In my experience, everyone on every team has ideas that could help improve the team. Everyone's experiences shape their perceptions of things. Getting your team

In my experience, everyone on every team has ideas that could help improve the team. Everyone's experiences shape their perceptions of things. Getting your team to talk about those ideas is the hard part. Small teams can grow in to high trust teams, but big teams pretty much can't. It's much easier to get meaningful feedback/retrospectives from high trust teams. I think part of the lead engineer's job is to foster trust. But garnering this feedback by asking the right questions is just as important. Even if it means asking difficult questions until answered. If a team struggles with meaningful retrospectives, it might be because they don't see the value in them. When that's the case people can end up thinking "it's just another meeting", "just let me code". Or it might be because the trust isn't there, even though it might seem like it is. Exposing problems (of whatever nature), tends to end up involving management at some point, and I've noticed over the years that many engineers have a strange fear of management. You can't have a meaningful discussion about problems if you don't trust everyone involved, including management.