Recently another team, that had recently read an article around team dysfunctions and appreciation exercises and wanted to explore the health of their team, particularly their trust levels, more closely, asked me to facilitate a retrospective for them. Facilitating a team you don’t know or regularly observe is usually a challenge, but it was one that I was up for, and thankfully the team member who arranged the session had a good idea of the feel/discussions he was hoping for as an outcome.
I started the session with the Focus On / Focus Off exercise. As English was not everyone’s first language, I prepared cards with synonyms for each of the word pairs. I had the team discuss each word pair and what they understood the differences to be together, and then gave them the synonyms to arrange under the correct ‘word’ in the pair. After we had been through the exercise for each word pair, I asked the team whether they were willing to commit to continuing the session with the correct focus (and, thankfully, they said yes!).
From there we moved to a simple Sad/Mad/Glad exercise with a strong focus on the team and its interactions. I’d found out before that the team members were more introverted, so I opted for silent brainstorming separately before each team member shared their feedback. The first two parts of the session actually went by more quickly than I’d planned, so I took the opportunity to then allow the group to move their Sads and Mads into physical circles of control, influence and soup. While they were doing this at the whiteboard, they automatically moved into a space of discussing what actions they wanted to take for the issues within their control. It was nice to see them being so pro-active about taking control.
We finished the one-hour session with a Temperature Reading. As this session was more about sharing and uncovering information rather than actions, I wanted to leave the team with some items for them to possibly work on or think about more deeply in their next sprints. The temperature reading also includes an appreciations section, which I have found really energises teams and helps end the session on a positive and optimistic note.
Feedback is that the guys really enjoyed the session and would be keen to have me back to facilitate another. Hopefully this one wasn’t a fluke! 🙂 Have you ever had to do a once-off session with a team you don’t work with? What tools or activities did you find generated the most valuable outcomes for the session?
Resources
Reflections of a Scrum Master 