Informal discussions with Agile team members
This week I'll be writing on why I believe informal discussion could foster the relationship between an Agile Coach, Team members, Scrum Master and the organization in a whole. I took a look down the memory lane and I noticed all the places I've worked even before my Agile Adventures, informal discussions have helped me to built bridges from the higher senior management to the junior staffs because most of these discussions started either in the dining room or hallway as a brief chat in which most of them got escalated to a more in-depth talk and 8 in 10 was successful.
I realized the best way to get people attention is when at the moment of triggering a conversation they are occupied with something other than work then they'll flow, a good example is a developer will be more than happy to take a Gemba walk with you down the street to talk through some pain he's going through in gathering investigation into a story or task but won't be too keen to talk while sitting at his desk, as we all know Developers are very intelligent set of people and I really do find them to be the best people to work with when they feel 100% comfortable with you and not judged by the code that was written wrongly or a line of code that has affected a live database which has caused a function or few to be disabled.
I worked with a smart bloke a few years ago and one day we were having our usual brief chat 2 hours after standup and he sent a message to me on slack to say he is taking a moment, as usual, to go have a fresh breathe outside as his brain may have just exploded due to a blocker we've recently removed, this lad came back in and said straight to me and I quote ''if not for the timeout and discussions we do have outside of the office he might have quit as he felt too much pressure sometimes and he has to crack his brain 5times more than normal which will surely have a negative impact on his health.
Whether you are an Agile Coach, Scrum Master or Manager of any kind. I'll advise you to start having that informal discussion with your team members if you haven't started and given the Gemba walk a try and see if any positive result will come out of it.
I'll leave it here today till next time I'll be diving into a different topic inside the Agile world.
I realized the best way to get people attention is when at the moment of triggering a conversation they are occupied with something other than work then they'll flow, a good example is a developer will be more than happy to take a Gemba walk with you down the street to talk through some pain he's going through in gathering investigation into a story or task but won't be too keen to talk while sitting at his desk, as we all know Developers are very intelligent set of people and I really do find them to be the best people to work with when they feel 100% comfortable with you and not judged by the code that was written wrongly or a line of code that has affected a live database which has caused a function or few to be disabled.
I worked with a smart bloke a few years ago and one day we were having our usual brief chat 2 hours after standup and he sent a message to me on slack to say he is taking a moment, as usual, to go have a fresh breathe outside as his brain may have just exploded due to a blocker we've recently removed, this lad came back in and said straight to me and I quote ''if not for the timeout and discussions we do have outside of the office he might have quit as he felt too much pressure sometimes and he has to crack his brain 5times more than normal which will surely have a negative impact on his health.
Whether you are an Agile Coach, Scrum Master or Manager of any kind. I'll advise you to start having that informal discussion with your team members if you haven't started and given the Gemba walk a try and see if any positive result will come out of it.
I'll leave it here today till next time I'll be diving into a different topic inside the Agile world.
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