Shaping Your Team’s Culture: Retrospectives For Various Contexts
How often do you ever reflect on yourself? On the choices you made and the way it turned out? Making sure that your dreams are still the same? Checking if everything is fine with your daily routine? Sometimes you have to take a step back in order to make sure that you are moving in the right direction.
Reflection is one of the Most underused yet Powerful tools for Success (R. Carlson)
Just as the personal growth is impossible without reflection, same applies to the team’s growth. It does not even matter whether your team is using agile, waterfall or any other type of mindset — if the team is not just a group of individuals working on their personal goals but rather a group with mutual goals and accountability for them, you can harness the power of reflection to shape your team’s culture into anything you and your team want it to be.
There is a practice of having a recurring meeting with your team called Retrospective where teammates reflect on their own teamwork. While there are numerous articles out there of how to run a retrospective, this article provides an additional framework towards preparing and running a session of your own.
Retrospective is about people and processes that happen within a team. Both aspects are always unique, dynamic, changing and there is no one-size-fits-all methodology to run a retrospective for your team. Yes, there are multiple fantastic templates and tools that can aid or inspire your session but in the end it is just you and your team who do make it work. Throughout my years of work with teams in NGOs, youth politics, academia and IT, I found my favorite retrospective structure to be most effective when narrowed down into 6 phases:
Opening
It is likely that participants will join the meeting while having different moods and energy levels. Some of them could even be unwilling to talk or have camera on. The goal of the opening phase is to raise their willingness to participate.
If a person gets to talk within first 15 minutes of the meeting s/he is more likely to be engaged through the rest of it (A. Kelminskiene)
Opening can be done in many ways: ask a random question where everyone could learn something about one another or what would they like to do if it was up to them to organise a team activity. Whatever makes them talk and brings empathy from the rest of the group.
Last Retro Commitments Check
When this retrospective becomes recurring, during subsequent sessions you should let the team reflect on the action points from the previous retrospective. And typically a successful session ends up with an idea to change something about the way your team works. This commitment check helps your team to see that you are using retrospective to keep each other accountable regarding cultural change in the team. It is also an opportunity to either ditch or adopt the new behaviour you were experimenting with since the last retrospective.
Input New Data
This is one of the most recognisable yet often misused retrospective phases where team reflects on itself based on the time frame since last retrospective. You might have already seen a board like this one below:
Looking relatively simple, it does require certain conditions to get the team put there meaningful opinions and insights:
- Participants do not feel tension due to fear of negative individual feedback, presence of their superiors or bad timing
- Participants understand the purpose of retrospective and are engaged
- Participants do care about their team
- The team knows what is unknown to them
At this point you might get really creative and find the most personalised format to open up your team. Check out Dave Westgarth’s boards for truly inspirational examples.
Just remember, fancy tools are there to inspire and help but not to do the job for you. The goal of this phase is to grant participants safety and ease to write down whatever there is on their mind.
Inspecting and Resonating
As the new data from team members is on the board now, it might be a good idea to go through every single one of them together. You could either read it out loud or ask the owners of the notes to voice it themselves if they feel comfortable. As you are doing so, it might be useful to also measure the level of personal resonance on each of those data peaces so that both you and the whole team can see the most matching topics of interest. This can be done by calling out loud to raise hands if someone thinks the topic is important or upvoting the sticky note individually if tools like Miro are being used.
The goal of this phase is to make sure that everyone was heard and visualise team’s preference for the hot topic during next phase.
Discussion
It is time for you, the facilitator, to let the team have discussion on their topic of preference. Make it visible! Write down that topic and start asking questions. Why is this topic important for us? What is the reason behind it? As you keep answering these questions, use mind mapping to visualise this conversation so the team can follow the flow and will not be going in circles.
The goal of Discussion is to dig down into the roots of the problem you are talking about. Once you feel like you have hit the bottom or the time for the session is about to expire, highlight your findings and start talking of what could be done until next retrospective to solve these root issues.
New Commitments
Once the team suggests and agrees on what actions should be taken, make sure to measure their willingness to commit those actions themselves. Write them down and ask teammates to raise their hands if they are willing to take responsibility and make them happen. This phase gives the whole meaning to retrospective as it empowers the participants to act upon changes in their processes and behaviour.
Conclusion
Retrospectives can be an insanely powerful tool to build your team and its culture. You will keep adopting new practices and ditching the old ones. Your skills to run and approach this session will increase every time you do this. Just keep in mind that retrospectives are as effective as the problem raised by you or your team is engaging. Make this session your team’s habit and you will skyrocket with team’s growth and performance.
