The Fellowship of Scrum
Considering personalities when building a team
It’s a dark and dry night. Clouds are concealing the moon and the stars. Watch fires and torches enlighten a small castle on top of a hill, surrounded by fields and small woods. Protected by boulders in one of these woods, another fire sheds some light into this darkness. Four people are warming themselves at the camp fire, which is deliberately kept small, while discussing fiercely.
Warrior: I’m sick of all this chit-chat. While we’re talking they are prepping themselves. If you don’t come up with anything better within the next 10 minutes, I’ll go in right away through the front door, don’t care what it takes.
Mage: 10 minutes is a little short. Anyhow, I already worked on some spells that we can use for this. Give me a couple of hours to make them perfect. Though I have to test which one would be the most fitting. Alternatively, I got some potions I can extend that help you with your … approach.
Coin master: We haven’t recovered from our last endeavour. Your weapons and armor are worn out and can barely stand another ambush — at least that’s what I call it. We will lose more in material than we might get out of it, not even talking about our heads. We also don’t have endless supplies of ingredients for all your potions and spells. These cost money, you know? You handle them like they grow on trees. Ok, some do, but not here, which still makes them expensive.
Aristocrat: I can’t understand why you all are targeting the front door and haggle on how to do it. Yesterday I met a local merchant who happens to have a cousin in that very castle, bringing him into play for deliveries. If we toss in a couple of coins and find someone with access to the chamber, we might even get it delivered here.
Personality models
All models are wrong. Some are useful.
— George Box
The individuality of each person is a virtue your team can benefit from. There are various models frequently used in management trainings and assessment centers. Many facilitate colors . A prominent one is the DISC model. Next to that, you find the Hartman personality profile, big five personality traits, the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument and many more. The swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung defined archtetypes which describe personalities.
I cannot judge which one is “more accurate” or “better”. Like many other things in agile and Scrum, I consider them as tools and pick what’s helpful.
For this article I choose a model which is not distributed that much, concerning personality or management core types. It is based on Jung’s archetypes. A detailed, German-only description can be found on the following web page.
By facilitating archetypes, it makes the topic easier to communicate (unless you like singing “Moonmen”). While the stretch might not be accurate, I will map them to DISC colours later on.
The warrior
A warrior is driven by reaching a goal and often values this over other aspects. A warrior might:
- Just do it: implement it, deploy it
- Push for a fast(er) resolution
- Break barriers on his way — processes, rules, ownerships, domains
A warrior is a good impersonation of commitment, courage and focus, so 3 of the 5 scrum values … with a catch. With this strong focus on the goal, respect and openness are at risk, accompanied with risking the sustainable pace of everyone in the team, including him- or herself.
Many characteristics of a warrior match the color green (=dominant) of DISC.
The mage
The impersonation of creativity, driven by their ideas, always wanting to build new and perfect systems which were never built before: That’s a mage. A mage gives you:
- The idea for the perfect solution
- And 5 minutes later: an idea for an even better solution
- And when 80% is done: the utmost urgent reason to redo everything
You will also get:
- A new idea for every problem the team faces
- Upfront preparation for many edge cases
- A “so-so” solution from a mage’s point of view — but perfect for the customer for the next couple of years
A mage might get lost in their ideas and try to follow up on all of them. This archetype can be mapped to the conscientiousness (=yellow) style in DISC.
The coin master
The coin master (or “farmer” as in the reference material, but that didn’t fit the story) cares about preservation, consistency and stability. They will
- create stable systems and environments
- ensure that everything is preserved/documented and well operated for a long time
- provide trust and stability
- Insure the insurance
A coin master is the resource foundation of the team. Without him or her, you have no coins, no resources and effectively no workforce. A coin master can be hard to convince of fundamental changes but once on board, they are all in. They impersonate many characteristics of sustainability but also have some challenges with agility and change. In DISC, a coin master would be blue (= steadiness).
The aristocrat
Driven by unity of everyone involved and the big picture, the aristocrat (or “principle” in the referenced model) will take care of
- a positive environment to work and live in
- good relations within the team and with others
- having a sound foundation with rules to work upon
- the bigger picture and how to get there.
With his or her traits, the aristocrat helps building and maintaining a motivated team, working towards one goal and together. Watching and cherishing the Scrum values and pillars as well as keeping good relations with stakeholders and customers suits them well and helps creating customer value.
Aristocrats have many characteristics that can be mapped to the influencial style (red) of DISC.
Building the party
All described above should not give any preference on what is better in any way. It should create awareness of differences in everyone’s personality and how your team can benefit from it.
A Scrum team is multidisciplinary and set up to deliver customer value. But it also needs to be of multiple personalities:
- A team of warriors might create features like a Gatling gun, but your customers and the rest of your company won’t be happy with the fallout
- A team of mages might design the perfect feature, but while getting lost in ideas and overhauling the product continuously, you’re losing market opportunities (or worse: get broke)
- With only coin masters, you might have a perfectly running system with every bug being addressed. But new features are getting in so slowly that you barely get anything done
- A aristocrat-only setup would have the best team motivation, the best stakeholder feedback and market insights, but you might not have a product to apply it to
Every setup has its own requirements and specialities, so nothing of this can be generalised. Also, different roles in a Scrum team benefit from different personalities. But as a thought: would you hire a team full of warriors when the main focus is to build a high availability system with little or no new feature requirements?
But when thinking about a Scrum team in software development, you need a bit of everything: great ideas and technical excellence (mage), the drive to make a product or feature out of it (warrior), ideally built in a way that it can run longer than a week (coin master). If it then matches the customer’s needs and the team didn’t kill itself while building it (aristocrat), you have a great Scrum party — or Scrum team.
So when hiring or building your team, don’t only look for the right skill set. The personality of each individual has a significant impact as well.
Don’t try to change people
The idea of many models is that the characteristics described above are an immanent part of an individual. While people can learn new behaviors, they cannot change their inner self — and for sure no manager can 😊
Irrespective of whether you’re a traditional manager, a scrum master or a dev team member: do not try to make a coin master out of a mage or vice versa. You will kill any motivation in the individual, and this will have an impact on the whole team.
Instead, fostering the individual motivations and giving room to them usually results in a much higher commitment even when the current activities are not in line with the individual motivations. This is a give-and-take. This is where Scrum’s respect and openness play their strength.
… and: action
Aristocrat: Can we re-iterate on the plan once more? I will go forward and convince the guards at the gate to let us in, with some coins …
Coin master: … few coins …
Aristocrat: … with a few coins if needed. You two stay in the carriage.
Mage: I will prepare myself for a quick invention if it’s needed.
Warrior: Me, too! (padding the sword)
Aristocrat: Please don’t squander it. We have an agreed signal in case something goes south. As we agreed, we start talking, and your skills will come into play later.
(to be continued)
