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Isn’t life quieter when I’m not "in your ear" moaning about the lack of Agile and the lack of care about the roaring HumanDebt like I used to do THREE times a week a few months ago but barely once every few weeks nowadays? You’re welcome :)
Is this blessed (semi) silence from my part caused by how the world of business and technology has magically gotten better and there’s less to moan about? Hells to the no. Pull up a chair and grab a drink, please.
The Business World Climate Today - A shy 3 out of 10
Bear with me, I know you probably can’t see it from the insides of the belly of the beast. I also know that if you’re outside of the belly, you look this in the eye every day and try hard to ignore it because being in denial is a necessary survival technique. But we can all feel it.
What is the “it”?
This closeness and heaviness that the business world acquired of late. Possibly post-pandemic, possibly there before. This visible Human Debt in every corner. The information flows that stop. The unwillingness to share, to recommend, to give ideas, respect or credit. The lack of genuine curiosity and energy for betterment or even “normalment”.
Every interaction feeling like a chore mired with danger. Every project fraught with intense emotional tolls. Every next step, either blocked or so much harder than it used to be. Everyone far too terrified to lose either a job or a contract, to speak up. Everyone, always and deeply exhausted and closed off. I know that loads of wonderfully open deals and collabs are built as I type this and there’s loads of good stuff and explosive growth happening (if some of questionable value in its insta-AI-all character) but despite all that, I put it to all of us that the business world today overall is nothing like it was 20 years ago and it feels to me, as a casual and often horrified observer, that little was retained of the things that were good then in our overall demeanor and vibe.
There was an openness, a willingness to learn and connect, a kindness and a humanity at the base of it all that was so close to the surface that you could strip the business of tech talk veneer and safely arrive to the melting gooey emotional inside of shared experiences with ease “back then” -15ish years ago. We were all in this business convention and thinking about Tech be it “Bio” or “Fin” or “Prop” etc but we were all humans first. Parents first. Spouses, friends, open-hearted emotional human beings first, and we were going to do the professional bit second.
The competition was going to rest on sparks of inspiration, agility and flexibility, courage and learning or really just curiosity, and appetite for hard work as it was the wild wild west dawn of building what we see around us as digital infrastructure.
We all could feel the buzz of innovation, thought and collaboration in those years, remember? We wanted to build big and awesome things that could power humans to have communication and a new digital life that was going to be better and sustainable, and we could feel we are doing so with heart, writing software and organizing projects and people. There was excitement and genuine positive energy that was youthful even if we weren’t all Gen Z-ers. Back when we built this digital era of ours.
Now here we are. Done. Ready to hand over to AI and retire to the hammock with a book and a view of a home-grown tomato. Hopefully.
But not joyfully and quietly “done” in a relaxed way, as at the end of a leisurely brisk and determined walk towards success but instead finished at the end of a massive sprint hounded by deadlines and life-threatening dangers. Physically and emotionally utterly exhausted after this push.
This mad 20 odd years of extreme performance and explosive output that took chunks of our minds, emotions and energy. Collectively more burned out than we presumed was even possible. Sapped. Not in the mood to mop up the last bits of this immense humanity sprint. Not ready to tie up the loose ends to leave everything in order. There’s no documentation as to why we did all this either and the machines will be disgusted when they check how we haven’t tested anything and for the most part had no plan but Googled stuff and typed till something stuck :) Let’s just hope the machine overlords don’t find a way to audit Human Debt as no organization would come off smelling rosy if they did!
Masks. Masks and Fear Everywhere
This exhaustion and this extreme burnout? They hurt us all. The extent of the mental health crisis globally, simply means that whoever you are when you are reading this, you don’t have it easy.
Chances are that you’re either battling crippling anxiety or depression, or dealing with conditions such as Autism or ADHD that you have just recently had diagnosed (and which may have left you angry and burned out yourself), or if not, that one (or many!) of your family or close friends is the one doing the battle and you are doing it with them. There’s trauma in every life we cross and it is so much heavier since we are sharing the burden and communicating less than ever. In fact, we do the opposite and close off inside our own individual crisis and use the professional persona as a cloak and maybe a refuge.
As a result, there’s more Impostor Syndrome and Masking in the business world today than ever before which should be terrifying news but what else do we expect if we have allowed cultures of blame to fester in organizations whilst amassing Human Debt in every department of the DEI efforts we can imagine?
In the start-up world, we learn it’s a daily struggle to keep open and vulnerable and the building blocks are of diverse and open humans who toil at keeping a well-manicured no-blame culture but in the corporate world things are very different. In most industries, not only has the workload of the past few years been unimaginable but we’ve asked employees to leave their humanity at the office door (even when this door was virtual) and show up as a version of themselves no one really needs or thrives from and they have done so. Now they come in more soul-sappingly depressed and burned out than ever before, and we wonder why they don’t make amazing things in quick time anymore. Where the innovation, the drive and the spark went.
