshly minted Scrum masters. Aside from those, they have a bevvy of others which they’ve built on practices they have seen thousands of teams benefit from so they are a wealth of information and a precious resource for many.
To understand the playbook format that works best for tech minds, we went straight to my favourite one that they put out - the Team Health Check Monitor. For anyone unfamiliar with it, it asks the team to spend some of their regular meetings to vote with a simple thumbs up or thumbs down on how some of the team attributes have gone in the last work sprint and come up with some ideas on improvement.
It aims to be a manual version of our data-and-action solution, I would have thought. In terms of what the monitor really is, while I won’t go into the side-by-side detailed comparison as it would be comparing apples and oranges, suffice it to say some elements are needed and useful and should be quantified, discussed and feedback is needed and yet disappointingly, it appears on closer examination that it misses the greatest lever of team performance - Psychological Safety and it doesn’t even ask people to self-assess their levels or attempt to unpack it for the respective team.
