Understand 'Insecurities' to make your team "Psychological Safe"!

Once my team decided to adopt pair-programming. Team was very good but one guy, ‘V’, was a brilliant coder. However, V never agreed for pairing. Other members proclaimed that V never wants to share skills with others & so he is not agreed for it. I started believing others, but I could never convince myself that ‘this’ is the reason why ‘V’ is not supporting pairing and it motivated me to find the actual reason behind it.

We have been given one beautiful thing called brain to preform so many activities. The outcome & experience of these activities is stored as intelligence, called Mind. This mind makes human a complex entity because we human are controlled by certain psychologies developed in this mind.
Psychology means different human factors like hesitation, fear, happiness, emotions, feelings, complexes, excitements etc. which are growing in our mind and psychological safety is how these are taken care of on personal & professional front.

Before psychological safety, we need to understand Psychological Insecurity. I have seen 3 categories of psychological insecurity: -

1. Job Role
2. Gender   
3. Social Inferiority

1. Insecurity related to Job Role:

We are in highly competitive world. Truly, most of the teams are now started talking coordination, collaboration & team-spirit, still there is a feeling of competition & sometimes it takes negative shape. Being an Agile Enabler, I’ve seen below areas where people are hesitant & feel insecure: -

1. Agile Team means we are building cross-functional team. This idea instils the fear in members that their role/skills might become decentralize. When we talk about cross-functional team, without understanding the core of it, member fills with spirit of competition & insecurity.
2. Scrum Team means there is a scrum master. Because of SM role, the traditional management team (team leaders, managers etc) feel insecurity.
3. Same case is with the idea of self-organized team. Traditional management team feel insecurity here.

Protect & Maintain the Psychological Safety based on Job Role - 

As per my analysis as an Agile Enabler, the main reason of this (job role) insecurity is half-knowledge of the concepts (like cross-functionality, scrum master responsibility etc.) & our own assumptions.
Here, my efforts are to:

• Make all the concepts (Theories, Practices, Roles & Responsibilities) clear to every team members & make them understand the core behind these.
• Encourage them to have communication & talks. Discourage any possibility of assumption building.
• Never leave anyone unnoticed. I try to engage each member wherever possible. E.g. – Earlier, in one of my team, there was practice that in sprint review, QA members will showcase the developed features to stakeholders. I presented an idea that each developer showcases her/his developed feature to stakeholder. This idea was practiced & they feel engaged and have better frequency with stakeholders now.
• Motivating them to learn continuously. We do not have SAFe as such but the idea of hackathon & innovation (IP iterations), we have adopted and almost all member participates into it. This helps us in improving technical skills & better coordination among the members which are the core ingredients of safety.

These steps helped, but it still needs more efforts to make people secure on this front because this is directly associated with the feeling of earning bread & butter.

2. Insecurity related to Gender:

Psychologies become more complex when gender comes into the picture. Studies say that Male & Female psychologies are different & most of the time both see the same picture from different lenses, & it is natural. I have experienced some instances:

1. Our organization had a training on “Sexual Harassment". Surprisingly, after that I sensed a behavioral disconnect between 2 gender groups in my team. I talked with each group to find the core and finding was "male group” developed an understanding that Female can use this as weapon in future so better to get disconnected earlier. I was shocked.
2. I witnessed the conflict between 2 male groups: one says - “Females are being treated differently & it is not good”. Other says – “We can’t use the same expression & language with female as we use with males, so we need to treat them differently”.
3. Once, In our cubical sitting arrangement, 1 male & female personnel were allocated seats facing diagonally to each other. One day she informed me – “That member who is sitting & facing diagonally to me, stares at me continuously. I feel awkward & unable to execute my responsibility....”.       

Protect & Maintain the Psychological Safety based on Gender Complexities:

These above incidents motivated me to talk to different people & groups to find the core. What I found was misunderstanding, overthinking & assumptions.

The concept of Sexual Harassment training was misunderstood. To convince the Male group, we had one more session solely on “what males should do to save themselves from false charge”. It took time, but we were able to re-establish the broken disconnect.

Again, that diagonal sitting guy had a habit of being lost in thoughts while thinking. He even did not know that he used to see that girl, while thinking. I facilitated talks between them. Today they are good co-workers & friends.

Finally, we need to understand “No girl wants to be treated differently because it gives the sense of discrimination. She wants “to be heard & responded” so that she might feel engaged. At the same time, boys also need the same & don't want to be the victim of feminism.

3. Psychological Safety related to Social Inferiority:

We all are different from each other, from different background, culture, language & traditions. Day-to-day comparison with each other, on these grounds, create rift & people tend to become insecure. Some instances: -

1. Language – If you don’t speak good English, you are alien to society, forgetting the fact that in many geographies it is not the native language.
2. Skills – Sometime people think themselves under-performer & feel insecure.  
3. Religion – Sometimes we see religion-specific incidents in our society. The people of that religion feel the pressure of society even when they are not involved in incidents.
4. Other difference like Politico-economic opinion, Sports opinion, Financial standard of self & family and Any Different Ability highly impact the psychology of individual. And therefore, psychological insecurities take place.    

Approach to create Psychological Safety:

Psychological safety is a trust that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.
It is the environment where team members are not hesitant to share their opinion, to ask question, to reveal their mistakes, to receive & give feedback.
All above instances, I handled through communication & certain initiative. I also took below initiatives: -

1. Highlight my own errors – On certain occasions I shared my mistakes with my team so that they feel making mistake is not a crime.
2. 360-Degree Feedback – I started this practice so that each & everyone can listen & understand others view.
3. Listening Habit – When someone speaks, other interrupt. To install the listening habit, we started high-penalty mechanism. If anyone interrupt someone, s/he will be penalized. We had good funds for weekend parties, but the revenue is reducing now.
4. KYT (Know Your Team) – I started this campaign. We play with story cubes. We select 1 cube & members have to interpret this. This shows how different we are from each other and it is OK to have difference. But the best part is when they appreciate each other’s point of view. This helps in bonding among them. 
   
