← Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
Empowering Teams and Retrospective Tools | Sara Caldwell
00:13:20
Sara Caldwell: Agile Retrospectives and Critical Team Insights With the Spotify Squad Health Check Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website:...
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Transcript19 lines
- [00:01]
Vasco Duart
Hi, I'm your host, Vasco Duart. Welcome to the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast where we share tips and tricks from Scrum Masters around the world. Every day we bring you inspiring answers to important questions that all Scrum Masters face day after day. Hello, everybody. Welcome to our Success Thursday. This week we have with us Sarah Caldwell. Hey, Sarah, welcome back.
- [00:30]
Sarah Caldwell
Hi. Happy Thursday.
- [00:32]
Vasco Duart
Absolutely. Happy Thursday, everybody. It's Retro Thursday as well. We'll talk about success in a second. But first, Sarah, share with us what is your favorite agile retrospective format and why?
- [00:45]
Sarah Caldwell
My favorite retro is the one that you're having that isn't the same as the last four retros. And we want to get specific here, which I know we probably do. I would say that one of my favorite retros, because it's underutilized, is the Spotify Health Check or some flavor of that that really helps the get a pulse on the health of the team. The quality of the team, as I often like to refer to it as, with various dimensions over time, where you're essentially creating a heat map of these things, you know, suck. These things are okay, these things aren't perfect, but we don't need to focus on them at the time. And the reason why I like that is because it allows us to have some structured conversations on where we need to focus from a process improvement standpoint. Remember, we just want to be 1% better or 5% better than we were yesterday or wore last Sprint, and we don't have a lot of time to figure that out. So these heat maps can help us be able to see how we're working and the changes that we're making and the iterations that we're having are impacted. The way we feel about the work, the way we interpret the work, do we feel that we're player or a pawn within the system? And it can be really great for leaders to also be able to see how their team is feeling supported and where we might need to focus a little bit more time.
- [02:12]
Vasco Duart
And that aspect is actually very important because especially if you do it on a regular cadence, let's say once every quarter or something like that, you can see how the team is evolving, where they choose to focus and of course, the impact of the actions that they take, 100%.
- [02:30]
Sarah Caldwell
And you know, this, this concept might, the thing that I'm going to say next might be a little bit scary in the wrong environment, but in the right environment, this, these trends over time can be really influential for leaders as a whole. I know oftentimes leaders are like. But I want to know what's going on in the retro. What are you doing? Tell me the action items. And sometimes Scrum Masters kind of feel like they may be reporting to the manager of the engineering team or the Scrum team they're working with and they know that, you know, what happens in the retro stays in the retro. And it's only the action items that should be reported. But that can be a really kind of difficult place based upon Power Dynamics, to kind of draw a line there. So this can be a really great option for the leaders to still feel connected to the team and how the team is directionally trending without having to be in every single retrospective or any retrospective.
- [03:23]
Vasco Duart
Yeah, and that's actually often a topic of conversation that comes up. I mean, we were talking about it earlier in the week, how leaders feel somehow kind of ostracized. Right? Like pushed away from the team. But this kind of information can actually be very useful and it can be a huge, hugely important backup information for some more, you know, targeted things that we want leaders to contribute to.
- [03:51]
Sarah Caldwell
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [03:54]
Vasco Duart
So of course we want to do this retros because it helps us help the team succeed. And obviously that is a very important aspect of our own success as Scrum Masters. So, Sarah, share with us. When you think about success for yourself as a Scrum Master, what are the key aspects? How do you define it?
- [04:15]
Sarah Caldwell
Yeah, so it's when I, I feel success when working with a team, when I feel like they've internalized the values and principles that I've been trying to help them understand. And it can show up in several different ways. But some stories that I've experienced that really just make me feel satisfied, make me feel proud, make me feel like I'm doing the right thing with the team is that if I've been working with a team maybe six months and I go on vacation for a week, and in my absence, they've done all the things, they've had daily standup. They didn't say, oh, Sarah's not here, should we do standup? They self regulated off topic items into a parking lot where previously, before I was working with them. Bob may go off on tangents and getting really specific items into the work, but instead, now I'm on vacation, I'm not there, they're their parking lot. They're putting PL into the team's chat and saying, we need to talk about the specifics of this work. And then, you know, like also like another really proud example of some success I've had in the past is during planning, one engineer mentioned, hey, let's run this through the just enough filter, right? So instead of going deep into the weeds, they're again self regulating without me even being there or having to say anything. It's that whole adage of Scrum Master is really ultimately trying to work themselves out of a job.
- [05:41]
Vasco Duart
So when do you. Yeah, go ahead, go ahead.
- [05:44]
Sarah Caldwell
You know, and this, I mean, it shows up in a variety of different places. Like, you know, demo is another area where sometimes when I'm first working with the team, they're like, this isn't demo, demo, we can't show this. It's back in stuff, you know, or they might create together a PowerPoint slide, or they might spend an hour and a half to two hours trying to prep for a demo. But again, working with them, they then start to realize, okay, let's just show working software, let's do just enough. And that can be really gratifying to know that, you know, I've had influence on a team and that they're doing everything that we talked about on their own without me having to be there. So I'm not the change, they're the change.
