Leadership Slacklining (Part B)
"The road to success is always under construction." - Lily Tomlin
Yesterday, we touched on the subject of a leader balancing between performance / output and creating a safe space that continuously inspires team growth. We shared some thoughts on hard performance metrics versus an environment that fosters the team members to grow and thrive together, and discussed how the servant leader can help form such an environment.
Today we will take it a little further by going deeper in 2 specific tools leaders utilize to maintain an overview of team’s mental status and morale. The 1:1 meeting and the Retrospective.
Challenges
Before we jump on these two types of meetings to share some thoughts, I would like to bring to your attention this work that shares some common problems and misconceptions that hurt agile teams:
Attempt to control individuals through certain meetings/events […]
Through these attempts, a team member of higher authority attempted to push the team and force them to perform better, while ignoring valuable information from the team members
Meetings as a form of interrogation […]
the meetings, instead of giving them tools to solve problems, often felt like a hunt to find a scapegoat. This approach made team members likely to avoid performing less predictable and more challenging tasks, while focusing on smaller easier ones, just to have something to report during the meetings.
Reckless agile tailoring […]
For example, while many participants stated that their team used Scrum, they gave various examples of actions that were contradicted the Scrum Guide.
The creation of team silos […]
When all information was to be shared at meetings, informal communication between team members became minimal. As a result, teams broke down into small, specialised groups of people that closely collaborated together. However, these groups encountered problems when cooperating with team members that were not part of their silo.
The 1:1 <> Retro recipe
The aforementioned challenges reveal team problems on a systemic level and usually emerge in rapid scaling companies and teams. A leader can use the combination of 1:1 meetings and the Retrospective to tackle or mitigate them.
Retrospectives are team wide meetings where the team members have the chance to share their experiences from the last sprint, celebrate wins, identify blockers, discuss how to be better moving forward and start with a clean slate the next sprint.
1:1 meetings are opportunities for the individual contributors to share some personal blockers on a discrete and safe space with their leader, ask for help and give constructive feedback to the leader or other team members that can inspire improvements in the way the team works. They are also a great place to discuss personal career advancement and professional growth.
Combined, these two meetings can give the leader a great overview on where the team stands in terms of morale and allow educated evaluation of the team’s capabilities based on the current capacity, the work challenges and the company’s strategy, moving forward.
It is the leader’s responsibility to avoid controlling or guiding the meetings and, at the same time, to inspire the team members to be honest and forthcoming on the work in progress, potential blockers and opportunities moving forward.
Resources of the day
Retrospective “flavors”
There are a lot of different retrospectives “out there”. You can find 22 different types of retrospectives in this post.
My personal favorite is “The Sailboat” retrospective. Here is how it works:
If you like what you see, you can use this miro template to quickly host a Sailboat Retrospective with your team.
Running successful 1:1 meetings
My personal go to information when it comes to 1:1 meeting, or engineering management topics in general, for that matter, is the posts on The Engineering Manager blog by James Stanier. You can find the 1:1 related material here.
Another great resource for 1:1 meetings is Radical Candor’s relevant post.
That concludes the second part of the leadership slacklining series! I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did! See you tomorrow 🖖.