← Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
The Role of Trust and Fun in High-Performing Agile Teams | Chrissy Fleming
00:18:05
Chrissy Fleming: The Role of Trust and Fun in High-Performing Agile Teams Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: . For Chrissy, success...
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- [00:02]
Pasco Duarte
Hi there, Pasco Duarte here, your host. I wanted to share a story with you. You know how sometimes Agile just feels like following another checklist when like processes and frameworks feel more important than what we are trying to achieve and sometimes even like handcuffs. I was talking to a customer of the Global Agile Summit and he used a term that kind of stuck in my he said, I have Agile fatigue. And I've heard that a lot from people since then. But here's the thing, it doesn't have to be this way. So we started thinking and at the Global Agile Summit, which is happening this May, we're bringing together practitioners who've actually done that, who've broken free from this, you know, install the framework kind of mindset. We want to focus the summit on real life, first person stories of Agile all succeeding that inspire you to action. We're talking real experiences, practical solutions, and of course, amazing insights from leaders like Gojkoacic, who will be one of the keynote speakers, and Jurgen Apelo, who will be one of the keynote speakers as well. If you're ready to leave the Agile fatigue behind, just join us in Dalit. The early birth tickets are now available@the globalagilesummit.com and mark your calendar. We will have workshops on May 18th, that's a Sunday. And then the conference itself will happen on May 19th and 20th of 2025 in Tallinn, Estonia. So let's make Agile exciting again. And remember, go to agile globalagilesummit.com that is, and get your early birth ticket.
- [01:56]
Chrissy Fleming
Now.
- [01:57]
Pasco Duarte
It will only be available until early March, so grab it now. And now onto the episode. Hello everybody. Welcome to our Success Thursday. The big question of the week this week with Chrissy Fleming. Hey Chrissy, welcome back.
- [02:15]
Chrissy Fleming
Hello.
- [02:15]
Pasco Duarte
Thank you.
- [02:16]
Chrissy Fleming
Hope you are all having a very successful Thursday.
- [02:18]
Pasco Duarte
Indeed, indeed successful Thursday for everybody. So we'll talk about success in a second. But we also always talk about retrospectives, right? Because that's one of the key tools we use to try to reach that successful outcome.
- [02:32]
Chrissy Fleming
Absolutely.
- [02:33]
Pasco Duarte
Share with us. Chrissy, what's your favorite Agile retrospective format and why?
- [02:39]
Chrissy Fleming
Any retrospective that gets people talking, the simpler the better. I heard someone on here maybe a couple of weeks or months ago now that they, they said the simpler the better. Don't get distracting, really get people just having the conversation and I agree with that. I think I also love retrospectives. I don't lead. We were talking yesterday about the importance of giving the team ownership and I don't know if you can tell this about me by now, but I Love to talk. And so I have a bit of a personality that sometimes when there are a lot of introverts around, I can take up the air. And I think as a Scrum master, you really have to be aware of how your personality either helps or hinders drawing out other people on the team. So I love rotating retrospectives and having other people lead them. And so I like team members bringing what they want to the team. And I used to love a tool. It used to be called Fun Retro, now it's called Easy Retro. They're not sponsoring me, but I used to really love that because they had a very simple retrospective format that was great for remote teams. And I also have a tendency to do a lot on Miro for remote teams. So I will say having a great tool is helpful, but it's all about the conversation.
- [03:58]
Pasco Duarte
Yeah, absolutely. And do you have any tips on how to spark that conversation even if it's not a retro format? Like what are some of the go to facilitation tips or tricks that you use to get the team to start engaging with the conversation?
- [04:14]
Chrissy Fleming
Oh, I, I could talk about this all day because this is where I really show my, my Scrum mastery. Nerdery. I love finding ways to draw out different people and I find you really do have to spend some time getting people grounded in that mindset. We are in a problem solving reactive mode a lot of the week. And then to instantly go into a retrospective and expect everybody to suddenly switch into a mode where you're reflective and introspective, it doesn't happen naturally. So one thing I always ask teams to do is pull up their calendars, look over the last two weeks. I remind them of recency bias. I remind them to look at what was happening over the beginning of the sprint, you know, and that's kind of the start of the meditation. And then I'll say, let's look at the board, let's look at what we did, let's look at what we didn't. And as we're doing that, they're adding notes and then really taking some time to, to have everyone ideate alone and unhindered first. And then one of the things I will often do too is because I'm so often wearing that hat of both Scrum master and product owner during our retro time. If I think I really let the team down as a product owner, I put that in the retro. I call myself out all the time and it's anonymous, so sometimes they know it's me, sometimes they don't. But I want to make sure that over time, everyone knows it's okay to say, wow, like this team member kind of let us down this week. And that. That's that this is a safe place. So one of the things for me building trust is to trust first. Right. And so, so I show that I trust them by showing my weaknesses. And that does make it safer for other folks to, to admit, oh, I wish I had done that better. Or it's even better when they say, hey, friend, I wish you had done that better. Like, I wish we could handle that differently going forward. And that's when you get the really good conversations.
