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A podcast about neither tech nor people but both and how, if we want technology to move as fast as the consumers want it to then we must admit it's time we started to consistently do the Human Work. With a total of 50 years in tech between them, author, start-up founder, thought leader and influencer Duena Blomstrom and VP of Engineering for Evora Global, Dave Ballantyne, the hosts of this show come from the two opposite sides of the equation above and debate how we can best meet in the middle. The hosts are also neurospicy, Duena is diagnosed AuADHD and Dave isn't yet formally diagnosed, the couple are (still) newlyweds and they won't hold back from real talk, banter or the occasional swearword!
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the inaugural edition, let's call it, of or episode of Chasing Psychological Safety, which is the first time that we put an inwards conversation and a conversation with one of my personal heroes at that on the air. So this is the first podcast, but some of you listening to this would have heard or would have listened, or even would have read something called Chasing Psychological Safety on LinkedIn or on my many other channels over the years. In this particular newsletter, the intention was, as you may remember, to talk about the topic of psychological safety, which I found to be sorely underrepresented when I got my head out of fintech, shall we say. So, going back a few years and I'm going to try and keep of course, how impression manager of me. I have the call, and I jump to turn it off.
Duena:God forbid, it gets on camera. And then all of our listeners are going to be appalled by the poor quality of our studio where a call entered. How extreme. Sorry, you guys. I forgot that we're talking to our team and to people who get it.
Duena:I had a call. It was horrible. Nothing I need to take right now or we could have paused this. Back to the topic, and I'll mark it so that maybe we cut it, maybe we don't. We are here to chat about psychological safety.
Duena:The reason we're here is because as I said, I am presenting to you today one of my idols when it comes to this topic. There are a couple of people I hold dear that understands the importance of psychological safety and Gitte Kerkat, I never know if I say it right or not, I'm sure she's going to correct me if she has to, but she's hurt worse, is one of them. She has been an absolute shining star of someone who has arrived at these concepts before she necessarily even knew the names for them. I have watched her grow over the years even further, if it was even possible, in her own journey and remain incredibly authentic and courageous, which is so rare to see in people and such an immense life quality that I I try and teach my boys to remember. So here we have her today.
Duena:I will try to shut up more and ask the right questions and let me tell you more. How did you ever hear about the concept of psychological safety data, and what would you want to tell people with your first exposure to it?
Gitte:So I think so like you said, I think I've been doing this for a very, very long time, longer than even the concept no, not longer than the concept existed, but like at least in a public mind. So in 2017, I was working in Spotify with a tribe where the two tribe leads actually had a lot of faith in me and the other agile coach. So I was there filling in for a coach that went on parental leave. And the other coach had looked a little bit into psychological safety at a coach camp. So we decided to put that up as one of the topics that could be interesting to look at for the tribe.
Gitte:So what we wanted to do, we wanted to improve, and we wanted to improve in the areas of tech, of product, of delivery, and of people. And we were actually on an off-site and then people could we talked about what are the different things, we had a small workshop where people walked around, talked about them, and then they could vote. What is the most important thing for us to focus on? Except for I think like two votes, everyone in the people sector voted on we want to have a place that's psychologically safe. So that's kind of how I got into it and I started reading about it and I started going like oh, oh this is what I do' and I had no name for it and I had no I had nothing for it.
Gitte:I just knew that somehow I made people feel like they could talk or they could make mistakes or they could be honest, but I didn't know what I was doing. So we kind of started on that, and what we started, doing was we took the seven questions that Amy Edmondson has designed a while ago, and we looked into let's let's make start here. Let's figure out how are people actually doing. So we made an anonymous, as anonymous as it can be, survey, where only I and the other coach had access to. So not even the tribe leads had access to the results.
Gitte:And we sent that out and we're kind of like, yeah, we are fairly safe tribe, everything will be fine. And we sort of worry, but there were things like 13% felt that someone in their team would deliberately undermine them. That's like one in seven and that really shocked us.
Duena:They deliberately undermine them, not even kind of to say they
Gitte:would deliberately undermine me. And so the way we chose to approach it was we actually made one of the OKRs, because we wanted to make sure that it had the same focus as improving the other things. There was a very clear decision from the two tribe leads, and I think they are the ones I've met that have been the most aligned when it comes to product and tech. Also, like
Duena:actually, said, Ginta, what was the actual OKR saying? We will make sure
Gitte:No, actually had that we will introduce psychological safety in the tribe and some of the measurements were that we have a common language, that we know what it is, and I forgot the last one, so that we could kind of measure that. So what we did was we had a workshop with each team where we talked about so we actually used Amy Edmondson's TED Talk about teams to start with, and then we had discussions about what does it mean to us. I think one of the problems with psychological safety is that it sounds really nice, but a lot of people don't grok it. They don't understand what it is. So the first thing that we did and that we actually still use in workshops today was helping people figure out what does it mean for me, what does it mean in my daily life.
