Tuesday, June 9, 2009

tour de témis (taay-mees)

To promote shared vision in a team, to anticipate or ease over problems, and to help individuals deal with stress, I set a goal to spend at least 10 minutes in conversation with each team member every week. In practice, sometimes I only average 5 minutes, but I start out with something like the following.

Hey, Joe, wanna take a tour de témis? Joe may not be available, but if so, we step out of the team room and find somewhere quiet--outside or inside depending on the weather and mood. Then I'll ask one of the following questions, and record responses on an index card:

What are the strong points/weak points in the team?
What do you think about how we've been using timeboxing for meetings this week?
What will you do next week to help us finish the iteration by Thursday afternoon (instead of our normal Friday)? Do you think it's a good idea to finish early?

Then I use Appreciative Inquiry to dig deeper into what is going on with each team member.

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