- [06:18]
Pasco Duarte
Yeah, absolutely. And I really like the tips of kind of grounding the team into the space of the retrospective, asking them to look at the calendar, kind of reinforce the older memories, kind of find the aspects that might still be relevant to what happened recently, but they were not happening recently and we might easily forget about them. Right?
- [06:43]
Chrissy Fleming
Yeah. And whatever. What came out of your last retrospective that did go better calling that out as well. I think a lot of people throw out retrospectives when they say, oh, it's useless and it's because they don't actually make change. So you have to bring up, remember in our last retrospective, we said we were going to do better at that. And, and we have great job, or, you know, so calling back to that so that they feel like, I'm not. This is not a useless hour where we're just going to complain and moan and then go back to our jobs, that if you reinforce we did something better as a result of doing this last time. And so now this is a productive conversation because we're going to choose what we're going to do better next. That also makes it real for people. It makes it concrete.
- [07:30]
Pasco Duarte
Absolutely. Making it real and concrete is one of the key aspects that is required in order for us to do this problem solving that we then need to do at least a retrospective. So, of course, we do all of this because we want to help our team succeed and we want ourselves to succeed as well as Scrum Masters. So, Chrissy, tell us, how do you define success for yourself when you take the Scrum Master hat?
- [07:57]
Chrissy Fleming
Oh, I could go on. Success is put simply, success is a high performing team working on solving valuable problems. It's very simple to say it is very hard to achieve for a high performing team. I find it funny. I now give trainings and workshops about high performing teams, so I have a lot of ideas about what it boils down to. But trust, I think we've been saying that a lot this week. You hear me talk about that a lot. Because trust is so, so important for team accountability. Accountability to each other, accountability to the promises that they make. A team that's grounded in continuous improvement, and also a team that enjoys working together. I don't believe that everyone on a team has to be friends, but everybody on a team has to be friendly to a certain extent. And the best teams are the teams that really enjoy each other and can have fun with each other. Because in the fun and in the play often comes the creativity that we're seeking from the team. So that's the high performing team part. And then you also have that solving valuable problems. And that's, that's what we talked about yesterday. The importance of really solving something that matters to the team and being clear and not just building code for code or not just building this thing because the CEO told us to, but really having meaning. If you can have those two things, to me, that's success. And I know that a team is successful. I'm on if the more honorary members we have on the team, the more people that call themselves like honorary members of our team, I know that this is the place where people want to be and want to come and work in the organization. So that's always a good sign for me. Like, the more people jumping into our team photos, I'm like, ah, then I'm doing, I think I'm doing well.
- [09:52]
Pasco Duarte
One thing that you said that I really want to emphasize is this. Often we think that a team having fun is kind of, you know, not taking work seriously or not putting all their investment, physical and emotional, into the work. But actually it also means something else. It means that we trust each other to be relaxed and we expect that everybody is doing their best and therefore we are happy. Like, there's this implicit understanding that when you're having fun that you're working less hard. But actually the best teams I've worked with, they were the hardest working teams and they always had fun. Like, absolutely. We would have bets. You know, we would have like these bets going on. We would do sharpshooting with the Nerf guns. We would organize pizza lunches. But we were hard workers. Like, you know, some people stayed later. That, that's. I'm not saying that people should stay late, but that just shows their commitment. Nobody was asking them to stay late. Right. They just did. And other days they left earlier. Right. Like that, that, that ability. And so these days I look at fun as more of a symptom of a good team than rather the cause of a good team. Do you see what I mean? Do you agree with that?
- [11:21]
Chrissy Fleming
Oh, 100. Oh, I 100% agree with that. And because you're right, you could have, you could have a team that is having fun and goofing off and not doing real work. I don't actually see that very often professionally, to be honest. If you don't feel like you're doing real work, you don't tend to have your guard down. And if you look at any of the more creative endeavors, and when I talk about trust so much to rely on each other and to be able to trust each other to play, I think we expect that as we're adults, we're not supposed to play anymore. And it could not be more wrong. And John Cleese wrote an entire book about creativity, and he talks about the importance of collaborating and playing together and being able to play off of each other's ideas and, and really get into the conversations together and, and to be in it. And I, I agree it's a symptom of a good team if they can play and joke around and kindly tease each other and, and there's a line there, right? Like they have to really read each other and you have to really know each other, accepting each other as humans, respecting the work that everybody brings to the team and, and then making the work fun. I, I love that you talked about bets, because I often will do bets when we're launching something as a trick for getting skin in the game. And so I'll say, all right, this is going out. Here's the range, you know, here's the goal. What, you know, Bosco, what do you think we're going to hit? You know, person, what do you think we're going to hit? And we'll put it up where we all can see and we see who wins and, you know, could even play.
