Fear & Trust in IT Teams

We live a paradox in which we spend more than half of our waking hours in work related activities and what we think of as “Life” happens outside of work. From this point of view, work-time becomes “dead time”, and Life becomes what is leftover.

The direct consequence of this very commonly held attitude is that people do not bring the whole of whom they are to work. They/I leave part of their/my self at home. Who is to say that what is being left at home is not important and of value to the work place? For workgroup productivity to improve in business, it is essential to move beyond this paradox.

The biggest obstacle to employees bringing more of who they are into their work is the FEAR running rampant in organizations of every size and culture.
Fear based management uses coercion and manipulation to obtain desired outcomes. Part of the issue is that often the executive management of an organization is not even aware of the impact of its own managerial style.
Research and observation suggest that people will do anything in situations where fear reigns, including agreeing to unrealistic performance goals. What is worse, employees and people who feel constrained, obliged or forced to perform to expectations they did not set for themselves typically experience much higher level of stress and can feel victimized, become resistant, take on negative attitudes and develop passive aggressive behaviors toward the organization and/or their leadership. The result is lower productivity, lower levels of efficiency and higher medical insurance costs.

We will examine first why a Fear Free work environment matters to the overall organization and to the IT industry in particular. We will look at what makes software development a creative activity and what are the characteristics and the obstacles to the creative flow. We will focus on understanding the impact of fear on software developers. We will see how Truth Seeking and Truth Telling are essential to software development and consider a number of suggestions on how a Project Manager can create a Fear Free project team. We will consider the reach of mindfulness practice in organizations today and close by looking at how combination of spiritual and business practices is the key to Fear Free project teams.
A Fear Free work environment matters to the overall organization
A Fear Free work environment matters for the efficient functioning of the overall organization and it is critically important for CIOs, and Project Managers working with software developers in IT Consulting, Software Development firms and Information Technology departments.

Building a Fear Free work environment matters to the organization. Because of increased competition, the faster pace of technological innovation, the relentless drive to lower cost and continuously improve process, the conduct of today’s organizations requires building on all of what employees can contribute to the organization.
We know that humans have capabilities, skills, creativity and intuition far beyond the narrow confines of a job description. For people to bring more of themselves into their workplace requires developing emotionally safe workplaces. The safer individuals feel in a group, the more likely they are to contribute to the group. Some readers might fear this approach to be yet another advocate for “touchy, feely” stuff” or something similarly dangerous!
In fact, after years of focusing on the facts and only the facts, I became an advocate of a balanced approach to Project Management that combines careful adherence to software development methodology and change management, fact based progress measurement/monitoring and fear free project teams.

In fact, I believe that creating a Fear Free atmosphere where employees are passionate about contributing is critical to anyone in a leadership position working with software developers in the IT Industry.
A Fear Free work environment is critical to the IT Industry
There are two reasons why a Fear Free work atmosphere is critical to the IT industry:
1. Fear is the main obstacle to truth telling
The only people who really know what is going on in an IT project are the software developers directly working on the project. It follows that if I truly want to ensure that everyone on my project team contributes their candid opinions, maximum energy and creativity, I need to ensure that the people in IT leadership position make the meetings they facilitate safe for the software developers who participate. Safe, i.e.: free of anger projections, blame and finger pointing.

2. Fear is the main obstacle to Programmers’ creativity.
Why is there a need for creativity in programming?
Programming isn't science, and it isn't engineering, although programmers routinely use tools from Science (Mathematics and Logic in particular) and Engineering (design before build), to structure their work.
Programming is magical: something is created out of nothing. Programming is an art form that is similar in many ways to creative writing or music composition. Programming simultaneously requires a strong analytical mind, a high level of attention to details, and creativity.
As there are multiple ways to open a bottle, a software system can be designed and coded in multiple ways. It is up to the software developer to design solutions and build code that is elegant, practical and efficient, and their creative powers are needed to address all three qualities effectively.
In a Fear filled environment, a software developer’s creativity is compromised and the quality of the end product suffers.

Fear is prevalent in organizations of every size and culture because the human dimension is left out of decision-making processes based on economic, technical and personal interest considerations. This means that in the language and in the mind of decision makers, humans often are thought as replaceable commodities.

