The New “Let’s Get Real About Fear” Team Action

As promised last week, as our form of aid for the war in the Ukraine, we created a new play called “Let’s Get Real About Fear” and we are publishing it here today for anyone to use with their teams and it is of course live in the PeopleNotTech Dashboard under the Openness tab in the Playbook.

As we were saying last week, while the world already had much other strife and conflict, this war and the prospect of its escalation, are extra hard to deal with in the wake of the pandemic and when it comes to technical and other distributed teams.

We have clients who have Ukranian colleagues off the grid and unaccounted for; we have clients who have Ukranian team mates still working as if nothing has changed despite the shelling around them; we have clients whose teams are not seemingly affected and we have team are riddled with “survivor guilt” and while everyone is different and experiences different things the one thing we can truly do to help is ensure each of us has had the compassionate space to open up.

We can tell you we have tried the play ourselves, in our own teams and a couple of clients and it is hard. It will be a tough conversation and most people will be very reluctant to engage with it. It is confronting, it is difficult, it is depressing even. We know that. But that is exactly what we can not -or really “should not”- avoid.

If nothing else works to get the team engaged, as a leader, try and appeal to their empathy and compassion by explaining this may just help one team member out of the total so is it not still worthwhile that we all get through it, if so?