Difficult team conversations and how to have them

For the November 2023 Agile Sheffield Meetup, Becky gave a talk and ran a few activities on the topic of "Difficult team conversations and how to have them".

In her talk she explained how difficult conversations are often difficult because they feel personal, and that we need to find ways of talking about difficult things in ways that allow us to focus on the issue at hand and not let our emotions affect us.

She talked about using a team health check as a good approach to regularly checking in on the whole team without making everyone have to talk about how they felt about things.  During the event, Becky ran a session using the spotify squad health check.  (click here for to go spotify's engineering website where they have full details including recent updates.)

Another approach was to run a retro in a way where the style of retro provides a layer of abstraction so that team members can talk about issues and problems without it becoming about people.  Becky suggested the use of the Movie poster retro. 

We split into a few groups and had a go at coming up with our own Movie posters.  Everyone found the session really useful with a few people planning on using it with their own teams.

For a copy of the complete presentation slide deck, please get in touch.