Good conversations are a two-way street. It’s important to not only express your own thoughts and ideas, but also to listen to and learn from others. Having a bi-directional conversation within a team is essential for building strong relationships, sharing ideas, and achieving common goals.
It’s important to be aware of how our behaviour can impact a conversation. If you want to keep a good conversation going, focus on being respectful, open-minded, and engaged in the conversation.
In an Agile team, conversations play a crucial role in ensuring that everyone is aligned with the team’s goals and priorities.
Let’s create a background on how to mess up with a team in engaging with a behaviour that is not conducive for any further team building.
If you want to spoil a good conversation, here are some things you can do (and believe me they work and give you the desired results):
- Talk too much: If you talk too much and don’t let others contribute to the conversation, you can quickly spoil a good conversation.
- Be negative: If you’re negative and focus on the negative aspects of the conversation, you can bring down the mood of the conversation and make it less enjoyable.
- Interrupt others: If you constantly interrupt others when they’re speaking, you can quickly make the conversation feel disrespectful and unproductive.
- Be closed-minded: If you’re closed-minded and not open to new ideas or perspectives, you can shut down the conversation and prevent it from evolving into something productive.
- Be judgmental: If you’re quick to judge others and their ideas, you can create a defensive atmosphere where people are hesitant to share their thoughts and opinions.
- Take things personally: If you take everything personally and get defensive, you can quickly turn a good conversation into an argument.
- Be distracted: If you’re distracted and not fully present in the conversation, you can make others feel like you don’t value their contributions.
It’s important to be aware of how your behaviour can impact a conversation. If you want to keep a good conversation going, focus on being respectful, open-minded, and engaged in the conversation, with this negative approach, you can destroy a team culture, you would not be respected, your opinion is not heard, you are a non-required person on the team.
Scrum master’s should help the team develop a behaviour and approach, where the Scrum Values are practiced and respected, this would help the team to evolve into the next orbit of collaboration.
When you are getting into a new team or supporting a tenured scrum team … I recommend you to adopt the following:
- Create a comfortable environment: It’s important to create an environment where everyone feels comfortable and safe to speak their minds. Encourage open communication, active listening, and respect for each other’s opinions.
- Define the purpose of the conversation: Ensure that everyone is on the same page about the purpose of the conversation. Make sure that you have a clear agenda, and that everyone knows what they are expected to contribute.
- Ask open-ended questions: Instead of asking yes or no questions, ask open-ended questions that require more thoughtful and elaborate responses. This can help promote deeper and more meaningful conversations.
- Be an active listener: Pay attention to what your teammates are saying and respond thoughtfully. Clarify any misunderstandings, and make sure that everyone feels heard and valued.
- Stay focused: Keep the conversation on track and focused on the topic at hand. Avoid going off on tangents or getting side-tracked by unrelated issues.
- Encourage participation: Make sure that everyone has the opportunity to participate in the conversation. Avoid dominating the conversation or letting one or two people monopolize the discussion.
- Summarize the conversation: At the end of the conversation, summarize what was discussed, and identify any action items or follow-up tasks. This can help ensure that everyone is on the same page, and that the conversation was productive.
By following these tips, you can help create a team environment that promotes open communication, mutual respect, and shared success.
Some additional elements to engaging in a delightful and result oriented conversation would be:
- Use visual aids: Use visual aids like Kanban boards or task boards to track progress and make it easier for everyone to see the status of each task.
- Focus on collaboration: Encourage collaboration and teamwork by encouraging team members to work together to solve problems and achieve shared goals.
- Be open to feedback: Be open to receiving feedback from team members and be willing to adapt and make changes based on that feedback.
- Celebrate successes: Celebrate team successes and achievements to build team morale and motivate team members to continue working towards the team’s goals.
Engaging conversations would also aid the Scrum values to be implemented, adopted and lived.
Remember, good conversations are a two-way street. It’s important to not only express your own thoughts and ideas, but also to listen to and learn from others. By following these tips, you can help create a team environment that promotes open communication, mutual respect, and shared success.
Believe that every team and each individual in every team is different, they have different needs, their personalities are different, their skills set, experience, talent, collaboration style are all unique and when we apply the same yard stick of discussions and conversation that has proven to be successful with some other team – we make the classic mistake of One Size that Fits All.
An experienced Scrum Master would / should be able to adjust its own approach / strategies and cater to the needs of the current team where the services are rendered / provided / assisted
In summary, managing dysfunctional team in an Agile environment requires a proactive and collaborative approach, focusing on communication, education, coaching, and team involvement, and measuring progress and adjusting as needed.
As we always say in Agile … Inspect and Adapt and Be transparent to yourself atleast and do a daily retrospective of Self-Behavior
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