- [13:01]
Pasco Duarte
Fantasy league with those bets, right? Like at the end of, at the end of the quarter or whatever, somebody gets a free lunch because they won the BET table 100%.
- [13:10]
Chrissy Fleming
I love doing stuff like that and I love playing, playing ridiculous games.
- [13:15]
Pasco Duarte
And I would actually. That's a great point. So I don't know if you read, but I, I read Annie Duke's thinking in bed.
- [13:21]
Chrissy Fleming
Oh, yes.
- [13:22]
Pasco Duarte
And she uses that concept of a bet to bring skin in the game, as you said, but also to create accountability. Right. Like, if you're going to make a bet, you better be sure you want to bet that way. Right. It's not just something you say Like a buzzword or something you heard in the latest Gartner quadrant or whatever, you're going to say, no, I really believe this. And, you know, here's the whatever. If it's not money, then lunch, tickets or whatever. Right. Like put something there. And I think that's so important because then it creates a sense of confidence in the team that helps them to then stand up to crazy ideas that come from other people outside the team, including leaders and managers who don't know, but the team knows because they work with it the whole time, right?
- [14:08]
Chrissy Fleming
Yes. Oh, absolutely. And I learned this long before I had heard of Annie Duth or I love her book. My dad taught me this. He worked in finance at a. A very large organization. And he would say that they'd be in meetings, they'd be debating something, and finally he'd say, I bet you a Diet Coke. Now, a Diet Coke doesn't sound like very high stakes, Right. But what it does to the conversation is it changes it from am I right or are you right? And it changes, shifts the conversation to how are we going to find out who's right? Which I think is a very important thing for the team to be able to transition into. Right. It's not me versus you, it's us versus the problem. And how are we going to know who won? Because once there's a Diet Coke on the line or whatever it is, I often say, I'll bet you a dollar, right. It doesn't have to be much, but whatever it is, it changes the conversation to how will we know who won? What are the empirical pieces of evidence we're going to use to determine a winner? And that gets the team into a more productive headspace than just am I right or are you right? We agree that we disagree. And now there's a Diet Coke on the line or whatever. And I have had to give my dad many Diet Cokes over the years when he's bet me and been right.
- [15:25]
Pasco Duarte
And you quickly develop a great intuition to the dynamics of the product or service you're developing. Because if you're doing those bets, you're reflecting deliberately on what is happening.
- [15:37]
Chrissy Fleming
Yes. And you look at the past, oh, last time I was way out of the ballpark. So this time I'm going to hedge it a bit. And yeah, it's fun, but to your point, it really does drive all of the things that we want to see in a team. Accountability and good conversation, healthy conflict, all of those things. And so it's gotta be fun. It really. The best teams are. And. And it's also a part of just bringing your whole self to the team. Right. I used to joke with one of my teams that we said, oh, we're gonna pick team names at some point. And I was like, sorry, guys, My. My daughter's already picked our name. It's going to be rainbows and unicorns. And this is a team of all guys except me. And. But when it came time to pick the team name, one of the engineers leans over and he's like, oh, these other teams are taking this so seriously. Let's just be the unicorns. We were. We were the unicorns. And I would have little. Like, I. I'd wear unicorn headbands. I'd borrow all my daughter's unicorn stuff for calls. But, like. But it just made it fun. Right? And I just can't emphasize enough that, yeah, I know I'm working hard and doing well when I'm enjoying it and you get to the end of the day. But, like. But you've enjoyed it with the people that you're working with.
- [16:55]
Pasco Duarte
You're tired but not stressed out.
- [16:58]
Chrissy Fleming
Exactly. And that's where you get peak performance mentally. Like, we. It's Our. Our jobs are fundamentally creative. Right. Engineering. I think a lot of people, again, they think because we're working with computers, we are machines. This is a very creative job. So I think the more that you can bring that out in your team, the better.
- [17:16]
Pasco Duarte
Absolutely. And check out John Cleese's book on innovation. And even there's a talk by him on YouTube that is definitely worth watching. Thank you for sharing all of that, Chrissy, and thank you for bringing the fun.
- [17:28]
Chrissy Fleming
My pleasure. Unicorns forever.
- [17:35]
Pasco Duarte
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.