My way as a Scrum Master
It has been five years since I decided to switch between being a former project manager and what I’m today a scrum master. Every day, every team, every person makes me better in this, so I am a scrum master in continuous learning. This is not about me, this is about the people who let me help, and who understand when people collaborate with each other magic happens.
Lately, I read once again the Barry Overeem article about his journey as a scrum master https://medium.com/the-liberators/my-journey-as-a-scrum-master-75d95cb4a54d and I just reflected on his experience, because both started as project managers, and today as he wrote in his blog post he decided to take the risk and became a 100% scrum master, and today he helps a lot of organizations and scrums master like me to become betters leaders to help teams to thrive and growth.
When reading that article I just begin to understand my journey. Some months ago, I started to have doubts about what I am, what I do, my purpose, and other questions about life that reflected in my professional life. For that reason when reading that blog post, it started to be more clear my mission as a scrum master. When I started this journey I even knew what scrum and agile meant, so I just started to read about it and at that FABRIQUE_A gave me the opportunity to experiment and today I can say: everybody needs a startup…the mindset that you are capable to create within is unimaginable… the only possible way to understand what is happening is to look at and see and to experiment and learn. In the end, I just realized that I need something else to prove myself the value of helping other teams. After some years I decided to quit and go to see others’ realities and to share my learnings with other organizations, I knew that I will be able to share all my learnings and knowledge acquired with my experience in a startup way (Learning by doing)and disruptive innovation. In the beginning, it was hard, big organizations don’t think like a startup, they don’t have (still) the mindset to experiment and learn, they don’t know how to get out of the status quo, because their employees just do what they said what they have to do, and this way of thinking was a big challenge for me, I don’t want to someone to tell me what to do, you hired me me because you need my help, just give me a challenge let me be… As Steve Jobs said: “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” ― Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs: His Own Words and Wisdom.
As a scrum master, I was driven by my anxiety to get things done, I knew the problems that the team had, but I was not able to help the team, because I was just trying to do what management wanted and I felt that we did not have the opportunity to take our own decisions as change agents. When that started, I realized why the most agile transformation fails, its because they are missing the point. It’s not about making things most fast, or vanity metrics or the number of features delivered is about the impact that you have on your team, and how they are able to grow and to create things that have an impact. It’s about how their objectives match yours and how they are engaged with your mission. When you have your team engage and you show them the way, you can continue your agile transformation, with the foundations of a great culture. So that was my zero moment of truth: I need another chance, but some more valuable and with a culture that fits my values. Is because of that, that I started some reflections about why I decided to continue my way as a Scrum Master.
I realized that is important to:
- Understand that roles and responsibilities are important but at the end is what are you capable of doing who talks about what you really are
- Culture eats agility for breakfast. You can not have an agile mindset if you don’t understand that culture is everything and the journey starts there.
- Communication is the key. Even if you think that you can communicate you need to understand the message and confirm it.
- Powerful questions, why being afraid to ask anything with a sense? If you don’t try you will never know. I had the reflex to always said: I’m sorry if my question is stupid but… It is important to always ask, that took me a long time to understand that there are no stupid questions.
- Facilitation: This is one of the most difficult things to do and one of the best tools for a scrum master. Facilitation is a full-time job a requires a lot of preparation, empathy, and resilience. There will be a good day and others than not. But in the end, you will adapt and you will kill after another…. Is a virtuous cycle of learning.
- Understand the system: one of the most precious things about being a scrum master is the capacity to understand and read the system and its components, with that you will be capable to see between the lines in order to help the team and the organization. If there is a part of the system that does not work you need to help the system to work without one of its components in order to adapt.
- You need to work with management, do to do what management says to do. This is one thing that is hard and sometimes organizations are missing about a scrum master. Is not about metrics, dashboards, or velocity, it’s about how the team is capable to adapt to any changes and get thing’s done. The most important thing to see is what I did that changed the people that I helped?
Well as you see, this is my learning as a scrum master, and be sure it will be more, because everything changes, as it changes, you will be capable to learn more about it. Thanks to Barry Overeem, Christiaan Verwijs, and John Doerr with this book Mesure what matters, because thanks to that I was able to write my first story on Medium.
