Lesson 3: How to facilitate a great retro

How to facilitate a great retrospective

This is the third and final lesson of the free Retrospective training that will help you feel prepared and ready to facilitate your first retrospective with your team.

In today's lesson, you will learn what's needed to facilitate a great retrospective.

You will learn the concepts of how to earn the trust of your team and you will learn one of the Seven Laws of Engaging Retrospectives.

So let's get started.

Earn your team's trust

When it comes to facilitating retrospectives, the most important thing you can do is earn the trust of your team.

You need to be someone that they feel comfortable talking to and sharing their thoughts and opinions with.

To do this, you need to be open and honest with your team.

You also need to be respectful of their time and energy.

Don't try to force them to participate in the retrospective if they're not comfortable doing so. Sometimes it's better to spend some time one-on-one with a teammate to understand why they are hesitant about participating.

Another way to build trust with your team is by being prepared. Make sure you have a plan for the retrospective and that you are familiar with the format and structure. With the Seven Steps of Effective Retrospectives that you learned about in the previous lesson you now know how a great retrospective is designed.

Now, for your next do a quick check-in with your team, to make sure that the topic you want to focus on makes sense for them as well, because that will save a lot of time at the beginning of the meeting.

The Seven Laws of Engaging Retrospectives

This is a great bridge to the seven laws of engaging retrospectives because law number one is to Set Expectations.

The seven laws are a framework that helps you prepare for facilitating your next retro, and they are also a way to reflect after running a retro. You can even use it to ask for feedback from your teammates after facilitating.

And like I said, law number one is to Set Expectations. You score high for this law if the session aligned with the team's goals, and everyone always knew what to do.

You can achieve this by being very clear about the objectives of the retrospective before it starts. Make sure everyone knows why you're doing this and what you hope to achieve at the end of the session.

Another way to set expectations is by giving clear instructions, and for this, the blue boxes next to the exercises in the template are your friend.

A low score means that the session wasted the time of your team because there was no alignment or confusion about what to do.

Sometimes this can even mean that it makes more sense to throw away the initial plan that you had for a retrospective, and go in a different direction because it's what your team needs. But always make sure that it's really clear to the team what you hope to achieve.

Next steps

Now with everything you learned in these three lessons and the Best Retrospective for Beginners template, you are ready to start facilitating your next retrospective.

In lesson one, you learned how to get started with retrospectives. In lesson two how to make retrospectives feel less intimidating. And this final lesson helped you to take a step toward facilitating engaging retrospectives.

Retrospectives are a proven way to build healthy team habits and break bad ones. And being able to design and run great retrospectives is a superpower that will allow you to help yourself and your team be more productive and will advance your career.

I have created the perfect companion to what you have just learned in my Run Retrospectives like a Pro course. The course includes eight videos to help you become a pro in facilitating retrospectives.

You will learn how to prepare and design highly effective retrospectives. First the foundations, then the agenda, and then the best exercises to achieve your team's goals.

You will learn how to create a library of amazing Miro templates that will help you save time, the next time you want to run your retrospective.

You will learn all the Seven Laws of Engaging Retrospectives, which will help you not only become a better retrospective facilitator, but a better facilitator for any meeting.

You will learn how to make parts of your retrospective asynchronous so that you can better fit your team's hybrid way of working.

And on top of that, you will get more than 10 ready-to-copy Miro templates, with retrospectives that I designed specifically for all of the five Tuckman Stages your team can be in. They all have detailed instructions for every exercise and will save you hours of preparation time.

Run Retrospectives like a Pro will make you one of the most invaluable assets at work. You will not only help your team be more productive, but have more fun and be more engaged at the same time. This will lead to better job opportunities.

Read more and signup for the Run Retrospectives like Pro course below this video.

But before you make sure that you have practiced with the exercises and Miro template of this course. When you learn by doing you understand that you have learned way better, and with that what the power of retrospectives is.

If you don't you will forget what you have learned, and you have wasted your time watching this course.

And if you have done all that, click the link to sign up for the full course.

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