How (Not) To Invite Teams, Stakeholders, And Supporters For Columinity

This article is part of the free workshop template “Getting Started Guide To Make Your Teams More Effective.” Download it to learn more.

Columinity helps teams improve by continuously illuminating the quality of their teamwork based on scientific insights. You can diagnose one or many teams, receive evidence-based feedback, and resolve broader organizational issues. Columinity is a great tool to create transparency and drive change.

It can also harm teams when misused. This is why we strongly recommend that all users follow the steps described below. They drastically increase the chances of successful use of the tool.

1. Study the research
2. Explore the principles
3. Facilitate a kickoff
4. Inspect the results
5. Develop strategies

This article focuses on the very first step. Consider it step 0 if you like. How do you invite your team members, stakeholders, and managers to use Columinity? We’ll share examples of how NOT to invite them and offer recommendations for a better approach.

Big No-No’s

Columinity is great at illuminating what works well in your team and what doesn’t. At least, this is what teams are telling us. This transparency requires trust and honesty. We can’t emphasize enough that you should never force teams to participate. Otherwise, you’ll get fake answers, create resistance, and all be a waste of time. Other no-no’s are:

• Don’t allow management in your organization to use the results to compare teams. Every team is different and faces different challenges. If people sense that their teams will be compared, they will enter fake data or paint a much rosier picture of the situation.
• Don’t share reports with management or people outside the team unless every team member unequivocally consents.
• Don’t pressure or demand that people participate. If they are skeptical, you have to investigate your approach and motives.
• Respect the anonymity of the survey. Don’t ask people to bring their responses or share them with you.
• Don’t casually share the survey without any introduction or prior conversation. If people don’t expect it, they won’t like this surprise.

The Right Way

The core concern you must address for your team members is: “How will Columinity benefit me and my team?” We recommend running a kickoff workshop to clarify the purpose. If you don’t have a clear answer, people will understandably resist, enter fake answers, or disengage altogether.

Our favorite approach is to first use the retrospective to explore under what conditions external tools—like Columinity—can encourage learning and improvement in your team. Following that conversation, you explain the steps involved in participating in the survey.

Also, emphasize that you will make sense of the team-level results together and without outsiders on a scheduled date in a 100% collaborative fashion. So you won’t tell the team what’s wrong and what to improve, but you will invite them to understand the patterns for themselves and work together to identify improvements. Also, be clear about what happens with the results afterward.

The entire team should participate in diagnosing, interpreting, and identifying improvements. Don’t limit it to just the Scrum Masters, Product Owners, or coaches. Otherwise, it will quickly become a tool for assessing developers, damaging trust and entirely missing the survey's point.

The Invitation

In your invitation to your team members to use Columinity, make sure to address the following (briefly):

• Address what you hope to achieve with the survey data and how it benefits your team and its members;
• Address privacy concerns. Our platform only shows your scores, but you can’t see the scores of other individuals under any condition;
• Address how and when you will make sense of the results together;
• Address how the data will (and will not) be used and who (and who doesn’t) have access to the team-level profile afterward;
• Emphasize how transparency and honest answers are the best ways to identify improvements. There’s no need to sugarcoat the painful truth.
• Teams should use the outcome of the survey as a conversation starter. Don’t use the results to judge teams.

Only the team itself can invite their stakeholders and managers. Once they decide, consider including all of the above again. This helps increase trust and sets the right expectations amongst everyone involved.

Learn more about Columinity

If you want to learn more about the tool, read the blog post “A Guide On How To Improve Your Team With Columinity.” It describes using the free version to drive continuous improvement in and around your team. Check the video below for a quick 1-minute video explaining the tool’s essence. Use it as a teaser to create interest and enthusiasm in your organization.

What’s Keeping You?

From experience, we know how hard it can be to drive continuous improvement in your team. There are often a thousand things to improve, but what will be most impactful? We are building Columinity to make this easier for you and your team. It’s free for individual teams. So give it a try and expand from there!