Learn, Lead, Love, Scream, Share: A Retro for Building Trust and Safety
The team of coaches I’m working with right now is amazing, many with international speaking experiences and connections to seemingly all the famous agilists. It can even be a little intimidating at times, you know, in the way that our imposter syndrome often speaks to us. My role on the team is the floater and coordinator, not dedicated to any one particular product or focus, able to step in and help wherever it is needed. And last week I had one such opportunity to work with a team while a colleague and good friend was out, and this team happened to be ready for a retro. Now, this friend runs incredible retros. He puts together timely and relevant exercises for his team, sometimes gluing together different things from tastycupcakes.org and improvising his own ideas beautifully. His teams will often laugh, cry and hug in the same retro. So, I knew I needed to do more than the average smiley, meh and sad face routine.
What follows is the retro I made up, given the specific circumstances I knew the team could use to make some progress. They are a team fairly new to agile and making great strides quickly, but have been working in skill silos, were struggling with some communication challenges and I suspected having some new psychological safety issues.
Opening Question
So I started with the generic question “What builds trust?” How do we even make friends? And everyone had great responses, they know what to do. Answers included sharing, familiarity, vulnerability, commonality, shared experiences, number of conversations, people in common, similarity in life situation or experiences. And I reminded them, to build trust you have to offer it first.
Ice Breaker Exercise
Then I asked them to practice a positive feedback exercise. Pair up, look directly into their eyes and tell them something to complement them with sincere honesty. Focus on something you’ve noticed recently that they’ve done or said, an action or behavior, not surface looks or fashion. This awkward exercise helps your teammates feel good and is a door opener to bigger conversations. And I relayed a quick story that this minor thing works on all humans. Like with my 12 year old son, playing baseball with his team, for example. When they’re positive and cheering each other on, they just tend to perform better. I believe the same is true with a team of adults working in an agile team.
Learn and Lead
This next portion I snuck into the exercise because I believe very strongly in a team striving to share skills with each other to become the ideal (and perhaps unrealistic) team where everyone knows everything and anyone can do anything. I asked everyone to write down stuff they’d like to learn as well as things they could lead a discussion on to educate others. And in a few minutes, the team had effectively created a backlog of learning and continuous improvement items toward cross-educating themselves closer to that idyllic team. This team has already established a weekly cadence of professional development time on Friday afternoons, which I think is an excellent start.
Love and Scream
Every team has work to do to improve the way they collaborate, cooperate, and communicate with each other. It might just be part of being selfish humans. This exercise was, like the regular smiley and sad face retro conversations, meant to clear the air and lay out what was working and what needs improvement on the team. I chose the extreme words love and scream just for fun, because these are usually emotionally charged topics.
Truth be told, I totally forgot to focus on the love portion when I facilitated this particular retro, but you should definitely make sure to do that. Celebrating wins and every success of the team is important! Sadly and ironically, one of the themes that came from the ‘makes me want to scream’ topics for improvement was to get better at having team celebrations!
As I was working through the planning of this retro, I had this idea that became the last section below. When some teams are struggling with psychological safety and communication challenges, it is often the case that not everything comes out during a retro. Only the big themes emerge. And plenty of small and seemingly petty issues remain unspoken. My goal and hope was to sneakily help expose some of these things. Even when big issues get solved, the small things that remain that can be just as maddening.
Share (Anonymously)
So the idea to expose these small things was to try to guess and say the things for the team without the team members having to say them. And I’ll be honest, I was not sure if this was going to work at all.
The idea is simple, but I bet you, the reader, can improve upon this idea. Based on my experience, I put together a handful of typical challenges and communication struggles that I’ve seen in teams. I ended up with 16 ideas. And I suspect, if I had more time I would have eliminated some of the slightly similar sounding ideas and come up with a better list.
My ask was for everyone on the team to read the items and write all of the numbers on a sticky for the things that resonated with them. What challenges do you see on the team that is represented by these ideas? Then I collected them and put dots in each square to show anonymously what their teammates had expressed. I think the team was a little surprised just how much they had to say that wasn’t called out during the ‘scream’ portion of the retro.
Next, we conducted an exercise to explore the themes exposed by these ideas. Without putting anyone on the spot, I asked the team to pick any square with dots and suggest something we could do as a team to work towards making progress on the topic. The conversation was fruitful and created new dialog that might not have happened otherwise. Someone on the team spoke up in the middle of an awkward pause during this exercise and apologized for something they said earlier in the week. The energy was great and the vulnerability everyone experienced, I feel, was exactly what they needed to spark new conversations.
I would have liked a lot more time to explore more solutions and document more action items for the team to work on. But what I’ve noticed just a week later is that the team is having more direct conversations with each other, and that’s great progress.
About the Author: Brian Link is the author of AgileMisconceptions.com (also available on Amazon) and the owner of Practical Agilist, LLC. Brian provides leadership and coaching services as an Agile Coach at LeanDog. Follow Brian on Twitter @blinkdaddy or LinkedIn, and subscribe to his newsletter.