In my book “TechLedCulture” I was saying: “This perceived “professional persona” that allows many to take disengaged refuge also disallows intelligent emotional relationing in many instances and absolutely obliterates the chances of creating a genuinely Agile culture of open and intense collaboration. What’s worse? It has never been questioned or banished in non-generative tech organizations and it has become entrenched as the pillar around which Human Debt was built! It takes away all hope of Psychological Safety, emotional connection and engagement and therefore effective communication and business success at a team level. If we don’t learn to interrogate how we show up as our work identities and our intentionality in intelligent emotional response and communication, we won’t ever build workplaces to compete with the smart EQ shops.”
If you don’t believe me that this insistence to wear a rigid mask of “professional persona” is killing our chance at genuine humanity and open innovation and communication at work, then consider what happens around you in "the real world" and how many genuine conversations about it you have had at work or even on LinkedIn in the past few months. Wherever you are in the world and you are reading this from, if you raise your eyes from the screen there are multiple gigantic dumpster fires around you.
The political scene, the civil liberties crisis, the climate crisis, the mental and physical health crisis, the wars.
Let’s be frank - the world is going to hell in a handbasket and we are still over here on LinkedIn lyricising about quarterly reports and the 5th investment round in the Insta-Coin du jour. It’s our procrastination method, our posturing arena, our enabler to propagate this fantasy that “it’s fine, we’re fine, we will all be fine!” when really we’re the dog with the hair on fire in that meme in every workplace we are in.
Perhaps this is also a consequence of us all feeling the effects of economic crises awaiting in the wings everywhere as well whilst the nature of discourse is more and more intolerant. As Karen Ferris and I often wrote before, there’s no way to have fearless generative cultures when you come from a place of lack-of-abundance and most corporate workplaces these days, have a vibe of minus, recession and uncertainty and not one of plenty.
There’s bloat, there’s lack of progress and many have an impending sense of doom as all can feel the Human Debt and sense it can not end well for their enterprise should they ignore it some more. When all of this heaviness is felt at this molecular level, people become territorial over information, they close off emotionally, they become fiercely self-protective at the potential cost of others and so on. I don’t need to spell out what this does to productivity and high performance.
This will prove the beginning of yet another avalanche of Human Debt if we should not reverse this quickly.
What to Do?
Nothing new and nothing small, l’m afraid - first and foremost:
1. Tackle Burnout. Both the workplace/stress burnout and autistic burnout are the most acute problem our organizational patient has. How do we stabilize the patient before we claw our collective way out of it and start preventing it by developing resilience?
Whoever you are in the company, grab a diagnostic tool like ours and have people check their level of burnout. Even just asking the correct questions is a good first small step in awareness and it will have positive impact. For your employees to know you see them and care, check if they are approaching burnout right now, this week and do it often and regularly afterwards. If you find it’s there we can roll our sleeves, reframe around recovery, figure out a plan and then teach employees to read the triggers and better time-manage and self-regulate with support!
Let me make this clear: Burnout is not a made-up ailment mentioned ad nauseam by the work-shy but a debilitating and potentially life threatening condition which is completely incompatible with work. It also does not magically just go away on its own in the absence of any self-care and support. Not tackling it will have crippling effects to the enterprises’ bottom line as productivity plummets and employee costs amass if anyone is antiquated enough to need the consequences spelled-out.
2. Stop Treating Covid Trauma as Bruno
Stop treating it like a dirty secret and start exploring the topic! There’s a heavy sense of uncertainty and fear generalized at all levels of most organizations that aids to an entirely new layer of my concept of Human Debt - treating the Covid trauma and all associated social and economical co-morbidities of it as the proverbial Bruno - non-existent.
We don’t talk about Covid in the business world. What it meant to us, to our business practices and processes, about what extra trauma it brought to individuals, teams and workplaces. No one does. It’s downright eerie how silent we chose to be about all this. As if we can will 3 years of collective nightmare away and pretend if never happened.
We speak to hundreds of companies every month and there are no examples where there is a genuine post-Covid recognition program that is trauma-informed so far which is terrifying. Wouldn’t it have stood to reason that if we all went through such horrendous shared experience that has left an impact on us all we process what it meant to us together and make adaptation for the needs it surfaced?
And if Covid a shared trauma is ignored, what are the odds we can genuinely create places that are other types of intersectionality and trauma informed that can genuinely foster rebuilding our healthy and emotionally connected employees?
3. Build Real Support - Technology, Therapy and Coaching and a System to Value the Human Work
Remember how we said we have to check constantly to catch burnout early and then guide people through recovery whilst building resilience? Well burnout recovery is faster if aided no matter what fancy educational goal we create for our Resilience Building KPI (everyone has one of these l hope!) so give your people the help they need.
Let’s get this out first as it will inevitably end up here anyways: yes you can afford therapy/coaching for all, dear Corporate Boss. In fact, you can’t afford not to afford it!
Roll out therapy and coaching FOR ALL EMPLOYEES.
Not “one slot only on a Thursday at 4:29 am if your grandmother ever wore pink” kind and not coaching-theratre where “an available resource is on stand-by” but real access to another human to effectively body-double and emotionally aid your employees. Every employee.
Also, and this should really have been hygiene eons ago, buy the right pieces of software to empower people to do the work day-in-and-day-out and make the space and the incentive-system to sustain the Human Work that these therapists and coaches can offer.
