I am a child of the long summer. Born into an era where large organisations recruited graduates, gave them a career path, nurtured them through the hard times and helped them steadily progress over many years. Where leaders were generally friendly, fair and honest and spent time reflecting with their people on achievements and development opportunities during regular catch up’s and bi-annual performance reviews. Where people worked happily together in teams, celebrating the odd long-lunch or Friday night drink to help relieve any stresses accumulated.
Alas, those days are fast diminishing. The rapidly evolving competitive landscape is taking its toll. Digital disruption, new technologies and higher customer expectations have darkened skies for many organisational members. A cultural chill has dawned, characterised by fear, threat, anger, depression and the negative behaviours associated with protecting self over community. Like the Starks’ arriving in King’s Landing, surroundings have suddenly become unfriendly, as leaders withdraw to their castles and team mates resort to fear-based tactics for survival: white-anting, bullying, subterfuge.
Relentless organisational disruption has produced the white-walkers of our time: an army of fear-based behaviours threatening the psychological safety of employees. Nobody is safe from higher workloads and uncertainty, leading to stress-related costs as people fight to maintain the status quo, their power, a healthy balance, happiness and wellbeing.
So what can be done? Submit to the fear of change, refuse to surrender ground, panic or take sides and fight each other to death? Or follow the wisdom of John Snow and pull together to fight the white-walkers with dragonglass- in other words, unite together behind behaviours and protocols that will improve psychological safety and enable people to cycle through fear and back to a new normal faster and better.
The emotional cycle of change
Restoring psychological safety under conditions of relentless change can be achieved, with collaboration, community, inclusion, selflessness, trust, respect and the courage to fight fear with faith, strength and the discipline of mindfulness.
Read more about creating psychological safety for high performance teams here: https://hbr.org/2017/08/high-performing-teams-need-psychological-safety-heres-how-to-create-it
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