The New People-Happiness-and-Performance Department

This week on my Chasing Psychological Safety newsletter I wrote about the irritating confusions and term conflations around the concept of PS and how that adds to the Human Debt and on here I was going to -again- bemoan the great divide between the DevOps and HR community -as sparked by another viewing of the InVision documentary “Squads” that we did yesterday with our team at PeopleNotTech- when it hit me that the need to write two different things in itself speaks volumes and that in a way, there’s nothing to bemoan at all.

There’s no point in reiterating what Psychological Safety is NOT to this community. That it isn’t about job security, or some loosely defined engagement notion or even about mental health, but about a clear pattern of engagement driven by fearless behaviours inside a team that leads to performance. That there isn’t a need is in itself, really telling considering this is a community who hadn’t in theory been asked to even think of these things.

I get a lot of pushback from this community when I reiterate their extreme people-literacy to them and when I say they are the only ones who can make a dent in the HumanDebt. At first, I thought it was part of the hefty amounts of modesty that seems to fly around. The DevOps community contains some of the hardest workers and best minds in the world, and yet they shrug and grimace at the mention of their awesomeness minimising the extreme resilience, the oodles of courage and the speed of their applied IQ all enabled by an extreme change in mindset that so many others evidently can not achieve, by saying they’re just focused on outcomes and this is just “what gets things done”.

When I point out that it’s spectacularly vast in terms of learnings and plentiful in insights regarding human interactions and relationships, there’s a lot of “Shucks, stop it!” or even “You’re exaggerating, we’re just ordinary people doing our work” reaction wise and that’s the modesty, but that objection is, of course, poppycock in a world where if there were a magical objective measurement of who in the organisation knows most about people topics and who effectively does most about people topics in any kind of meaningful way, the “IT side of things” would consistently come on top.

But I’m beginning to think it isn’t modesty alone that motivates the dismissal of the praise but the subconscious realisation that if the above were true, then they are the only ones who can pick up big tickets from the “make our people happy to make them highly performant” story. In the same way that a teenager doesn’t want to do too good a job when asked to vacuum in case it then falls on them to do it every week after, the DevOps community is naturally reluctant to admit they are the repository of culture goodness and light now that the world has turned on its head and we live in an accidental technocracy as they would then have to deal with it all. The minds that have learned the hard way, in the practical trenches of having to try and deliver without having their teams happy and healthy, have the answers but they may not want to admit they do.