![]() Here are some practical things you can do in your next retrospective to encourage open communication. After all, you’re there to direct the conversation-or are you? Facilitators exist to help the conversation flow. When you’re facilitating a retrospective meeting it’s easy to feel responsible for getting the team talking. How To Get Teams Talking In Your Retrospectives The faster your team can learn together, the faster you grow and the better you become. A good retrospective can be a transformative experience for teams, revealing hidden insights, and helping them to chart a bold path forward. Learning becomes something to celebrate rather than to fear.This prevents siloes and hidden information. When teams can be open with each other about their work, they are more likely to be more open during their work together. Communication enhances team transparency and openness.This creates a vicious cycle, where team members start to believe retrospectives are boring because the same issues keep coming up. Without it, you will run into the same problems time and again. Honest discussion is necessary for teams to improve.Having open communication in retrospectives is important because: Bottled up quieter teams might find these feelings brewing into resentment or of not being heard, which can damage psychological safety. Strong and experienced teams may be more confident discussing issues, but new or less experienced teams are more likely to internalize issues because of various fears or insecurities. When problems or issues aren’t exposed, discussed, and solved, they can build up in a toxic way. Like bottling up negative feelings, quiet retros are dangerous for your team’s health. Unless you are able to gradually open up, it’s impossible to move forward and have productive meetings. And like therapy, the goal isn’t to have all the answers after one session, but to make steady progress. Every 2 weeks you sit down together and talk over the past two weeks. Why Quiet Retros Are A Bad SignĪgile retrospectives are like team therapy. If that’s the case, here are some tips for designing more introvert-friendly agile meetings. Some of your team members may also be more on the introverted side of the spectrum. I see this commonly where team members feel they have contributed by writing retrospective reflections, but they don’t feel confident verbally expanding on them or the issue at hand during the retro. Team members may feel that they don’t have anything new to contribute to the meeting, so they remain silent. Don’t know what to say: Agile retrospectives are meant to serve the team primarily, rather than managers.So some team members-particularly newer ones-may feel that what they have to offer isn’t worth being discussed or will make them look stupid. Fear of judgement: Everyone wants to be respected by their peers.New teams in particular may find members struggling as they worry that their failures may be used against them. Fear of reprisal: Sometimes people don’t feel safe being vulnerable, whether it’s owning a mistake or simply acknowledging that something went wrong.There are a variety of reasons why team members may be quiet in retros. There are a few things that might be preventing a quieter team from speaking up in retrospectives: But it also makes them more difficult meetings to participate in. Vulnerability and openness is what makes insights from retrospectives so valuable. Sprint retrospectives are strange meetings, because unlike most other meetings, retros ask participants to share vulnerabilities, weaknesses, problems, or challenges. Why Is Your Team Quiet In Retrospectives? How To Get Teams Talking In Retrospectives?.Why Is Your Team Quiet In Retrospectives?.Not only are retrospectives painful when no-one speaks up, but they no longer serve their purpose of creating continuous team improvement. Through Parabol’s activities helping teams run better, more democratic, and more inclusive retrospectives, one common struggle I hear from Scrum Masters and Product Owners is: “my team are really quiet in retrospectives-how can I get them talking?” Retrospectives only work with team member participation. Retrospectives can’t go anywhere if team members aren’t committed to talking about issues and taking responsibility for making continuous improvements. But almost all of them-whether it’s honesty, psychological safety, openness, or simply a desire to improve-rely on agile teams expressing themselves. There are many ingredients that go into making a good retrospective great. Spend less time searching and more time doing with automated digital asset organization and workflows. ![]()
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