5. Start Informal – I have habit of starting communication informally most of the time. It goes like knowing about her/his well-being, family-well-being, anything crucial at her/his end. And, then we go to actual issue. It helped to get my team closer to me.  
6. Last but not the least, Cultivation of Scrum Values (Courage, Commitment, Respect, Focus, Openness) among the members will be very useful. 

Psychological Safety is complex aspect which can’t be seen by 1 lens. Unique psychologies need to be magnified through different lenses.

Do you still remember ‘V’ who was against pair-programming? I involved with ‘V’, had informal communications and one day ‘V’ told me:

"You know, I am news-freak guy. I have a habit of checking breaking news very frequently. It never impacts my work, but if I am involved in pair-programming, I’ll be judged on the ground that I spent more time on news sites than work.”

Covid-19 Distances brought us Closer - A Case Study

Covid-19 is an unforgettable situation in our lifetime on each front personal or professional. It brought disaster to the world (in Socio-politico-economic conditions as well as to the life of individual). Most of the unexpected things are happening around the world.

At our team level also, when distributed work culture adopted due to Covid-19, number of problems were encountered. On one single day, distribution adopted and without analyzing future challenges we followed the government guidelines. But it was not easy as many problems, in our workflow, were about to visible due to this. Although, few of these problems were existing in the teams already but distribution brought these up on the surface bluntly.

But, is this not that one situation which Agile is trying to focus from the beginning, that is: -

• Uncertainty
• Unplanned
• Exponential challenges
• No defined solution to the problem

Let me share what happened with my teams & how we, my team and I (as their Agile Enabler), came out of it.

The first week of distributed workforce was like sailing boat in hurricane and the onus was on myself to help my team to sail this boat through hurricane and reach on the shore. And the journey began as follows:

First Step: Early Retrospective

I (as an Scrum Master of the Team) facilitated a very early Retrospective (after 4 days of distribution starts) with very specific & only one agenda i.e. “Challenges due to distribution and how to address these challenges”

              This Retrospective proved to be boon for us. What we found, were the core challenges of working separately. To be more specific, our main problems were related to: -   

1. Problems of lacking self-organization in the teams (few members faced enormous challenge in organizing themselves)
2. The communication became lesser user-friendly as it was not face-to-face (or co-located) by any means
3. Digital intervention & particular time-box required to begin any communication
4. Home environment is not supporting (disturbance, no dedicated space) to deliver what is expected
5. Technical challenges, VPN issues, Device availability etc.
6. Few members (correctly) pointed that we are working from home does not mean we cannot have personal time. It is expected that we should start early and end late in night because we are at home.

In the same Retrospective, we started discussion to find solution of these challenges. (It was well understood that before leaving the table on that day, all of us should reach to some(expected) solutions of these problems because we can’t go anywhere until we resolve these). After some brainstorming, discussions, arguments, we decided to adopt certain practices.

Second Step: Possible Solutions/Changes introduced by Team

1. Increased frequency of daily scrum to Twice/day – Team decided to have 2 times daily scrum during the day, one when starting first half and second when starting second half (i.e. like 10 – 10:15 AM and 2:30 – 2:45 PM). The whole idea was improved coordination among the distributed members and highlight the blockers ASAP. Now, members were to share the plan only for 4 hours in each daily-scrum session. It helped the complete team in increasing coordination, but it drastically helped them who were facing problem in self organization. They were feeling comfortable as it was easier to plan for lesser time-box now. It really worked for us. I am still following the same with 3 out of 4 teams in my organization.  
2. Common chat group to facilitate discussions – We created a common chat group and all of us were committed to have any work-related discussion on that group only. Until & unless it is very-very specific between 2 people, the communication shall be done on common chat group. It will maintain the sync and information leakage can be cured.
3. If possible, priority will be for video calls – We made an agreement, irrespective of magnitude of discussion, if possible, we shall have video calls. Undoubtedly, on video calls, the engagement was less interrupted
4. Weekly Retrospective – Another important decision taken to have weekly Retrospective with very specific agenda “Challenges in working distributed & solutions”. It is quite different from Sprint Retrospective which focuses on Sprint-happenings. It actually made us better.

Finally: When we got distributed, my whole idea was to strong the scrum values among the team. These values (Commitment, Courage, Focus, Respect & Openness) gave us confidence & courage to be more aligned & have better coordination. And, it happened because we understood the value of communication & alignment. What can be better example than: “One member actually managed to get pass from govt. administration, to visit the remote locality, just to get one device & make it available to another team member so that we can deliver the feature timely”.

Approach for Future:  Now we are prone to have such pandemics in future also and we should be prepared further. In my opinion, the very first step is to understand what the problem is at core & so we need to talk. The approach will be the same, find out core problems & let’s brainstorm to solve these, like we did this time (Retrospective & more coordination). 

I understand that this Covid-19 is unforeseen challenge & might be, we’ll never be out of it. But I cannot deny, it gave, everyone in general, and I & my team specifically, a new way of thinking, new kind of team-spirit, next level of maturity and great confidence to handle such challenges.

One thing still needs improvement that is related to our geographic culture. In our geography, most of us are not supporter of working remotely ( like Work-from-home) and that is why most of us don’t have certain arrangements like dedicated space, working hour ethics at their end (home or anywhere else) which sometime create unnecessary delays & disturbance. I believe, everyone at her/his level making effort to improve such scenarios and is this not the essence of Agile - “To Inspect the current scenario, Adapt the better way and Learn from it for future”?