Refocus on Teams. Or Else...

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

“I'm sorry, this is my last month, I can’t do this anymore, I’m taking an offer I’ve been swatting for a year” - were the now-familiar words I heard from yet another tech leader last week. I didn’t have to ask what “this” was. What he couldn’t stand anymore. I knew it was inertia. The hypocrisy. The paralysis. The incessant lip service. The mountain of HumanDebt™.

Unfortunately for the organisations, they are leaving -who genuinely have never had better talent than them- we have been hearing similar words from many of the Superheroes we’ve been travelling with in our journey at PeopleNotTech. In the enterprises who became clients relatively fast, they’re still around but almost mathematically, if our process span over the entirety of Covid -and it will, both organisational and team level resistance are that great and the maddeningly slow pace the price we pay for changing people’s work’s lives- we heard these words a lot and people left a lot. So much so, that yesterday I spent some time looking at our CRM to see if it supports this and found that 4 out of every 5 Superheroes we initially started talking to about changing the lives of their teams through Psychological Safety are either out already or in the process of jumping out of the soon-to-be-burning vehicle.

It almost feels like our software should come with a warning “Careful: once your best people see the need for the people work and increasing their Psychological Safety they can’t “unsee” it so either get serious and then rush to create real support and organisational permission which would reflect in every single KPI including retention or don’t come anywhere near it, because you’ll ironically lose them if they sense you don’t care.”

Granted, this is not exclusive to technology and many people are at end of their teether in different ways but when it comes to the Agile leaders, the ones who had fought long before this moment, the ones who were already obstinate in their servant leadership and powered by sheer passion? They have even more reasons to be tired and fed up.