Gitte:That's kind of how we started figuring out what does it mean, what do I do to make people feel safe, but also, interesting enough, what do I do that might make other people feel unsafe? Yeah. So that's kind of where we started. And then, like, later we moved on to making sure that each team had an action point, so we kind of built on it every year to make sure we went into the things that mattered for these people.
Duena:It's always so incredibly fascinating to me to hear this story. I knew it. But every time I hear it, it's it it it has a different vantage point because we you and I have had maybe parallel journeys with this. And your experience has been what I would call building this the harder way because you've had to build it, what I call pen and paper and repair ends with very little in the way of either a political permission or will or more money or time. So to have done that, kind of through the sheer fact that you've had good teams that were smart enough to understand the human work is amazing.
Duena:But I find I found in the last few years that despite the fact that our journeys mirror, we two started with, you know, kind of Amy's and a cross between Spotify and Amy in terms of questions. We then evolve from there, obviously build the algorithm. We are measuring other things today. And obviously, the most important bit, like you said, is not what you measure, is what you do with it. In the conversation space, is the action of doing the human work and is, of course, the ability to kind of do something about it and to want to do something about it.
Duena:You never want to do something about it until you measure it. So you guys practically mirrored exactly what we built in software, but for the same reasons we found it's needed. And I I would bet there must be a thousand different stories out there. One is Project Unicorn, one is what People Notech did, one is your experience, one is AIMIDS academic experience towards it, one could be the initial experience at Google, which I'm sure was incredible in terms of psychological safety, which let's face it, has eventually horribly disaggregated in that SRE team. I would love for someone to sit down with a pint of non alcoholic beer to tell me what the hell has happened in that Telstra theme with psychological safety.
Duena:Do you know any juicy topics on what may have happened within Google when they lost psychological safety?
Gitte:No, don't. But I think it's a little bit like the Spotify model, which is not really a model. It's like a snapshot of a point in time. And I do think that when you look at what Google did, I think the area where they made their research, where they went in and see what are our best teams, I think that the best teams did have psychological safety, and I think maybe their best teams today do have psychological safety. The problem is that it's such a huge organization.
Gitte:It's spread out over many countries. It has a lot of different cultures. And psychological safety is something that you need to really work on. And like when I was working at the tribe in Spotify, one the managers said to the tribe leads, I think this is the least dysfunctional tribe in Spotify, which I thought was really interesting. It's like
Duena:And this is the one twenty seven people still potentially
Gitte:taking advantage of Yeah, this was the one I was working in, and it was the first place where I saw leaders, like tech leaders and product leaders, who actually understood we need to work with people as well.
Duena:We need to do the human work.
Gitte:Yeah, and I think a lot of people don't understand that it's the thing. Like I was doing, I was going to ask, was it last week, more two weeks ago, I was in Eindhoven doing a talk for women in Agile Europe. I was doing the opening keynote And
Duena:thing So was about I didn't interrupt you, Gitte, but if anyone is listening to this and has any talks, that they need to have an amazing speaker for, that have anything to do with people, productivity, imposter syndrome, psychological safety, women, agility and most of all how to get shit done in big organisations, then you need to get Gitte to come over and speak for you.
Gitte:Thank you.
Duena:Go ahead.
Gitte:So the theme this year was crossing the chasm and a lot of people there would speak about, you know, how do we get more women in IT? I chose to take it from the perspective of what is missing right now. And if you look out in the world and if you look at like the last four years, so much happened. I mean, if you look back to 2019, and you said to them, we're all going to be working online and remote, and people go like, no, no, that's never going to work. And I mean, I know more about vaccines than I ever wanted to know.
Gitte:And so we have the we have all of a sudden, we have actually war in Europe. There's so many things happening, which means that we need
Duena:There's to a be horrible one down there. It just gets the hands. There's we have no idea that we're gonna be around from the point of
Gitte:view of
Duena:five months. The the mental health in general of humanity is more on the decline than it has ever been. We are in the dumps, people.
Gitte:We are, and what we need to make things, to get out of it and to also succeed as a company, I think, is you need to have innovation, you need to be able to be very flexible. And the thing is, what I see the companies focusing on is making money, putting in tech, making a new feature, things like that. And while we need the tech and we need to make money, otherwise our company is not going to be able to pay our employees, it's not enough. We need the other side of it. We need the what some people call soft provide, I call it people skill.
