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> I will second retros. I have seen team cohesion go up and down based on the quality of the retros.

Could it be the other way? That the quality of the retros went up and down based on the team cohesion? If that's the case (and I believe it is most of the times, in my experience), the retros are just an artifact, not the real mechanism.

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There’s a lot to this, bad moral lead to bad retros. But I’ve seen a team with very high cohesion shut down completely when a particularly toxic manager was present in a single retro. It was very illuminating to watch. When no one feels safe to talk in a retro that’s going to bleed into the rest of the interactions at the company. And while the reverse is true too, it can be set up to be slightly assymmetrical. If you can make a safe space for the group somewhere even if it’s only an hour twice a month it can really help alleviate toxicity elsewhere. It’s not a magic bullet, and honestly I don’t know how repeatable what I’ve experienced is. We had a really good facilitator on loan from another team at one point, and I’m not sure we could have kicked off some of our changes without this person.

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