I am scared to ask you
This is about one of those things you never want to hear from a new team member.
I was amused by this scene, somehow. Did he just really say that he is scared to ask me things? Clearly one of the rather weird things that ever happened. Mostly because I thought this week was way better than the previous two. Turns out this was just my perception. Or, something else was way off.
We had our sprint retrospective. To me, it was one of those sprints where one hits a low in the middle thinking „how I’m going to survive this“ but in the end, all goes well. That set my expectations for retro. Especially wrt one newer team member who clearly had ups and downs that sprint. Mostly, because of getting into the process, one would assume.
He took the first sentence.
It was difficult for me. I am missing the point of my role.
Bam. Silence. Our Scrum Master noted „role confusion“ on a sticky.
Also, I feel that I am told how I should do things and I don’t like that, I want to figure out things by myself.
Within the first moment, I thought he’d be talking about the middle of the sprint but realized he meant the altogether.
Immediately, an overwhelming feeling of pressure kicked in. I felt betrayed by my own expectations and intuition. The team practices openness and honesty. Yet this was totally new to me. Instinctively, I zoomed out and left the field to our scrum master, letting her guide us through the situation.
Still being physically present, my mind started wandering off. I tried to imagine what he was referring to.
On Planning 2, I had objections to the granularity of the tasks, wanting to break them down more. Maybe my tone was too harsh or I was too pushy.
Then, there was a similar situation during some code reviews where I commented quite a lot because the code was not conforming to our standards.
The last thing I could think of was that we had a backlog refinement session where his story was estimated too high and a split was suggested.
Pretty normal stuff, one would say.
The retro went by. I felt that nobody really wanted to touch that subject. I briefly thought about speaking up about the elephant in the room but eventually decided against. Maybe this was not the wisest decision. Thus we silently agreed on postponing the topic which felt weird.
Retro closed. Some action items, but no takeaways. Was everybody else in shock as well?
All others but our scrum master, him and me went out of the meeting room. He took the opportunity.
I want to talk to you about this. I think you are aware that I meant more you than anybody else.
If there would have been no pressure on me at that point already, it would have started now. I was angry. We had a good sprint. We got things done. The team started working well together. His on-boarding was bumpy the two weeks before but we improved a lot. He delivered value and started getting into it. What the heck was going on?
I asked to not talk about it yet. I felt the desire to re-align my thoughts, reaching a non-impulsive state of mind. But he insisted to talk now. Luckily, our scrum master jumped in. She supported my request, noticing that nothing was in order inside me at that point.
This is part I of this story. Part II comes soon.
