Resisting the Human Work - New Plays and Empowered Teams

In the last few articles, I’ve talked about the fact that we may be creating new HumanDebt™ and that the only way to combat it effectively is to distribute the people work to the teams. We’ve also written an article in he Fundamentals of Psychological Safety Series entitled “The People Work – what does it take?” and the next one is “Individual objections to the Human Work” so we are working hard to give you enough ammunition to get your own organisation on the right path when it comes to these topics by appealing to the reasoning of its best asset - its people.

It should come as no surprise that we believe the work to better the team dynamic has to start with psychological safety and be done by the team itself and that is why we measure it and why we’ve included our plays so that teams can do just that: undertake the people work effort at their own bubble level and see the effects of changing behaviours as a group.

To do that though, we have to have teams that feel empowered to make any changes or examine their behaviours and to invest the work of making this new ask a priority and a habit. This is, unfortunately, stupendously rare.

A lot is being said about autonomy, lack of hierarchy and how it all fits into changing from command and control to servant leadership.

All of these are big themes that are to be urgently explored and almost everyone has made an attempt at discussing them, but as of now, there only are a handful of champions of the human work out there that have made the leap from just raising awareness, to putting it all into transforming action.