"I didn't know that" 🙀

This is the 19th Petals snapshot of spring 2024. And today I want to talk a little bit about how petals could work in your team. So yesterday I caught up with a few engineering managers, fellow engineering managers, about petals as a concept and introduced it to a few people that weren't particularly aware of it, others that had tried it and used it in different ways. One of the main takeaways I got from it was the conversation starting points that can come out of using the petals framework. My favorite quote was, I didn't know that. And it is one of those moments where you realize the value in running a health check or having a conversation within a retrospective around sort of feelings, which is something that petals is really good for. What I do find is that people put their scores in. You tend to look at the averages and the trends, but the outliers are the really interesting points. A very common example is low serenity, which is one person, maybe two as well. And then someone says, I didn't know that. And it starts a conversation as to why that was the case. And in the right psychological space, it's really helpful for the teams to be aware of each other's serenity or stress and how they can help each other out. What was really useful to see, though, was the kind of the outcomes from that. If people were realizing that their teammates are quite stressed out, others will help out. And for me, that is a really healthy team. There's all that camaraderie. There's that unified view of what's got to be done and helping each other out to get things done together. There we go. Think about it, how you might want to use petals and the benefits of doing this and these little moments of I didn't know that coming really useful. I'll be back again tomorrow with another petals snapshot.