- [06:26]
Vasco Duart
So for me, like, all of those behaviors are a wonderful checklist for us to reflect on and see how the team is doing and maybe decide where we want to focus ourselves. But for me, what is really important is to start detecting how open the team is to taking on those behaviors, how they are progressing. Like, how do you keep yourself accountable to those ideal definitions of success that you just shared with us? Like, how do you follow that up? What kind of things do you look for? Do you use one on ones? Like, how do you keep track of that?
- [07:01]
Sarah Caldwell
Well, first and foremost, it's a lot of self regulation because I am a direct, passionate, opinionated person. And one of the things that I really try and do is monitor my air time and let the team struggle and dance with that struggle. I do a lot of dancing where, you know, if I'm first working with a team and where, you know, there's some things that they don't, you know, general concepts about agility and scrum and mechanisms. I'll lean in a lot more, I'll talk a lot more. But as I'm, I'm seeing that they're coming up with, with ide ideas, even if they're not quote unquote, right, they're directionally accurate. We go with it. We say, great, that's, that sounds like a great experiment. How do we know we're going to be successful? And you know, so it ends up being a pattern that I found is like working with new teams as I'm leaning in up into the point of just kind of helping model that change, make it feel safe, acknowledging that things can feel icky when we're trying something new and then kind of playing with the uncomfortability, but then quickly trying to move my behavior into more of just observing and letting and ensuring that the team is actually doing the talking, the team is actually doing the deciding. And I only chip in when I'm asked or when I think it's going to sink the ship or I think that they're not agreeing to some sort of standard that they already agreed to in their working agreement.
- [08:33]
Vasco Duart
And that dance that you describe, I think it's very important. And you also mentioned self regulation. And I'm thinking, okay, so first dance of course is a metaphor here, but it also means that we are not trying to somehow constrain, we are just trying to figure out what's the rhythm that we can be present for but not necessarily change unless you know there might be some catastrophic event happening otherwise. Right. And so monitoring the air, monitoring your air time is I think a very practical and very clear way to make sure that you are really dancing with the team's evolution and struggle rather than trying to interfere too much. When you do your reflection, I don't know if you do that like weekly or if you do that as part of the one on ones with the team members. When you do your reflection, what are you looking for to keep yourself accountable, that indeed you are holding yourself to that ideal that we need to dance with the struggle and not necessarily overly direct the team.
- [09:38]
Sarah Caldwell
So I try to do it in a couple ways. In the past I've done an NPS score in myself. Where would you rate me as a Scrum Master? How would you rate me to a Scrum Master? To your family and friends, obviously to other teams. But it can be funny to compare Scrum mastering with your friends and family and maybe ask a few questions of things that I can do better in an anonymous way that can be helpful. I also find, you know, more like organic way is to let the team to continue to let the team know like hey, I could be wrong, there's likely something I'm not seeing. So I like to, I like to do a lot of self reflection moments in the moment. If I've been talking for a few minutes, like I like to kind of stop internally and think why am I talking here, right? Am I adding value to the team or am I telling the team? And then I also like to continuously remind the team, like, we're all smart people. We all have really great answers here. We all, you know, we are complex problem solar sellers as a collective. So it's not just what Sarah thinks, it's what we think. And I, I balance that out with these enabling constraints. So enabling constraints are different than like governing constraints in that, you know, it's like the concept of enabling constraints says you can drive any place on the road, just don't hit a car. Whereas a governing constraint is you can only drive on the left side or right side, wherever you live of the road. And I think it's important for teams to understand those boundaries so that I can dance with them so that we do not, you know, quote unquote, fail too largely as a team to get, you know, where somebody's saying quote unquote, this isn't working. Agile isn't working for the team. And then retrospectives, obviously keeping, keeping a place for people to be able to, you know, talk about the roles and the value of the roles and how they're impacting. So there's a lot of different forms between the one on ones, the retrospectives trying to create a safe space. When people come to me and they say, hey, I don't think we should be working that way. I don't, I don't, I typically don't correct them. Right. I try and take that powerful coaching stance and say, what are some things we're not seeing? Or can we run this through the just enough filter? Or what are, how do we know we're going to be successful and how do we know this isn't going to work?
- [12:05]
Vasco Duart
And those are very powerful questions for our own reflection and most importantly, they trigger that reflection also in the team members that we are having a conversation with. I think that this was incredibly actionable, very practical. So thank you for sharing that with us, Sarah.
- [12:23]
Sarah Caldwell
Yeah, thank you for letting me nerd out.
- [12:27]
Vasco Duart
Part of a successful Scrum Master job is to help the product owner. Tomorrow we explore that critical role in Scrum, the product owner role. Tune in to learn about product owner anti patterns, what you can do to help the product owner and a real life example of what a great product owner is and what made it so. Tomorrow on our Friday product owner episode. See you tomorrow. We really hope you liked our show and if you did, why not rate this podcast on stitcher or itunes, share this podcast and let other Scrum masters know about this valuable resource for their work. Remember that Sharing is caring.