
Growing Our Team with Retrospectives - bjacokes
https://blog.plaid.com/growing-our-team-with-retrospectives/
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himynameisdom
The effectiveness of a retro rests upon the empowerment of the entire team. If
the team isn't empowered to own their own success/failure, then there is no
point in doing a retro.

From my experience, business units need just as much coaching on agility as
development teams. It's hard to change culture, but it's essential the BU gets
out of the way (let the team own how they plan on delivering a solution) and
facilitates empowerment of change for the team to thrive.

Again, from experience, the main driver of apprehension is middle management
feeling the squeeze from making everything transparent. They're use to being
the routers (worst case, bottlenecks) of information and work, when in reality
their role should be to empower the team with the resources they need to own
their work. The shift in focus from delegation to facilitation is essential to
the whole process, making retros more effective once realized. Empowerment
builds in psychological safety for the team to sink their teeth into their own
issues and solve those issues themselves.

Another main driver of apprehension is power within the team. If there are
only 1 or 2 main members of the team that dictate the pace of the
conversation, that crowds out the rest of the team from buying in and/or
providing their insights. The entire team needs to be empowered to own their
success, not just a handful of members.

~~~
milkytron
> If there are only 1 or 2 main members of the team that dictate the pace of
> the conversation, that crowds out the rest of the team from buying in and/or
> providing their insights. The entire team needs to be empowered to own their
> success, not just a handful of members.

I notice this all the time, some folks might be really outgoing, and love to
talk and drive conversations, while others are content with staying silent.
But all opinions on the team are valuable.

I've experienced this first hand where I've worked on great teams, and we all
got involved in discussions about equally. I think it's easy to get someone
quiet to speak up (if they have thoughts about the topic at hand they aren't
saying), the more difficult challenge, at least for me, is trying to quiet
down the team members that go on tangents.

~~~
jeandenis
A good practice is to ask people to write as opposed to speak. You can give
some space for everyone to put their thoughts on post-it notes before the
conversation starts (or to put things in a doc before the retro meeting).

There are so many dimensions: shy v. not, or introverted v. extroverted, or
active v. passive thinker, or oral v. written communication, etc. Ideally you
shape practices that can account for this diversity of thought.

And +1 to setting expectations so that people who are very vocal don't take up
all of the space.

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maxxxxx
Retrospectives are great if they actually lead to change. Unfortunately that’s
often not the case. The same issues keep coming up repeatedly and soon the
retrospective is just another chore.

I would love to see retrospectives where managers one or two levels up attend
(usually it’s just the devs), listen to issues and address things that need
support from a larger point of view. Agile theoretically should transform
whole organizations that way.

~~~
gatherhunterer
In my experience retrospectives are just lip service. Managers who attend use
them as an opportunity to make excuses for the company and focus on what’s
wrong with you, the employee, and what you can do better. People eventually
realize that the smart thing to do is to stop making yourself an easy target
for down-sizing by not speaking up. Then when someone has a complaint about
the development process a manager can say, “If you had such a problem with it
you should have mentioned it in the retro.”

Employers who want to hear from you will foster an environment that is open to
discussion and even polite dissent. When an employer formalizes that mentality
and slaps a label on it you can be sure that it’s a managerial con.

~~~
jeandenis
One point of the post is that if you do constant retros (say every 2 weeks),
within teams with the engineering manager, you can help foster an "an
environment that is open to discussion and even polite dissent" (as you put
it).

As a VP Eng, I've found that it can definitely hurt for upper management to
get involved in retros. I try really hard to create bottom-up empowerment
where individuals and teams can solve problems and improve their processes
independently. That kind of ownership is really powerful. Retros really help
with that. Plus, from my perspective, I can just read retro-notes to find
common threads across teams that may require my help to improve or fix (e.g.,
if we're consistently underinvesting on testing or if aren't providing enough
avenues for career growth or ...).

I obviously can't speak to your experiences, but what you're describing sounds
really dark: management "conning" management. I hope you've been able to get
away from such places!

~~~
fatnoah
This is literally what I did as a VP Eng. I let the teams drive the
improvements and kept my role to a) ask questions to help the team identify
areas of improvement and b) help implement the changes when necessary. The
result was that I had many teams with fairly different processes, definitions
of ready & done, etc. but that was the whole point. It's all about what helps
the team work best, and ownership of the process along with the result goes a
long way.

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Yhippa
The present team I'm on is really good at being open and honest during our
retros but we can never seem to do anything with the action items for
improvement that comes out of them. We've tried everything from mentioning it
explicitly in our daily stand-up or making it a zero-point story in our
current sprint but nothing seems to work.

~~~
ostap0207
What do you mean by "nothing seems to work"?

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yetudada
Retros are great when there's follow up! We always make sure to document
things that come from the session.

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anacleto
Do you know those screenshots from what product are from? Look a bit like..
Confluence pages?

~~~
ostap0207
I believe that's a Confluence page. Confluence already has a "Retrospective"
template for this occasion.