Understanding the role of Fear
We have grown unaware of the incredible amount of fear that permeates life in our culture. We have grown to ignore the tension created by working side by side with colleagues/co-workers under appearance of togetherness and the reality of personal isolation. As a consequence, the contradiction between work and private life supposes that our private life is something that we are supposed to keep hidden and to which our colleagues/co-workers do not participate in.

Understanding the role that fear plays in the workplace is critical because:
- Fear weights heavily on individual psychological processes,
- Fear prohibits honest and efficient communication at the group or community level,
- Fear negatively affects team members’ behavior,
- Fear negatively impacts developers’ creativity and productivity.

To illustrate this point I present a short case study based on the history of the Information Technology Department at Trident Pharmaceutical Corporation. Trident Pharmaceutical is a fictional entity and any resemblance with actual people or organizations would be purely coincidental.
While reading this case study, I suggest you pay attention to all the factors that contribute to increasing the level of fear in the mind of the staff members of the Trident Pharmaceutical Business Computing Group (BCG).

I started this article by stating that fear is the main obstacle to Truth telling.
Truth seeking and Truth telling are essential to whole process of software development.
Requirement Gathering, Business Analysis, Specification Development, Coding and Testing are steps in a process of distilling human language into small nuggets of truth. So much so that the point of traceability software tools and of Formal Development Methods is to validate that every work-product created during the software development process from UML design to code specifications actually meet each requirement they attempt to satisfy.

In that respect, truth seeking is as close to a spiritual practice as it is to a business process.
In order to increase safety, eliminate the separation between “life” and “work”, decrease/eliminate fear at work, make truth seeking and telling possible, I suggest that to make your project team meetings a blend of ritual/spiritual practice and business process.
The Sanskrit word “Sadhana” comes to mind. “Sadhana” means:
- "Disciplined practice towards a goal”,
- “Seeking truth”,
- The establishment of a truth”

The role of the Project Manager in this proposed paradigm is to move the project along by keeping the integrity of the team and of the project while maintaining an atmosphere free of fear.
I suggest you see each project team as an opportunity to practice holding the terms of this apparent contradiction.
How can you free your teams from Fear ?
- Start your team meetings with a seven minutes meditation. This is not about praying. I am referring here to silent meditation. (See list of resources in Reference Note # 2).
You may wonder why starting with a meditation?
The meditation serves several important functions:
o The team leader and all the team members make themselves vulnerable.
There cannot be trust in a team without the team lead and team members showing their true face safely. In other words, the meditation help establish the safety of the meeting
o It serves as a transition from whatever activity a team member was doing before the meeting and the meeting itself. In other words, it is a tool to help team member be present in the moment.
o It “tunes” the team together.

- Follow the meditation by an individual check-in of each team member, in which confidentiality of any personal matter is guaranteed and no judgments or comments on each participant’s check-in are allowed.
- The individual check-in is followed by an occasion to look at any negative emotions existing between any team members that would be in the way of the team’s progress.
- The one speaker at a time rule ensures that each individual is heard and has a chance to speak his/her truth.
- Remind the teams you work with, that trust requires accountability both ways.
- Each team member states in detail what he or she did since the last team meeting.
- Each team member reports on any obstacles encountered.
- What task each team member commits to accomplish by the next team meeting. This constitutes a contract that each developer commits with him/herself and with the team.
Each team member captures his/her commitment in detail on a whiteboard.
- Regularly introduce new team building exercises and games. Team building exercises are important tools to increase the level of comfort and familiarity between team members in particular when new members are coming into the team.
- Keep the team meeting on task. I have noticed that software developers love to dig and dwell into the nitty-gritty of a particularly complex design issue and totally forget that the objective of the Team Checkpoint meeting is to discuss PROCESS and not content.
None of these suggestions are expensive or complex to implement.
Objections
The objection that I have encountered is:
We do not have the time for this bull%$@%#~~! We have deadlines to meet.
The question is: What is the cost of failed projects ? What is the cost of never deployed applications? What is the cost of stress induced heart illness?
In a forty-five minute Team Checkpoint meeting, the protocol I am suggesting here, typically takes less than fifteen minutes. If need be, this protocol can be compressed to ten minutes. My experience is that when the protocol takes longer it is because there are hot subjects that need to be heard and addressed. And if they are not addressed, they will negatively affect the quality of the work and the effectiveness of the team.

