The HumanDebt Is No Joke But We Should Smile As We Tackle It

In this week’s Chasing Psychological Safety we’ve spoken about the fact that Psychological Safety is never “Done” and how, despite how it doesn’t immediately appear so, the reports of issues in the Google Borg SRE team are in fact good signs of the vast amounts of work they have dedicated to the people work and to Psychological Safety in particular.

Both of these articles cost me followers/subscribers. At first, I thought it was because they didn’t agree with the rather controversial point of view choosing to focus on the wins but then I met some ex subscribers at a breakout of a keynote and on a podcast.

They all said pretty much the same thing once they were satisfied l was genuinely curious why they left it and not simply being a diva - “It was depressing. I felt triggered. At first, reading your stuff was just a reminder to keep doing what I was doing. At that time I was at Superhero-in-training level, saying and pushing things to demolish some HumanDebt that others didn’t, the beacon of sanity and advocate of the people work in my org. Then, I have to admit as time passed, I did slow down a bit on these topics. It felt like too big a boulder to push up the hill and I kept getting knocked back and told it wasn’t my place and that it was being taken care of. At times even ridiculed. So I didn’t stop but certainly slowed down. And then every time you’d write something that made sense, I’d feel like I failed. Not a good feeling and I have enough things that depress me not to read this too so I unsubscribed.”

How very understandable! No one wants the relentless reminder they haven’t arrived where they had to be. The newsletter became the equivalent of that annoying habit-creating app we installed in January in our frenzied enthusiasm to create new habits and uninstalled by February - or March for the more resilient ones- because it kept sending notifications that served as a reminded we didn’t get there at all.

Let’s face it, it’s a looooong road ahead to do this people work, we ought to perhaps settle in, be kinder, have some fun and take breathers just so we do not feel like uninstalling anything.