How one simple shift can build trust in retrospectives

By Ivana Ciric

Whether you work with your team remotely or in person, you will not build a high-performing product team without trust. It takes time to build trust, but there are also plenty of opportunities. One of these is simple to implement on a team ritual that product teams are already familiar with.??

The retro is a meeting that product teams use to regularly examine the team’s work and generate inputs for continuous improvement. Within teams where trust is low, retros can be a place to blame individuals for the team's failures. As a result, team members can feel misunderstood and less motivated to perform.?

But with one simple change, the focus of retros can change to one of continuous improvement, empathy, and collaboration. Before we dive into the solution, let’s understand why there’s a problem.

Challenges of Building Trust?

When teams are colocated, trust can be developed through shared experiences, side conversations, and proximity. But, colocation alone does not guarantee trust.

In asynchronous communication, some of the key elements of in-person interactions are missing: body language, voice, tone, and silence. We overestimate our ability to correctly interpret sarcasm, humour, or sincerity over text communication . Missing all this real-time feedback during asynchronous work makes misunderstandings much more common, empathy harder to feel and trust much harder to build.?

One powerful element we consistently have access to is language, and it can help us dramatically increase or decrease trust in our team interactions.?

Language

Research has shown that language influences how we think, how we reason, and what we remember. How can we use language to improve our retros and working relationships??

?A well-known concept in clinical psychology is that of “I-messages,” which are an assertion about the feelings, beliefs, values, etc. of the person speaking and generally expressed as a sentence beginning with the word "I." I-messages are often used with the intent to be assertive without putting the listener on the defensive by avoiding accusations. They are also used to take ownership for one's feelings, rather than implying that they are caused by another person.?

It sounds simple, but it makes a huge difference in helping us empathize with our team members and work together to resolve issues.

Techniques for Running Effective Retros

When trust on the team is low, it helps to focus on small actions to show progress. As you may know, retros on a team with low trust can turn into a venue to vent and blame others, without focusing on constructive criticism and resolutions, which is why remote retros need their own rules.?

Rules:

Before the Retro

1. Use a remote retro tool (such as FunRetro or Reetro ) to gather feedback anonymously before the meeting.?
2. Explain the technique ahead of time.?

During the Retro

1. Each item will be read by someone who did not write it. There are several ways to do this. If you know your team fairly well you will already have a general sense of who has written what - this is fine.
2. Each reader will “claim” the item as their own, and repeat it in first person using an “I-message”. For example: “The backlog needs to be ready before iteration planning” becomes “I did not prepare the backlog before iteration planning”. It will take a few minutes to get this right, and if the trust level is low you may get questions about why you are doing this.?
3. The reader will then facilitate a conversation with the team and, if appropriate, suggest an action item (a small task that can be accomplished toward the goal).
4. As in any other retro, the last portion of the meeting can be used to group, prioritize, and discuss action items.?

With this one change, you will immediately see a shift in the group's energy and notice the diversity of solutions increase as the thought process changes.

There is no quick fix to building trust on a team. But if you start with this small change and follow it consistently each iteration, you will see both immediate and lasting benefits that lead you and your team to build better products.

Our Product Thinking Playbook is filled with tactics and techniques that help product teams build better products. Look out for the Team Retrospectives technique next week, and click?here ?to download your copy of the complete playbook.