Gitte:We need to have leaders managers who actually lead, who do not manage people. Because if you want to be proper flexible, if you want to have proper innovation, you need the brains of everyone. And the only way you can get the brains of everyone is by having them feel safe enough to come up with their ideas. Having them feel safe enough to go in and say, okay, I'm going to try this out. I think it will work.
Gitte:But then it has to be okay when it doesn't. If we don't get there, we are not going to get companies that have that innovation and that flexibility.
Duena:I mean, the fact that we even have to explain these things at this low level, ten years into saying the same things about psychological safety and six years after the study, dust my head in. If someone like Google tells you, look, I might not be perfect, but the way I make some money is by having these teams that have this thing that's like a magic, like a family, like a shit. They like each other. I don't bloody know what it is. They have it in one room.
Duena:I don't know. Maybe you should keep them together more. Maybe give them more ping pong. Maybe have structure, clarity, maybe have impact, maybe have purpose. Maybe make sure that these people are dependable.
Duena:Have these things and you'll be golden. And we are 8,000,000,000 later and not even Google themselves are keeping themselves to these five things and then another five for leadership. There are 10 things in my view that can make anyone's culture Google level or better. And they are those five, and then the other five they found in the Aristotle and Oxygen project. And I can be anyone's cultural officer and make them do those same things for a year.
Duena:You can do. Anyone with enough product ownership, hard understanding of the problem of developers and technical people have no skills and no ability and no interest and too much laziness and a bit of whatever, pissiness, and they're too tired to do the human work, so they need a bit more help. Let's give them more software. Let's give them an easier way of making this into a habit. I will be there as a Sherpa for a year for all these things to become the right team.
Duena:And then I'll go. And if that's not changing your culture, nothing will.
Gitte:And I think the problem is that it takes work. So if you go out and look at much of the Agile today, for instance, you go out and you buy a recipe and this company comes in and it says, let's do these seven trainings, here's the playbook, ta da, now you're agile. And with psychological safety and as well with agile, that's not just not how it works. I can go into a team and say you want or into a group of people and say you are now a team. But until they trust each other, until they take responsibility together, until they do all these things, they're not a team.
Gitte:And it takes a lot of work to do this, but it also takes work from the leaders because if you do not state clear expectations, if you do not make that clarity, if you are not able to show your people, like the thing is from Google, like I am actually contributing to this product, the work that I do contributes to this product. If you're not able to do this as a leader
Duena:cannot have
Gitte:And it takes work. And especially because the way we've been working for so long is that we haven't done this. We've been, like, telling people what
Duena:to do. Yeah. The human one doesn't even have a space in our work schedule. It's not recognized something that needs to happen. It is something we have no skills for, and it's something we have no tools for.
Duena:And it's something that is sorely needed. This is what I don't know if you remember. In my last book, was I was simply pleading with people saying, look, it is maybe agile that's gonna bring us to the fact that we need to do collaboration and body doubling and Yeah. Pair programming. There might I'm I'm starting to believe that there are all these other formulas that each team should grow.
Duena:We, for instance, have something internal called TEAS for TEAM, and we have all of these things that we know for a fact to work for us. Yeah. I would never dream to put those into a framework and sell them because I don't know exactly what works for others. I might write a book and be like, this is what we do. I don't care about other people.
Duena:I would never go in and say I have a maturity framework. It's called TEAS for Teams. No? I have a start to think framework, if you like. We say the teaming is every day.
Duena:We say that it has to be timely. Either something is a ticket or is a text or you put it down in a tab or you keep it in your whatever. You test it together. We have these seeds that work for us. Get your b's.
Duena:Get your c's. Get your I don't even care what it is. But do they hit on these five for Aristotle and these five for the oxygen program. And I would say, start with the one at the top of all of them. And that one at the top of all of them, let's get back to it, is psychological safety.
Duena:So tell me something, Gita, when it comes to psychological safety, have you seen psychological safety as an actual in the wild measurement for team leads or agile coaches or even,
Gitte:I don't know, No, I have not. I've seen people who say they measure psychological safety in the teams but don't. I've seen where they ask people, like they do all these surveys and they ask about, for instance, mental health, how are you doing, how are you feeling? And I think that can do a little bit, but I think that the whole problem with all of this is that it's seen as separate things. It's seen as, yeah, we have all the hard stuff, we need to make a product, we need to do all these things, we need to sell things.
Gitte:And yes, there's this human side. And one of the things that my talk was about that I did two weeks ago was, they are not things that we need to build a bridge between, because they are so connected. And after this a woman came up to me and she said, I never looked at inclusion this way before. I always thought of inclusion as we need to be fair to everyone, which I think is part of it, but she never saw it as this is actually a benefit for companies.
