Facilitation Skills

Petra Wille (0:04)

Hi, folks, this is All Things Product with Petra Wille and Teresa Torres. And we're so happy you're here.

Teresa Torres (0:17)

Petra, I want to dig into a topic today that is very common. I'm sure you've seen it before. It's this idea of when a product team, so we're encouraging product trios to collaborate cross-functionally. We do. We do.

What happens when they struggle to get along or there's conflict, or they don't know how to resolve differences? I get this a lot, and we can get into how I help with this, but I also know you have some super awesome soft skills strategy here that I would like to hear about. But really, let's just frame it as we have a product team, they're going about their daily life, they're doing their stuff, inevitably conflict happens. What should they do when that happens?

Petra Wille (1:10)

Retrospectives.

So the thing is, what I can get so emotional and passionate about that topic, because I know Agile, it's so old, nobody wants to talk about it anymore. But I'm always wondering, why are we not at least taking the things that have really worked well for so many product teams? And this is like pause every once in a while, and talk about efficiency, that is what it's all about.

So as a team, how are we collaborating? How do we approach our work? Is there a team culture that everybody is subscribing to? All these kind of things. Do we love pair programming or not? Do we value everybody's time in being on time for meetings? Whatever it is that people need to discuss.

I think it's important that we give room for that in our calendars. And I think it's even more important that whoever does it is good in facilitating these sessions. I think the skill of facilitating a group conversation, and that could be a retrospective, that could be a workshop, a stakeholder workshop, something like that, let alone user interviews, but that's a different kind of skill. But facilitating such a session where people have to talk maybe about interpersonal conflict, maybe about why is this one person always taking over this other person in the meeting. So stuff that is really tricky to talk about. And that needs to moderate it well, that needs to prepare it well. Somebody has half the time and the skill to prepare these sessions and to facilitate these sessions. So I'm very passionate that there need to be some people somewhere in an organization doing that well. And I have clients where the teams have the skills, so where they do moderation and facilitation around Robin.

That's rare. And I have a lot of clients where they still have a good old Agile coach sitting somewhere, our Scrum Master, doing this really well because that's what they've done in the past a lot. And I always encourage the product people to learn that skill as well because it's an important skill. And you cannot only use it on your team. You can use it in whatever team workshop situation, how to prepare the workshop, how to facilitate it, how to make sure that the people really talk about the underlying problems that you see as a facilitator may be clearer than the actual team. And what are good, for example, we can share that in the show notes. There is a retro methodology that I love for that, which I call the team radar, where you, for example, if you sense the team has a particular problem, then this is one axis of your radar, and then you add seven other ones, and then you ask the team to reflect on those, and you can see what the team thinks. And it's not so much about what you think, because that doesn't matter. You're the facilitator, that's your role.

But you can see what the team thinks about a particular topic. So yeah, facilitation and time to have something like a retrospective, that would help. What's your take? You said like you have ideas and tactics, different tactics maybe?

Teresa Torres (4:32)

I want to unpack a little bit of what you said first. So the first thing that you said, made me think of team charters. So really just talking about this, like what do we have conflict about? So I think I'm going to create two really broad buckets. The first is teams have interpersonal conflict that often tends to be around norms, communication styles, personalities.

And I think a lot of what you talked about with these norms, one tactic I really like to see teams do is to literally create a team charter. And I think when we create team charters, we tend to create them from the business point of view, like what's our outcome, what's our mission as a team. That's all great, but I actually think where team charters are way more powerful, is to as a team have a conversation around, these are the hours that will be available. These are our preferred communication styles. This is how I like to make decisions.