Improving Team Retrospectives by Focusing on Individuals

Every Scrum Master has experienced the dreaded “retrospective eye roll.”

Sometimes it is the subtle sigh of a team member who is settling into their seat for the mandatory hour-long retrospective meeting. Sometimes we see a “tentative” response to the retrospective meeting invite, testing us to see if we will really require attendance to yet another gathering, especially if the sprints are flowing productively and the team is working well together. Other times, a vocal team member will directly challenge the usefulness of the retrospective, presenting a perfectly valid argument that “we don’t learn anything new from these meetings anymore,” or “our time could be better spent grooming the backlog and working on user stories.” Having been trained to identify and remove obstacles for our team, we begin to ask ourselves…are they right?

The Retrospective Paradox

In 2001, seventeen influential software designers met at the Snowboard Ski Resort in Utah. In the now legendary summit, they penned four values and twelve principles that re-defined the world of software development. Like Moses descending from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, this Agile Manifesto promised to fundamentally improve the software development experience for customers, developers, and users. For the faithful who have embraced the Agile Manifesto, the formula has indeed improved customer collaboration, shortened the lead time to working products, negated the harmful impacts of constantly changing requirements, and relieved the frustrations of developers caught in the never ending Gantt charts and contractual legalese of their waterfall projects.

For the Agile community, these values and principles are sacred. Each idea is equally important, including the twelfth and final principle, which reads:

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

It is clear that some form of retrospective must be conducted, at regular intervals, to maintain a truly Agile environment as first envisioned in 2001. Our team members may have valid frustrations with these activities, but we do not have the option to eliminate the activity or diminish its importance, even if the retrospective has been deemed a non-value-added obstacle to the productivity of the team.

Temporary Relief

To breathe new life into stale retrospective meetings, Scrum Masters will introduce any number of ideas.  We will change the venue to make the meeting feel “fresh” again. Perhaps the meeting will be moved outdoors on a particularly beautiful day, or to a local pub if our team is particularly hip. We might bring in lunch to encourage attendance, and to offer a consolation prize for tolerating the obligatory hum-drum meeting. If we are particularly desperate, we may even facilitate the group through mental gymnastics like asking members to describe how they feel about the sprint as if they were a character in a movie.

However, the lifts gained from these types of activities are often short lived.  At best, the novelty temporarily engages the minds of our talented team members like a new shiny object.  At worst, we offend our team through forced participation in activities that are campy, annoying, or even childish.

Strengths to the Rescue

As servant-based leaders, Scrum Masters know that in order to serve the members of our team, we must understand the unique strengths and traits that motivate each person.  We have several frameworks available to us through which these strengths can be discovered, like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, True Colors, DOPE 4 Bird Personality Test, and The CliftonStrengths assessment.  These tools are most often deployed early during a team’s formation, used as a team-building activity to promote progress through the forming, storming, norming, and performing stages of a newly assembled group.  Usually, these activities are quickly forgotten except when used as excuses for unsavory behavior.  We may hear comments like “Cindy’s Orange is really showing today,” or “Scott’s not trying to be a bossy jerk.  He just can’t help it, remember that he’s an Eagle.”

Dusting off these shelved personality profiles may be just what our teams need to resurrect the energy and usefulness of our retrospectives. As a famous Gallup survey shows, three in four American adults are not using their strengths enough hours daily to achieve maximum emotional benefit. Instead of structuring our retrospective meetings around questions such as “What’s working well?” and “What needs improvement?”, we should be using these meetings as an opportunity to reinforce how we value each team member’s unique strengths. When we get to work to our strengths most of the time, we are happier and more productive. When every one of our team members gets to work to their strengths most of the time, we see unprecedented levels of performance. Isn’t this the stuff that Scrum Master dreams are made of?

Here’s how it works in practice:

1. The team agrees on a strengths assessment, and completes the activity as a group if one has not already been performed. If possible, utilize a trained facilitator to achieve the maximum amount of understanding that each individual assessment provides. Your team will enjoy this activity – we human beings love to learn and talk about ourselves.
2. Every member of the team is assigned a standing question for every retrospective, based on their strengths. Each time the group meets, the member is expected to update the group on their assessment of the team’s performance in their strength area.  For example:
   • Dwight is an “Owl” personality type, and his detail-orientation strength is strong. Every retrospective, he will update the team on the results of user story functionality testing, and any improvements that could be made.
   • Oscar has a strong “Learner” strength. Every retrospective, he will research and update the team on any new technological developments and industry best practices that we could leverage to improve our team’s performance.
   • Angela is a “Gold” personality type and thrives in precision and organization. Every retrospective, she will update the team on our burn-down charts and identify ways we can be more diligent in adherence to schedule during future sprints.
   • Pam has a particularly strong “Harmony” strength. Every retrospective, she will update the team on the current temperature of our relationship with our customer and offer ideas about how to make our interactions with them even more positive.

Takeaway

Using this strengths-based approach, every team member is encouraged to play to their strengths daily, in preparation for their role in the focused retrospective. They feel valued for their individuality and look forward to the meeting because their floor time is spent speaking to areas of their natural strengths.  Perhaps best of all, this approach keeps the retrospective interesting for team members over the long term, sprint after sprint, freeing up the Scrum Master to focus their energies on removing true obstacles.  Gone are the days of experimenting with short-term facilitation shenanigans in the hopes of preventing the “retrospective eye-roll!”

Enroll today in Facilitating the Agile Culture Change: Building an Effective Agile Organization (ICP-TAL) for a free TTI assessment.

Tony Rose