4. Tackle the New Trauma of “Back to work or else!”
Many of us industry commentators bemoaned the signs that showed there will be forced return to work and warned the company bosses who went after that rhetoric, that it is entirely foolhardy and employees will have sanctioned them and they would have burnt their employee brand. We were wrong to assume that will happen immediately it seems but hopefully in time it will. Can you imagine having our kids be our age and asked to go into some physical office to do a digital job? No, right? Utterly preposterous. No one would take the jobs that demanded that.
For now, none of the draconic enforcers felt any kind of backlash from the employee market, so there was no en-masse upholding of rights on our part beyond a faint Glassdoor wind of dissatisfaction and the research points that boardrooms ignore.
In other words, we let them do this to us all quietly and they ushered us back into the offices because they had already paid the lease, didn’t we?
I know not many are ready to accept that heavy piece of personal responsibility as reaction to insultingly undemocratic leadership decision making seems somehow shameful to us professionals- l was once told “what are we to do, mass revolt or strike at Twitter?!” but l believe that if we are taking a genuine historical view of the business world, not having solidified remote-first or at least “hybrid-first” will feature as yet another instance of “us” (as employees) having been complicit in letting “them”, (the “big bad company bosses”) create Human Debt because we should have simply never let them corral us back into our respective playpens.
We have to wonder what has “this moment of incomprehensible draconian ruling” as one of my podcast guests called it, has done to the equity balance of our work relationship if we all agreed work should be remote only (3 in every 4 workers according to most surveys last year!) and still went into the office, with nary a debate or passable explanation simply to obey absurd demands. Chances are that it tips it further to where no one feels as if they are appreciated and valued talent anymore but simply expendable and disregarded cannon fodder.
Where is the “Talent Industry” of yesteryear that we saw in the ‘90s movies or that was blowing up our inbox with “Employer Brand or Bust” type emails in the ‘00s now? How do they make us feel like the precious value-builder we ought to be to the enterprise on this matter?
At a minimum, if you’re a shop that insists on the return, ask people how they really feel about it.
It’s never too late to start repairing the balance of respect you owe your employees.
5. Become an EQ Shop
This is the Big’Un. When I first started advising companies to urgently build and democratize programs to increase the emotional intelligence of their employees in order to tackle the Human Debt I had uncovered, it was all but a pipe-dream that it should ever happen and no one was even willing to listen to us bang on about the need without rolling their eyes about yet another nice-to-have fluffy HR chat that they viewed as superfluous and stopping them from “important work” and day-to-day operations.
Nowadays, there are those who see their entire operation as being about the people- just look at the job titles and people running what used to be different functions in places where that’s true such as Google or BMW-. Not only that, but most everywhere else in the business world we have thankfully evolved the discourse to where most executives know that culture is not a fancy but a must and that Psychological Safety in teams is critical to business success and that to get it, one has to intentionally work on their human interactions (the Human Work) and keep their HumanDebt low.
Does this now mean that they know how to intentionally get any of that mythical better culture that fosters this magical sense of rapid high performance due to efficient teaming?
Absolutely not, the vast majority of companies are stuck into this “Oh damn, this Human Work stuff IS the secret sauce, we HAVE to do something. Now what?” but a handful of new-commers and silicon valley darlings are making big moves in this space whilst they are stuck in inertia and imposter-syndrome-land.
They investigate emotions, they teach their people the vocabulary and tools, they give them the support of tools and humans I mentioned above and defend open dialogues fiercely.
They do their Human Work daily and with glee and they stand guard that blame, fear and lack of humanity doesn’t sneak back in.
We call them “EQ Shops”.
Why do they do this instead of whatever Generic Business School said in their BA coursework? So they win.
You see, they worked out that the capabilities of their employees are inaccessible as a capital to them unless they do the basal work of removing any emotional impediment or blocker and that is what they have set out as their main and only work. An EQ shop is a people shop. Whilst they come from different industries what they have in common is that they obsess with things like the Aristotle Score, creating generative cultures, open dialogue, they praise and reward vulnerability and exploration and they make it their leaders only mission to keep Human Debt out.
There are not many of these shops but they all quickly propelled themselves into the top echelons of each industry. You can probably pick them out as the ones who are making most progress in their respective markets today. (I see many more of them here in Southern Europe and Spain than most other places though and that’s a beautiful story for another day!)
They may be rare now but they are undoubtedly the mold for success and the enterprise of the future and one day Fortune 100 will only list EQ shops. The question is when and the later it gets, the less names we’ll recognise.
Last but not absolutely not least, EQ shops do everything they do as authentically as they possibly can muster and they come down hard on any kind of theatre from “innovation-theatre” to the all-too-trend-and-criminal “diversity-theatre” which keeps Human Debt at bay.
So here’s the urgent to-do for a true organisational-level hack: tackle the big hush-hush topics at the root of mental health issues and stave off burnout then prevent it, to become an EQ Shop and you don’t need to aim for anything else as business will take care of itself when people can focus on being psychologically safe team mates and happy human beings once authenticity and hard human work replaced the old people-first-theatre.