Dealing with your own fear in implementing this protocol might turn out to be your main obstacle. That fear might take the form of the fear that team members would reject the protocol out right, or the fear to make yourself vulnerable by showing your true face, etc... Whatever it is, remember that these are stories you are telling yourself in your head and the only way to find out if it works for you is to try. Over time, you will notice that, in your absence, the team members take ownership of the practice. They follow the protocol by themselves because they find it of value.
Reach of meditation practice in organizations today
You may wonder what is the usefulness and the reach of meditation practice in organizations today ?
A growing number of organizations including Apple Computer, Yahoo!, Google, McKinsey, Deutsche Bank, Nortel Networks, Hughes Aircraft , etc.. offer meditation classes to their employees3.
Ample scientific evidence attests of the positive impact of meditation on the human physical and mental health. A regular meditation practice has shown to reduce stress symptoms, lower cholesterol levels, improve sleep, improve PMS symptoms, decrease risk of stroke and heart attack, reduce chronic pain, slow the aging process, improve immune system functions, reduce the length and duration of epileptic seizures, etc…'
Because of reduced stress related illness companies have successfully decreased their medical insurance premium with a direct return to their bottom line from the mindfulness classes offered to their employees.
I find particularly intriguing the results of the research performed by Professor Richard J. Davidson. Dr. Davidson is Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and Director of the Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior.
Dr. Davidson has focused his research on the neural substrates of emotion and emotional disorders. In the course of his research Dr. Davidson has studied the brain activity of meditating Buddhist monks and of various populations enrolled in regular mindfulness practice using MRI and PET scanners. You will find in Reference note #4, a short extract of a talk given by Dr. Davidson at the First International Positive Psychology Summit that took place in 2002 in Washington D.C.

Beyond mindfulness classes, combining spiritual and business practices is the key to Fear Free project teams.
The suggestions I listed above go beyond meditation classes offered to employees over lunch by forward thinking organizations. I am proposing the blending of spiritual and business practices inside a solid protocol as part of the every day work life of an IT project team.
If one were to apply the protocol I described above to the case of Trident Pharma Business Computing Group, the above suggestions would contribute to resolving the situation the BCG is in by creating safe places where developers will be heard and seen, i.e.: the continuous creation of openings in the organization’s culture.
If your objective is to create and maintain a climate of trust and establish honest communication in your project teams, these simple suggestions will get you there.
You may think this is way out of mainstream project management practices. Considering the growing number of IT professionals who have a regular personal mindfulness practice, it is time to enrich project management practices with 4,000 years old mind discipline techniques.

