In your team, do you take the time to give each other encouragement? If you see an opportunity for a teammate to grow, do you tell them?
During a weekly retrospective, my team was chatting about how positive and constructive feedback helps us be better in our careers. We agreed that we hadn’t made space to offer such feedback, beyond just “thanks for that!” or “do you mind if…” during the work days.
Within our team, we all shared the same goal of personal growth and improvement. As four members of a programming mob with a high level of psychological safety, we all had plenty of feedback for each other. How to best share this feedback in a constructive way for a remote team of peers?
To make the time to share feedback, we hosted a “team feedback session.” It was a little like our regular retrospectives, but instead of reflecting on our work and process, we focused on giving direct feedback to each individual (and self-reflection, too).
After the session, I was delighted to get both positive and constructive feedback. On the one hand, I left with a better sense of what skills I had that are valued on my team. Some of these things were surprises - things I didn’t realize others valued. On the other hand, I got specific and helpful feedback about areas to improve. Some of these things I was aware of (although it was helpful for others to affirm my self-assessment) and some of the things I hadn’t considered.
The rest of my team said they benefitted similarly; they said they found it helpful and we’re planning to make it a regular occurence.
In this post, I’ll explain the context for our unique reasons for wanting a team feedback session, how I came up with the format for the session, and describe how the session was run.
If you want to skip the back story, jump to How To Host
Background
This idea came about when my team was discussing how we could each grow within our job responsibilities.
The way that the Hunter Software Development Department handles promotions is different than any other place I’ve worked. It enables department members to “nominate” each other for promotions instead of relying on management to recognize achievement. Someone being promoted has a track record of being awesome within their current skillset, and using that awesomeness to make others awesome in the spirit of Modern Agile. They are not necessarily promoted when some external role determines that individual exhibits every trait of their job position in a satisfactory way. That said, the promotion nomination process doesn’t necessarily result in direct feedback to a nominee. Individuals are expected to elicit feedback from each other directly, and those asked are expected to respond with kindness, consideration, and respect and to share their true thoughts with radical candor.
Within our team, some of us aspired for promotions and some did not. We still all shared the same goal of personal growth and improvement. Since we worked together closely every day, we were uniquely poised to give each other rich feedback. We just had to make the time and space to do so.
Even if you work somewhere with a more traditional promotion process, you may still not get the sort of feedback you desire from your teammates. This session could be done with any set of peers with high psychological safety that work together often, whether or not they’re in the same team or department.
Developing the Format
When I did some research on how to structure a retrospective for self-reflection and shared feedback, I noticed most of the formats involved thinking about what one does well, what one should stop doing, what one could improve, or what one should try out. It occurred to me that this line of thinking is essentially a “Start, Stop, Continue” retrospective. What should I start doing? What should I stop doing? What should I continue to do? We do this exercise often in the scope of our team of four, but haven’t necessarily done it for the individual.
Honing a “Start, Stop, Continue” retro for sharing individual feedback for teammates, there were still a few things I wanted to ensure would happen.
I wanted to make sure that feedback could be given as anonymously as possible. Each individual should be empowered to share only as much as they felt comfortable doing. Obviously, someone receiving feedback would know that its coming from one of the other three members of their team, but that piece of feedback may be diffused with other pieces of feedback - it could theoretically be from any of the three.
I wanted the feedback to be direct, specific for that individual. I have previously participated in anonymous feedback sessions that resulted in very generic action items that weren’t very actionable. We each have our own unique skills and strengths, and each of the four of us are at different places in our careers - of course each individual would deserve feedback tailored to who they are as a person and where they are on their professional journey.
Finally, I wanted to make sure that each individual had the opportunity to speak to their own self-reflection. I wanted this because I selfishly wanted the chance to tell my team how I wanted to be better! Because I wanted this for myself, I realized I wanted to hear what each teammate would theoretically tell me about themselves as well.
Preparing For The Feedback Session
I built each team member a RetroTool board with three columns - “What should I start doing?” “What should I improve on?” and “What am I doing well?” RetroTool is great because it allows for posters to remain anonymous yet distinct.
I assembled links to these RetroTool boards onto a Microsoft Whiteboard with the outline for how the session would go, to act as a landing page for each person. This could be a Miro board, Mural board, or any other remote whiteboarding tool you prefer.
For my team’s feedback session, I also put the Hunter Development Position Responsibilites chart on the whiteboard, so the different skills and responsibilites we aspire to have by role would be handy for teammates to refer to. You could put job descriptions, the Agile Manifesto, Software Craftsmanship Manifesto, a code of conduct, or any other materials that your teammates use as a guiding star for how you work together. This is definitely not required!
Hosting The Feedback Session
We set aside one hour for this retrospective. We did the following:
- 5 minutes for self-reflection and adding cards to your own board. Self feedback! Looking at the responsibilities for your job position, what would YOU start doing or do differently? what do YOU think you’re doing well?
- Up to 2 minutes per person to share highlights from their self-reflection. Order was based on volunteering. Some folks took every second of time, some folks only took about 30 seconds.
- 5 minutes to rotate to offer feedback to a teammate. Links to our individual boards were arranged in a square, and so we “rotated” clockwise through these boards.
- 5 minutes to rotate a second time to offer feedback to the next teammate.
- 5 minutes to rotate a third time to offer feedback to the last teammate.
We agreed at the start of the retro that if a card was posted somewhere that captured a thought you also had, instead of “up-voting” the card or claiming “everything I think was already said” we would still create a card and express our thought in our own words. This means there may be more than one card that captures a single sentiment. We also agreed not to affinity-group cards that were similar, and let each sentiment stand on its own.
Feedback on how the session went organically came up as the session progressed, so I created notes to capture that feedback ad-hoc. Next time I would create space for feedback in advance, and encourage attendees to add notes when it came up.
We finished with ten minutes to spare, which we agreed to spent individually reviewing the feedback we had just received. I would make sure to create time for this in any future retros like this.