Duena:Right. There's a big blast to it.
Gitte:Yes. Have different brains and if we can get there are so many examples of products that do not get really great. But then there was also this, what was it called? Something with farm that was during the pandemic everyone was playing. I forgot what it's called now.
Duena:Near farm?
Gitte:No. Yeah. Maybe. But the thing is they made this with a diverse team, which means that it had the game play had different elements that are purely different cultures, different yeah.
Duena:And they said if they're not going to take that seriously in the age of AI, we're going to have much bigger problems than just representation in
Gitte:a team. So it's not about only being fair. I mean, fair is being part of it, of course, but it's because it makes sense for the company. The thing is, it's not going to be as easy. Because if you have a group that might be diverse, but it's actually having to stay within the same rules, then you're not going to get that.
Gitte:But it's got to be easier. It's going be Like, I mean, if I look at women in tech fifty years ago, the ones who really were able to move forward. They acted and looked like men because that's the only way they could do things. And I mean, for some of them it was natural, but for a lot of them they had to fit in. And if you do that, it becomes easy.
Gitte:But if you have someone, like you and I are different cultures, we're very different and we have a lot of things in common, but that also means we will disagree. Yeah. And it's so much easier if you have a team where people don't disagree. But the thing is, if you and I don't disagree,
Duena:how have innovation, then we don't have communication, then we don't have truth, then we don't have authenticity, then we don't have a team, then we cannot have psychological safety. Yes.
Gitte:But also we won't get the cool products. Because you might say something where I go like, Oh! So like a friend of mine was working on this app for women and one of the topics was that someone wanted a countdown to when you would give birth, the due date. And she actually had to explain to them kids do not come on due date. Sometimes kids don't even come.
Gitte:Sometimes you have, there's something wrong and your body rejects the child or it comes two weeks early or six weeks early or it comes later. It's not like it's not like oh and now I can count down to Christmas and it's twenty four days and the guys literally did not know this And, I mean, if we don't have this where we can discuss these things like, you're in England now. I'm in I'm in Sweden, I'm Danish. And there are cultural differences. And if we don't talk about this, if we do something together, we're not gonna get it in there unless we have that discussion.
Gitte:I'm not talking about conflict as in fighting. I'm talking about conflict as in we disagree. We have a good discussion. And then you and I can go, and then I can go like
Duena:There isn't fighting is conflict with corruption. But absolutely, I cannot agree more. Although not in our case because I used to live in Sweden for fourteen years. I think we're very we understand that culture well, but we don't agree with it.
Gitte:We can fight for something else.
Duena:But I wanted to ask, being of cultures, if I can bring in a point is, a lot of my readers and my listeners, I think, are, from across the point. And what I hear a lot in the other we we put in this I, have a cohost with American on a podcast called the secret society of human work advocate and human death fighters, and preventers. I keep adding to that bloody. But, but the the conversation is really to kind of drive it from an HR perspective and go, like, what seems to be the the the holdup. And she is an she's obviously a PhD, ex HR super superstar.
Duena:And she has this exceptional perspective that's very data driven, but it's also super American, obviously, because that's where she is, and that's where she is in driving legislation around safety and so on. So I was really interested to see how the legislation around safety in the workplace would pan out. And two things that I think are interesting is, are that there were two different directions that went out of it, if you wish. One to me was very like workplace related because it seemed to kind of go the direction of how much bullying do we have in the workplace, which I am ambivalent about. I feel like it's a really dramatic and punishing take that will unfortunately shake all neurodivergent people from the tree of any talent of that enterprise.
Duena:So if we're gonna go like, well, don't anyone be a bully and ever raise their voice as anyone else, then you're sure to lose talent because there's loads and loads of people that raise their voices because they're dysregulated or passionate or culturally think it's acceptable or believe that everyone else is gonna come. There are reasons for people to to sound what would easily be thrown as bullish when they're actually just passionate and involved. And if we don't learn those differences about people in the workplace and they don't start to have a neurodiversity lens, then we're not going to get far. But I would like to put it to both you and I that these are what I would call luxury problem situation. Both you and I live in in in in fortunate and privileged situations where we can moan about, oh, you know, we can't really wear our hair like we would like in a corporate or they never give us a CTO job, but they give us an almost CTO job multiple times.
Duena:They did a lot. Let's face it. If they really want someone to build them a product or several companies, they'll get one of us. The reason they're not calling us is because no one's building anything. If they're not they're not building.
Duena:Let me be clear. But the the the point I'm making is there's lots of women that want that don't have and it's it's taken me long a long, long time to understand that. When I started my career, I was super up in ants about what seems to be the holdup. Everyone, if you want your tits out, you have your tits out. I will not have this that you can't have a privy to work.
