Superheroes, Superheroes-in-training and the Organisational Existential Crisis

We lose followers and subscribers any time we go back to basics and we can’t blame the leavers. It’s tiring to hear “same old” and we eternally chase the new in particular in a “newsletter” but we simply can not cater exclusively to the Superheroes. They’ll be ok without us. We have to help hold the hands of those that most need our help - the superheroes in training.

These are people who have just started their journey in helping their teams. They have such a monumental and potentially Sysyphian task ahead, that they need all the supportive studies, statistics and articles they can find.

They come from all areas of the business - mostly technologists but the odd Superhero leader or HR person too -thankfully- but they all have one thing in common: they have “seen” the HumanDebt™ and they have enough of an emotional investment in their company (or even just in the people of their own team) that they experience a growing conviction that the answer is in doing the people work and starting with the Psychological Safety of their teams. To do so they need to make others see the same light.

Everyone else. The reluctant; the resistant; the middle managers convinced there is no other way but command and control; the leaders who are eternally “busy”; the ones stuck in a past where none of this makes sense or matters; the completely disconnected and disengaged - they all need “proof” that the human work matters and needs doing. They all need the clear and unequivocal tone of some of these articles which may well be superfluous and repetitive to the ones much further down the journey.

In this video, I speak about how obvious the difference between the two experiences -that of of the Superheroes and that of the Superheroes-in-training- is to us when we meet tens of each kind every month and how conscious we are each needs a different set of “I see you, use this weapon for your next battle” and how we try to cater to both through this newsletter but also the Fundamentals of Psychological Safety series.