Recognize Interpersonal-Skills Traps

As people develop these skills, you might see some traps:

• The team members don’t provide enough feedback to each other.
• Team members inflict help when they see a solution.
• Team members “sandwich” their feedback.

You can work to overcome these traps. Here are ways that might work for you.

Trap: Not Enough Feedback

Collaborative teams learn how to work with each other. They talk about the product and the process on a regular basis. Healthy teams have team members who feel safe enough to ask for help and to discuss what’s going on for them. If you have ever encountered a problem where you got stuck and you asked for help, you used feedback.

For years, organizations recognized and rewarded people for individual work. That meant we had incentives to work alone, plug along, and solve the problem however we could. It also meant we worked alone for as long as possible, because the more difficult the problem, the more we might receive as recognition or reward.

That working-alone mindset is in stark opposition to a great agile team. Agile teams work together, to move work across the board, to help each other finish work, to work as generalizing specialists. Instead of being rewarded for individual work, we move to rewarding teams for team work.

That means even if people work alone on some chunk of work, we don’t want team members to be stuck and not ask for help or feedback. If you see team members working alone and being stuck, consider offering these options to your team:

• Consider a team working agreement for how long people work alone without making progress. I like a timebox of no more than 15 minutes for being stuck. Then it’s time to ask for help. The stuck person can explain what he/she has done up until now, and then ask for feedback and coaching.

• Talk to the Duck.^[10] Rubber-duck debugging works even better when the stuck person pairs with someone else. (I explained my experiences talking to the duck in the article “Tell Your Problems to the Duck.”^[11])

• Suggest that the team pair or mob on the problem. Everyone has different expertise. Consider inviting the team to use its wisdom together. If several people get stuck on test-driven forms of development or how to create small stories, you know to consider a workshop or coaching. (See ​Work as a Whole Team to Create the Product​, for details on pairing and mobbing.)

If you don’t hear a steady buzz, either in a team room or on some form of communication channel, consider asking your team members if they receive enough feedback from each other. Consider the feedback board in ​Does the Team Need to Track Collaboration?​, as a start to see what’s going on.

Trap: Inflicting Help

Everyone on your team is smart. In fact, if your team members are like some of the teams I’ve worked with, some of those people are super-smart. They have a ton of experience. They’re not afraid to help people, even if the people don’t want the help.

That’s a trap. While people may offer feedback or coaching, no one has the right to coach without explicit permission from the other person.

You have several options if you see this:

• Provide feedback to the coach about what you see. That might be enough of a conversation.

• If the coach agrees with your feedback, ask, “Would you like some discussion of what else you might do?” If the coach agrees, remind the coach about the possible stances as outlined in the graphic ​here​. Together, you and the coach can discuss what might be a better alternative.

• Ask the person being coached if he or she would like some help. You don’t want to inflict help either!

Make sure you have all the data if you think someone is inflicting help. You can try feedback to the people and then follow up with meta-coaching if they want you to do so.

Trap: The Feedback Sandwich

Feedback training isn’t very common, so people think about feedback in a variety of ways. One way that people have encountered is the “feedback sandwich.” That’s where Person A provides reinforcing feedback, followed by change-focused feedback, followed by reinforcing feedback. When someone does this to me, I feel whiplash. I would rather receive all the changed-focused feedback at a different time than all the reinforcing feedback.

If you want to provide feedback to someone, and some is change-focused and some is reinforcing, consider these options:

• Ask yourself if the person really needs all this feedback. Maybe the feedback is about you, not the other person.

• Ask the person which feedback he or she would like to hear first: change-focused or reinforcing? Then, organize the feedback.

• Conduct separate meetings where you provide one kind of feedback. At a later date, provide the other feedback.

The best thing you and everyone else can do is to practice feedback. As with many agile ideas, the smaller the feedback, the easier it is for the other person to hear it and act on it.