How to get "The 5 Keys to a Successful Google team"? - Fun #Retrospective #agile A Path to High performance teams.

This article is about using an Agile Retrospective session to improve a teams' performance according to the 5 Keys that make a Google team effective. For more about retrospectives, please read the best seller Agile Retrospectives book.

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Introduction

Some years ago, a group in Google’s People Operations (HR) used data and rigorous analysis to answer the question:?What makes a Google team effective??and in November 2015 they published "The five keys to a successful google team" which caused interest in many managers, CTOs and leaders.

Although I could not find many details of which data they used and the analysis they did to determine these 5 keys, I am sure they are very serious about it to publish it and that any modern manager or agile team members will agree that these are characteristics of a team that make a lot of sense to pursue. On the other side, In some way, I see these findings by Google as some kind of solution to the "The 5 dysfunctions of a team" book by Patrick M. Lencioni.

They learned that there are five key dynamics that set the successful and high-performance team apart from other teams at Google:

1. Psychological safety:?Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
2. Dependability:?Can we count on each other to do high-quality work on time?
3. Structure & clarity:?Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear?
4. Meaning of work:?Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?
5. Impact of work:?Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?

The retrospective

So how we can use this to help teams to become highly effective? We need actions and I think the way to look for the gaps to these 5 keys and take the right actions in order to improve the team towards them is by running a 5 steps retrospective style session, so I created one according to them.

1) Set the stage

For this step of the retrospective, you should run only one activity, but you have many options:

1.1) One-word gif: You can start with One Word or One Word Gif activities but the team members to think of "what makes a team successful?" and summarize in one word in a sticky note.

1.2) Knowing each other better: I think that something energizer or where people can share something personal like candy love or guess my favorite song would be good. We want to increase trust, openness, and empathy, right?

1.3) Safety check: If you suspect the team is not speaking up or psychological safety is already in risk you may try something like safety check.

1.4) The 5 keys Semaphores: Another way to set the stage would be to use red, yellow and green semaphores, collect votes, and in the next step you can focus to gather data or discuss the areas with the most green and red votes. This is inspired by the Squad health check model by Spotify.

2) Gather data

This activity "The 5 Keys to a successful google team" is the core and the purpose of this retrospective. Here is where we focus on reviewing our strengths and weaknesses according to these five keys.

Steps:

1. Introduction: The facilitator explains that we will be evaluating our strengths and weaknesses in 5 different areas that are desired in successful teams.
2. Connection: The facilitator asks one team member to read the title of the first column (Psychological safety). Then, asks another team member to read the second and so on until the 5th column (impact of work).
3. Questions: The facilitator asks the group if they have any questions about the meaning of 5 areas to be discussed. Explain them and allow small debate.
4. Gather the data: The facilitator asks the team to reflect for 5 minutes about their strengths and weaknesses in these areas and write one sticky note per concept. This activity can be individual or in groups of 2 or 3 participants. For collocated session: The facilitator tells to not post any sticky notes in the board. For a remote session: The participants will write the notes in the online board.
5. Post and review: When they are done. For a collocated session: The facilitator asks each participant or group to put each sticky note on the board and read it without further explanation. In the end, the facilitator asks if there are any questions or some notes are not clear. For a remote session: The facilitator asks one participant to read all the sticky notes in the first column and ask the team if there are any questions or some notes are not clear. The facilitator selects another team member and repeats the same activity per each column.
6. Filtering: The facilitator asks the team to group notes that are similar and ask team members to do a dot voting or other filtering activity to identify the concepts that they would like to discuss further.
7. Next step: The facilitator starts discussing each of the most voted items in the following steps of the retrospective.

Alternatives:

• 2.1) Mad, sad, glad / start, stop, continue: Instead of strengths and weaknesses, you can use "mad, sad, glad" or "start, stop, continue".
• 2.2) Semaphores and futurospective: If you used the 5 keys semaphores to set the stage, you may use other activities like a futurospective to gather data. For instance, suppose that impact of work has a lot of red votes, you can use speed car abyss with such concept in the finish to analyze what is stopping us and how to get there.

3) Generate insights

Iterate over the most voted items with a generate insights activity. There are many options, in my case, I used a variation of fishbone diagram to find the root cause. In this example, the team is looking to improve its impact.

4) Decide what to do

In order to generate real actions, as some changes might involve other areas I would prefer Circles & Soup / Circle of Influence or Low hanging fruit to focus on what they can really change or on something valuable with low effort, but there are a lot of options.

Sometimes, I also like to ask the participants to rewrite the most voted or interesting actions with SMART goals or who what when steps to action.

Remember that is very important to get the commitment of people and assign responsibilities to people for the actions.

5) Close

When closing this retrospective It is important to know how this retro was valuable to the team with an activity such as grade it please and decide if makes sense to repeat it after some time.

Conclusions

This retrospective can help the team to think from a new perspective to improve the work environment, happiness, and effectiveness of their work in the real world.

How different roles can help in each area:

• Psychological safety and Dependability: I think that the development team and scrum master will have a direct impact on actions to improve in this area. Scrum masters and agile coaches are change agents and they should also push the company in the right culture and agile values.
• Structure and clarity: The Product Owner should work hard with stakeholders to bring clarity of vision and goals. The Scrum master should push the PO on this quest and help to suggest techniques and with clear roles within the team.
• Meaning of work and impact: The Product owner's goal (besides maximizing ROI) is that the product must be a success and users just love it. Product owners, Managers, CTO, CEO should be able to provide transparency on business decisions, why we are doing this and how we are making a better world. Scrum Master and Agile coach should be able to provide techniques and agile transformation to bring agility into the business.

I hope you enjoy it and get good results!

Notes:

• The examples provided are fictitious?but inspired by observations that I have seen in many teams along with my career.
• This article does not imply that google runs this retrospective. I just created it for any company using the five keys of successful teams they published.