Duena:I will not have this that kind of a hello kitty pink roller in a meeting room because screw you. Why can't I? So my attires and my the way I've mentored and and asked my my teams to to be was women being all out there. And know we're jumping between all these topics. This is because I wanted to bring us back to DNI.
Duena:DNI like we see it here, and like they even see it in America, where, by the way, there's an entire current, which is what I wanted to bring us to, of DNI initiatives and funding being pulled, because it has been done. It's okay. The DNI bit is being pulled, so all the budget for next year is being pulled in America. And also all the budget for Black Lives Matters is being pulled in America. So let me tell you, if they found budget for psychological safety, I would be super surprised.
Duena:So I am very concerned. In particular because Alessandra, that's her name Alessandra Polisi, doctor Polisi, is also involved with various legislative measures where she's looking at introducing the ISO 45,001, which says, has been dictated by the World Health Organization that says, look people, we have a mental health crisis. Can you at least at work stop destroying these people by not letting them be horrible to them? No bullies, no discrimination, no fake women, no not letting them wear their hair, no throwing them out. Can you please be sure that they have health and safety at work?
Duena:So that's what the standard says. She was involved in that work. Lots of academic work there, in my opinion zero commercial work, zero government really involved, than at the very far away levels. And if you look at what's happening there in America, which is concerning, but still closer to how do we change the fabric of the workplace. But when you then get lost into an argument around bullying, but at the same time you pull funding from important matters that you haven't even fixed yet.
Duena:And they are contributing to your human debt every day at work, and that human debt in turn contributes to no psychological safety, no dependability, no impact you can show people, no purpose anyone has, and guess what? No enterprise and no good team and no money is not the victim. And it's just, it makes you wonder who is leading enterprises, is not losing sleep over the mental health crisis, the productivity crisis, the burnout crisis, the fact that our developers are fed up and untrained to do the human work. The fact that at this rate, we may be needing to put other structures in place, but maybe we need two developers and the developer minders like you and I, to sit there and go like, oh, just a second. Do we know how we regulate?
Duena:Let's all breathe. Let's go have a coffee. Everyone sit down. Do it again. I don't know what it takes.
Duena:But what we have today in terms of structures, where we also have a fight over should they do it in the office, is an insane conversation in
Gitte:the government. I look at it, it's like people companies do take the problem with productivity very serious, because we can't produce much. And I think this is also very much an output mindset. Yes, I want to output a new feature. Well, maybe the thing that would provide the most value for your customers would be to remove five features, because it would be easier to get an overview and it would be easier to use your product.
Gitte:Instead of we don't talk about value, we talk about, oh, output, output, output, output.
Duena:But how do they communicate what the customer wants?
Gitte:I think the problem is that a lot of people don't. And I mean, even though there's I've actually met very few proper user research people. The one I found that I've worked with has been so interesting. How much they can find out, even from talking to a few people, it's like, oh, how do you see our web page? What's the first thing that you think when you do this?
Gitte:Even taking that as a start.
Duena:Last weird question is something. It's better than nothing at all. I've done a lot of research into this issue when I was writing emotional banking because I just couldn't comprehend. I was convinced that every other industry is looking at customers properly, not like banking. And I was like, let me let me check.
Duena:And you know what? There are there was a fad of design led agile service development in the 2010 to 02/2014, I wanna say, off the top of my head. And with that fad, we had a lot of human centered design that slithered its way into conversations. And you had an HR department and the CFO that all of a sudden were agile, and they were designing with the customer that and all of a sudden, someone told them who their customer was. Because this department never knew they had customers until this conversation started.
Duena:So they're like, oh, wait. This CEO is my customer, so what should I give them? It changed the conversation. But here's the the kicker. No.
Duena:It didn't go anywhere. We got bored. It fell off the news cycle. We didn't do anything with it. It didn't stay because we don't come back to principles because we get bored of them.
Duena:And why would we repeat the agile ones? And why would we repeat the five good questions from Spotify? And why would we do impression management checks in the morning, welfare checks on all of our people in our teams, one on ones if necessary. If not, do they have everything they need emotionally, mentally and work wise? Let them do their shit and remove blockers.
Duena:It's not difficult.
Gitte:No, it's about having brain surgery. Help people learn how to communicate properly. Because I think one of the things that we forget is that, like in tech, most people are educated in tech. What I learned at university was how to make routing protocols for computer networks. The only communication thing I had was about how do you make a scientific paper and send it in.