JayMa




References:
1. Books on the creative “Flow” by Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:
- "Flow: - The Psychology of Optimal Experience” - Cambridge University Press 1992,
- “Finding Flow” Basic Books; Reprint edition (April 1, 1998),
- “Beyond Boredom and Anxiety” Jossey-Bass; 2 edition April 15, 2000.
2. Books on Mindfulness and Meditation:
- “Wherever You Go, There You Are : Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life” -- by Jon Kabat-Zinn
- “Insight Meditation: A Step-By-Step Course on How to Meditate”
by Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein
- “Going to Pieces without Falling Apart: Lessons from Meditation and Psychotherapy” – by Mark Epstein
3. Recent articles in Business Magazines on the use of Meditation in Corporations:
- “Zen and the Art of Corporate Productivity” – BusinessWeek July 28, 2003. www.businessweek.com/magazin...3076.htm
- “Perspective: Doing well, by doing nothing” – Inc. Magazine July 2004
www.inc.com/magazine/200...spective.html
- “Meditation: New research shows that it changes the brain in ways that alleviate stress” – BusinessWeek August 30, 2004
www.businessweek.com/magazin...7439.htm
- “Who says CEOs can’t find inner peace” – BusinessWeek September 1st, 2003
www.businessweek.com/magazin...z063.htm
4. 2002 Positive Psychology Summit. – Dr. Richard Davidson University of Wisconsin/Madison. “Positive Affective Styles: Perspective From Affective Neuroscience”. Transcript from voice recording.
www.gallup.hu/pps/davidson_long.htm
“I want to end with something that we have been, that's sort of been on the back burner but is pertinent to this group, and that is whether a psychological procedure like meditation, and I certainly don't mean to suggest that meditation is in any way special or different from other kids of purely psychological strategies, but the general issue is whether psychological strategies can indeed modify the central circuitry of emotion in ways that can promote more positive affective style.
And we happen to be in a position to explore the potential efficacy of meditation in this domain. And so I don't have time to go through all the details of this, but we've done one formal study which is now in press showing that if you take naive people, put them through an eight week program of meditation, you do see a change in trait anxiety following the eight weeks of meditation in ways that are not surprising. What we're particularly interested in is looking at changes in brain function. And we took measures of brain activity before and after the eight week training as well as six months after the training ended, and these data just show the change in brain activity. Again, this is the same metric that I've shown you earlier in all of the other, many of the other slides, high numbers mean more left-sided activation, and you can see that the meditation group is showing an increased left-sided response, the control group is going slightly in the opposite direction. In this study, we also gave people influenza vaccine and looked at antibody titers, and you can see that the meditation group is actually showing enhanced antibody titer response to the influenza vaccine, and the measures of brain function correlate with the measures of immune function. That is, the individuals who showed the biggest change in brain activity were the ones who showed the biggest change in immune function, that's illustrated here.
I'm going to end by just sharing one other piece of data with you. Over the last decade, I've been honored and blessed with the opportunity to interact on a number of occasions with the Dahli Lama. He was in my lab last spring, spent two days there, and it was quite an extraordinary event. And my relationship with him has been one of the reasons why we have been interested in exploring these topics, and one of the things that we've done as a consequence of that is study some Tibetan monks in our laboratory who have spent years cultivating certain kinds of positive emotional states. And we have a great recruiter to help us get these highly adept subjects, and that recruiter is the Dahli Lama himself, and so we've had some really wonderful people in the lab.
And I just want to show you the data from using the exact same metric that we've used earlier of prefrontal asymmetry taken at baseline, and this is a histogram of 175 subjects who were tested in our lab on the identical procedures in the last year or so, and then this is the data point of the one month that we tested, who, as you can see, is showing the most extreme left-sided frontal activation.
Let me end by just sharing with you another quote, and this comes from the Dahli Lama's book, The Art of Happiness, and he said the training of the mind, the cultivation of happiness, the genuine inner transformation by deliberately selecting and focusing on positive mental states and challenging negative mental states is possible because of the very structure and function of the brain. But the wiring in our brains is not static, not irrevocably fixed. Our brains are also adaptable. Thank you.
Question and Answer
I was just curious about the meditation. When you had these subjects, did you give them any specific instructions for meditation, or did you just have them meditate on whatever they wanted to. And is it just the specific instructions for kind of focusing on positive, or is it just a kind of state of mental relaxation that increased this left frontal asymmetry.
That's a very good question. We have studied these people under a number of different conditions. One is just in their ordinary mental state, without having them do any specific form of meditation practice. And one of the things that these people will tell you is that the goal of meditation is to obliterate the distinction between meditation and every day life. And so for these people who are very highly trained, presumably they're walking around with a different kind of baseline state. So some of what we did is just without any specific instruction, just adopt your ordinary mental state that you would as you go about your every day life. There are other conditions where we had the practitioners perform a specific kinds of meditation, and they are all, the individuals that we've tested are all individuals who have been trained in the same tradition. And one of the practices that they do, which is a practice that the Dahli Lama has done since he's been four years of age, and this is a practice that is done every day, for at least an hour a day, just think about the impact that any kind—I think of this as skills training, no different than other kinds of skills—musical training, you know, people in this culture are obsessed with physical exercise, they go to the gym on a regular basis—imagine if you trained your mind in this way on a regular basis. And so the specific practice is a practice that is involved with voluntary cultivation of compassion. And it is the way I think about it as a western psychologist, it's kind of a little like systematic desensitization. And what they do is they actually envision very explicitly, they visualize individuals and situations with which with whom they have had various kinds of conflict and aversion. They conjure those people up in their mind or situations up in their mind, and then they are voluntarily transformed, and they try to exude compassion in response to the people and situations, which previously were associated with conflict. And it is a very specific, intentional kind of practice that is done on a very regular basis. All the members of this tradition who practice do this practice every day. This is one of the core elements of their, the many different kinds of practices that they do, but this is one that everyone in that tradition does.”