The retro that made everyone warm and fuzzy inside

As I have mentioned before, although I'm not the scrum master of our team, I have volunteered to facilitate our retros...and I've done it for almost 6 months, but then I felt a bit drained and I asked my teammates for help. I thought I needed a couple of sprints to recharge my creative batteries, but honestly, I feel like I still need some more time. 

Anyway, my dear friend Korcholis (probably my best friend at work, but don't tell him) volunteered to facilitate some retros and they were good. They made everyone in the team sigh and be all "aww I love you all", which was beautiful and felt great, but being the flawed person I am, I felt a bit jealous (and feeling jealous made me feel small). 

Jealous? Why? Well, because I've been trying to get the team to reach that climax for almost 6 months and I felt weird that someone else achieved it. Since Korcholis and I are the kinds of friends who can be honest with each other, I confessed my jealousy to him, and guess what he said? 

"First of all, all processes are long and sometimes they take time. The fact that they said that when I was facilitating it might only because I was "a new person" facilitating the retros, but the whole effect came from before.

Second, if you hadn't brought games and 'emotional things', I wouldn't have brought games and emotional things. To be honest, when I was officially responsible of facilitating the retro, every day before starting work I'd look for metaphors about how to split tasks in "good" and "bad" and that's it, but afterward, once I started looking for games, I realized that splitting positive and negative things of the sprint into two columns was not the most important part...the most important part was to see how we work as a team.

Third, I know you don't like to hear this, but you can't allow someone's words to affect you. [...] Fourth, don't say you feel small, imagine you teach someone how to ride a bike. Will you feel small because that person knows how to ride a bike now? Will you feel small when someone tells them "Wow! Well done! You ride your bike so well!"...of course not. You should feel proud of being such a good teacher."

I must admit that, after those words, I felt a bit emotionally manipulated to feel proud of my work and happy about what had happened... After all, he's really smart and he'd know how to cheer me up, but he made a good case.

We're finally riding the bike together (sometimes).

"You is kind, you is smart, you is important"

The title of this post is what Aibeleen Clark tells little Skeeter Phelan to remind her how important she is, and because she knows that as adults, we can help shape children's self-esteem and confidence by reminding them important things. Whereas a scrum team is certainly not made up of children, the confidence of its team members might increase as the team matures, but also if they're shown that they're valued and appreciated.

 From the film "The Help"  

Sometimes I feel that we're usually more prone to giving negative feedback when we have to rather than giving positive feedback spontaneously. But what if the other person really needs to hear something nice? What if the other person is having impostor syndrome or is simply having a terrible day and a little nice gesture could make their day?

Living with the current pandemic in Spain is not easy. Lots of people are losing their jobs, and I can't imagine how awful it must be to have to look for a job when you're not feeling good about yourself and when you don't know how much you're worth.
That was the thought process behind this retrospect activity...that, and perhaps my own need to be validated.

The day before the retro:
I don't know about you, but sometimes when I ask people to think about something, anything, it takes them ages, so I decided to give my team an assignment, so that time wouldn't be an excuse. I asked them to make a list of each person of the team (except for themselves, but now that I think about it, it would have been cool too) and list two or three virtues for each.

I also found this Secret Santa tool and tested it to see if it did what I needed from it https://mywishlist.online/secretsanta/new

The day of the retro:
I decided to give them one little push and send them a list of virtues https://www.virtuesforlife.com/virtues-list/
(Just in case they didn't know what virtue was and they were too lazy to google it). I know what you're thinking, I'm spoonfeeding them, yes, but I was scared that some of them hadn't understood the task and were afraid to ask, so I decided to give people a little push.

The moment of retro:
1. I set up a Secret Santa email distribution list, and each member of the team received an email with the name of a team member (the website I used takes care of not sending people their own name and there are some rules you can set up).

2. I sent them this link https://avatarmaker.com/ and asked them to draw the avatar of the name they got by email.

3. I sent them a link to an open Google Drive doc and asked them to go to the link in incognito mode (so that it would be anonymous) and paste the picture they drew and add the virtues they thought of.

4. Once all the pictures where on the doc, they asked me why did I make them make a list for everyone, but then only add the virtues to one person? :) It was part of my evil plan mwahaha. I knew that sending them a name on the spot and asking them to think of virtues would be hard, especially because we're like sub-divided in the team and we don't work with each other all the time, so I figured that giving them some time in advance to think about it wouldn't hurt. I asked them if they wanted to add the virtues to all avatars and they wanted to, so we did.

5. In the end, each team member had an avatar like this (see image).



Conclusion:
My memory might be playing tricks on me, but I feel like this was the first time I was thanked for facilitating a retro (Disclaimer: we don't have a scrum master and we don't take it in turns to facilitate retros, I have volunteered to do it when I started working here, 7 months ago). Anyway, I'm not sure if being thanked is a good or bad indicator of anything (etiquette aside) but it felt rewarding. Do you know what felt awesome too? To know how they see me, which virtues my team thinks I possess.

Regarding the other team members, I know that they felt good about the exercise because they said so.

I really liked the fact that I had to write a list of virtues for each team member. It made me see how different we all are and it made me appreciate the diversity of my team even more.

P/S: I don't know who made my avatar and the person whose avatar I made doesn't know it was me and, you know what? I like it this way, it makes it mysterious, and the fact that no-one asked who drew them makes me think the others like it this way too.