Gitte:So first of all, we need to help people communicate there, but we also need to help people communicate from leadership and down and listen what's happening. Because I think the thing is with all of these things is we are forgetting that it's very individual. That is things and that means we need to constantly work on these things. It's not just, okay, go in, I can do a psychological safety training, ta da, now everyone is safe. No, The thing is about getting the conversation started.
Gitte:And once we have the conversation
Duena:Right.
Gitte:And I mean, yes, you talk like talking about bullying. Yes. It might be that you get angry and yell at me and somebody will see this as bullying, but we want to create an environment where I can go, you know what, Joanna? I did not feel okay with that.
Duena:Yes, and I understand it and apologized and discussed it and you see my limitations, I see your limitations.
Gitte:Because if we want to put different brains together and we do because we want innovation and flexibility, we need to be able to talk about these things. I have like Latino friends who've been told that they're too passionate and it's kind of like the reason we want to pull them.
Duena:I'm half romantic, I get that every day from my family. I'm proud, I'm too much, I'm too passionate. Can I come home?
Gitte:Yeah, we don't take that passion and that whole stereotype Latino culture, what's the point of bringing in a Latino if you want them to act as a white person who was who grew up in Denmark in a in a boring school?
Duena:I can I can I can mark this and make sure you don't get canceled because let me tell you? I'm not even joking. You and I are from cultures that say what's right. It's what probably what the problem is and why we don't get employed is when we do get employed, you'll always have a CEO or a board or someone somewhere who is insecure enough to go, oh, no. This woman with her insane hair and all passionate things will show the world that the emperor was naked.
Duena:And I am I I even said this on a podcast the other day. It's almost it's worse than the emperor is naked to them in every in every boardroom these days. It's almost like it's naked and it's dangling. It's stinky balls and no one goes, this won't happen anymore. Like, we're always just sitting there going like, I can't sit.
Gitte:No. It's not them.
Duena:And
Gitte:And I get why it can be difficult. You've been I think that's part of it is I think a lot of it is still on the leadership, and I think part of it is that the leadership we have today in a lot of companies is still based on the old fashioned you hire someone who's good in the field, who is good in that area, but you might not hire someone who's good at being a manager for people or someone who's good at running an organization.
Duena:How about internal? Are they gonna know? Who's gonna evaluate this person for being good at We the people's
Gitte:need someone to help the current ones, so that they can start looking at it. Because I think, I don't think they're doing it deliberately like, oh, I'm gonna have someone who's gonna micromanage. That's not what happens. What happens is this is what you have been rewarded for. And another thing that's really wrong is you've been rewarded to be the best.
Duena:A 100%.
Gitte:And that also means that sometimes you can struggle with people knowing more than you. And if you put your ego and hang it up on I'm actually the best and that's why I'm in this position, of course it's really difficult if somebody comes and says I have another idea or I see this problem. So what our leaders need to do is
Duena:they need to change.
Gitte:They need to take the ego and hang it up on: I have the best department. I help grow these people. I am the one who creates the frame so that they can make all the amazing things that I can't.
Duena:A million percent. And that's it's so difficult to have that click for people That this thing is not just a management plaque, but indeed if you empower people, they make you look good. It's still on your on your performance review. It's still on your bonus. All you need to do is make these people be happy enough to give you better Exactly.
Duena:And they will only give you better stuff when they it's not difficult to keep them happy either. You just have to listen to them. You have to give them the tools and the knowledge to talk to each other, and then you have to make sure they have the time and the space and the tools to do it. And look, no one's saying that there are magical managers who know how to do this. In fact, I sometimes kind of rebuke the idea that it has to start with the managers because I say sometimes, look, if every enterprise in the world would close doors and would put their their business on its ass for six months while everybody, not only managers, but everyone from janitor to CEO would go through a very basic these are what emotions are, this is how we talk to each other, and this is how we make sure we have common language and we keep teaming.
Duena:If we did that and then we came back to work, in my opinion, we would still end that year in double the numbers because we would have done something foundationally worthwhile for our lives doing the human work. Until this is clear, and it has to be clear for everyone, until every I ask my guys in my teams every morning, what human work are you doing today? What? Well, we have a team meeting, but what are you doing for yourself? What's your what's your self care?
Duena:What when are you meeting with others? What's your human work today? If you're not doing any, then you're not actually showing up for work because you're gonna get so overwhelmed with all the operational and technical and other shit, you're not going to be any good to meet by the end of this sprint. So if you do none of the human work, I don't
Gitte:No, want you I work think that company what they do is like, if people have a burnout, a lot of companies have a process. This is how we do it. This is how we help them. But a lot of companies do not do the preventive work, which is, yes, there are things that you need to do outside the work, but there are also things you need to do at work. Like you say, have you talked to another person today?
Gitte:And not talk to another person as being in a meeting. Have you, taken a little bit of time to reflect? Have you asked a question? Have you listened to someone? And these things sound very, very simple and they are, but they're also super difficult.
Gitte:Because if I listen to you, I need to relate to what you say and maybe I need to do something. But we do need to do that. And I mean there are jobs you can have where you can go in, you can work, you can put it away, you can go home. But in knowledge work, most of the work will not be like
Duena:that. Thank you for saying that. I've been saying this for a while. Unfortunately, we can't give anyone a pass. Absolutely everybody.
Duena:Look, we don't even need to I don't think we need to advocate for this. I think this generational change would be a lot faster than ours was. I remember this thing here. We had a good twenty years at the beginning of our careers, where we would meet people who had been there before us, more senior, not at the very top because we weren't mixing with those at that time, but they would be like innovation managers or, you know, those superheroes somewhere in the very middle of the belly of the beast, a human death fighter or a human death preventer, desperate to go like, know this emperor is naked, but look at me, we can build on this thing. It's just you can recognize them.
Duena:Right? So I remember them. And I remember thinking, oh, bless them. Maybe the the this guard on top of them, the CEO, the board, whatever, will just get old enough and leave. And it was a thing, if you remember, when we were younger.
Duena:Let them just flush out, let them get old enough to retire, go play golf and whatever. First of all, don't think they did. Still, I think they're still around. And second of all, I think they will. And I think they will in a very instant way.
Duena:I think this change of guard will be sudden because this new generation that's coming behind, if they think if if anyone listening to us thinks, oh, those are luxury problems. We mean psychological safety. I don't even know if I can feed my children. Let me tell you. I don't know who you are and what industry you're in, but if you're at all in an industry where machines could be doing your job and they can understand how you've done that computation, You will not be employed, your kids will not be employed, and you will not have a place in this world unless you find a way to grow this human work ability inside of you.
Duena:We just won't. It's sad, but they've come after the only things we've ever had to give to the workplace, our knowledge. And now they have it in a different way that they don't need it from us. What they do need from us is that augmented knowledge that has courage, that has insight, that has humanity, that has that moment of innovation that Gita is talking about. And unless you find that strength within yourself as a professional, within you guys as a team, and I you know what?
Duena:These days I encourage everyone to stay with their team. Consider your team. Don't consider the enterprise. Stay with your team. If you found a team that has psychological safety and it looks like you guys are stable at all and you're a product team, bloody stay.
Duena:Don't ever take a job to leave that because finding another team that's having that nucleus and can do that communication might take you a lifetime. It's You might never get that again.
Gitte:Yeah.
Duena:It's more important than And
Gitte:I think what what I think what what I've seen work really well is that when you then have, like, developers or designers, doesn't really matter, but people in teams who knows this, then you have, like, an advocate in the team, and they can tell you about these things. And then slowly people will start to do this. And I think, I mean, I remember, I think it was twelve years ago, there was something called the STUS project, which was about they met in STUS in, I think, Switzerland, and they were like, oh, we're going to change leadership and stuff, And nothing really happened. And I think the part is that some leaders, owners of companies for instance, need to step back. Like I was talking to a company in Germany recently, and actually their CEO, what he did six months ago, was he stepped back.
Gitte:He said: I'm a founder. I'm really good at coming up with ideas. I am really good at running a company of 20 to 50 people. Now we have 500. I don't know how to run a company like that.
Gitte:So I'm gonna be in the board, and I'm gonna be close to the company. Yeah. But I need someone else to run the company because I don't know how to run a big company. And for me, having that insight, humility, taking that step back, self awareness. So I think a lot of what also leaders and individuals need to do is start working with yourself.
Gitte:Start having that self reflection. Have someone who tells you, you know what, the way you act in this situation, it can see differently from the outside and you go like, oh, that's true.
Duena:That's an alternative I haven't considered. That's a reframe I didn't That's the power of having a that's the power of having a therapist. Look, it's I don't think it's even I I've seen a study. I can't remember where it was. It was, I think, maybe Carnegie that was saying, if each of us got therapy from here on and coaching at work, so two different types of help, personal help and work help, on a daily basis, then they could predict a potential drop in the mental health rate of decline of thirty percent.
Duena:Now consider this, if each of us had two people we were working with all the time, each of us, and I think we're going that direction anyways. If we want to keep anyone the five people that are going to have to keep their humanity are going to need a bloody team to keep plugging them to function. And, you know, maybe that is the model. I was speaking to our CTO a few nights ago, and he he reminded us that ages ago, there were these models that said, maybe you need one developer and one secretary and one person giving him food and whatever. There were all kinds of models.
Duena:Right? It was silly. But you know what? I don't think we have the correct models at all anymore. I think we need to talk about things like team burnout that I I have researched.
Duena:Up and down, no one talked about this. Why not? Team burnout to me is a new concept we haven't even looked at,
Gitte:which Interesting.
Duena:Which means that in this particular team, we cannot continue like we were. Yeah. Something broke here, like a stale marriage, like, you name it. It's not that we hate each other. We grew apart.
Duena:We're not interested anymore. We need to. That's team burnout. Why don't we ever think for that? Why don't we change that?
Duena:Why don't we know about it? Bloody hell. No one's even researching this thing. And then we talk about the psychology of teams all day, every day, but no one is actually, believe me, researching this in the workplace. It is dire.
Duena:If you look, there's a GitHub study here and there. There's a Microsoft thing here and there. And let's face it, I don't even want to go into how much, what do you call it, posturing and lying there are from some of these companies these days, but I will want this one. And outside of that, you have like middle sized companies, you know, kind of high growth startups like us trying desperately to make a dent. But you can't because when you make something that is so evident, what we make is practically what for those of you who don't know what Gita has been explaining, they've been doing this for years in different enterprises, which essentially we started with a with a with a set of questions from Spotify and miss Amy Edmondson, and we expanded that.
Duena:We ended up with an algorithm. That algorithm shows you how you're doing on flexibility, how you're doing with your emotional connection with your team, which is called engagement from the dashboard, but it's not what engagement HR calls engagement. It checks resilience, it checks learning, it checks whether people are impression managing, it looks at whether or not people have the impact, the dependability and other bits in the Aristotle project. And it shows all of those to people in one dashboard so that they can come back to this day in and day out. So they they talk about this.
Duena:If this, I'm not low on flexibility. I'm ready to go right now in another project. Why are they saying that? Well, it might be me. I'm not quite with it right now.
Duena:Let's not make any changes. Let's do a play together. Let's see what other teams have done that were in this impasse and had low flexibility. And then we had them crowdsource from a bunch of teams that have used them and have seen growth. And then by next week, when they come back and they check again, don't ask them silly questions.
Duena:Ask them to check progress. Because when you close that loop, and anyone can do this, we've we've never been, you know, kind of with the exception of the algorithm, which I'm not happy starting to write anywhere, I explain this to everyone all the time. All you do is you create the dashboard because it has to be a dashboard. If you don't look at it once a day or once a week, you don't have a team. You're not teaming if you're not doing the human work once a day or once a week.
Duena:I'm sorry. You're not. And then you look at it and you do some of this shit. I don't even care what it is, but you do it together as a team and then you check again. And that cycle alone allows I've seen developers cry, see that they have kind of grown.
Duena:I've seen developers asking us not to remove it when their company was dumb enough not wanting to pay us. I've seen developers leave jobs going like, I cannot do this anymore. Cannot believe I've not known that my kind of the dude across from me has five kids from my first wife, and we never discussed it in ten years. F this. It's just so much is coming out.
Duena:None of the human work has been done in technology. We are now more burnt out than other industries. I think it's looking bad and there's no industry that doesn't have taken it as well. So practically, this is for everyone. Anyone in the knowledge industry, like Gita said, if we keep ignoring psychological safety and the importance of teaming and the importance of doing human work, we will probably be looking at much bigger problems in the future.
Duena:Meanwhile, we have some ideas, some workshops, and you can listen to us on many of our podcasts. Let me see if I can remember them off the top of my head. This is my bit of tourette's at the end of this. I never have it recorded. So you can listen to us on the Secret Society for Human Work Advocates and Human Death Fighters and Preventers.
Duena:I believe it is every Monday or Tuesdays between myself and Doctor. Alessandra Polizzi. Or you can hear us on People and Tech between myself and Dave Parekh, who also presents developer insights, he's going to show you a couple of people in DevOps he talked to last week about the topic of DORA. Same people that I talked to on merit to tech. And what we really want to put together is all of this constellation of bits and pieces in technology, in DevOps, in humanities that understand the problem of teams are teams everywhere.
Duena:People are people everywhere. If we don't do the human work, we're gonna grow both our tech and our human debt. And people like Yitay can help you. Call her and get her to speak to your people. She is the most inspirational speaker you can have that you can bring in front of a developer to tell them what psychological safety is.
Duena:So thank you for coming over today and and inviting your knowledge. And, hopefully, we're gonna hear you on one of the other ones sometime soon. And everyone else, listen to us if you can and subscribe. Subscribe. See See you you next next week.
Duena:Week. Bye. Bye.