Being a Scrum Master Part 4: I’m no longer a Scrum Master.
But I didn’t quit being “it”, I just naturally transcended my role.
How?
Simply by servant leadership and the thirst for knowledge.
Well, where do I start? As I wrote in previous articles, I transitioned from a small agency to Europe’s largest seller for music instruments, yadda yadda.
When I recall my last “being a Scrum Master” article I wrote while being relatively new to the agile cosmos and still working in my agency I summarized the following:
You need these main skills:
(https://medium.com/agile-punks/being-a-scrum-master-part-2-im-teaching-people-now-1664ef6f2ef5)
- You need to organize other people in a sense that they are able to work both, productive and creative. Do it within meetings but in the best case during their normal working days. Maybe they can accomplish self-organization after a certain period of time and some degree of mentorship.
- You need to reassure the team you’re working with that they follow their own path and that they can see you as a backup, if they alone can’t advance.
- You need to give them the tools to carve out their own agile method that suits and fits their needs.
- You need to be confident in order for others to grow in their confidence.
Now one year later, I can say in hindsight: All of this is 100% true. The structures I’m currently working in couldn’t be more different than they were in my agency days.
Naturally I applied all this and at least until now it works. In fact, it works so well that I’m now in a more reactive position than ever. There is a space between what a company wants and needs and what you want to push as a change agent.
This is where I enter the world of agile coaching. The job description Scrum Master, at least for me, is what the Agile Industrial Complex once determined, and what is now copy-pasted on LinkedIn. This is the direct result of the discrepancy between what the hiring company actually wants and what they are told they need (via marginal theory, marketing, and the thin knowledge about agile in practice).
My new role demanded much more than what was written on my contract about Scrum Master duties. If I only had acted as a Scrum Master, I would have been blind to what really hinders much more than one or two teams in becoming self-confident, self-organized and practitioners of agile values.
I guess that is one of the main reasons why Scrum Masters are often doomed to “fail” from the start. When entering your new company for the first time, there are many factors that affect your team externally. If these parameters, which influence decision making, production, and autonomy, completely ignore agile values then you won’t get far with your team.
At a certain point (sooner than later) your team(s), and you as a servant leader and change agent, will encounter unseen borders which make it impossible to move one step further unless these borders are lifted — in the brains of other roles outside your team.
For me it was natural to transcend into this role. And it was possible as we (Ralph, who also writes for agile punks and me) were hired with no clear intention what we should or should not do. We had the privilege to follow our gut and take our experiences and manifest them into the company reality.
While my colleague works in a leadership position, I strengthened my role as servant leader.
That gave us a lot of creative and practical power. Our greatest achievement:
We initiated all steps necessary, to servant lead our whole team from “we tried some things that didn’t really work and have discrepancies on human levels” to a purpose driven, role using, self-organizing and (mostly) agile team.
While all I wrote about the skills you need to be an authentic Scrum Master holds true, it isn’t enough.
In order to do that, I had to discard my role as Scrum Master and become more. Here is what I learned and recommend:
- Focus on more than Scrum as a possible framework (don’t become a demagogue)
- Take servant leadership serious (that means to know when to serve but learn how to lead)
- Don’t force change for the sake of change, focus on the agent part (be around, have your eyes and ears open in order to gather data where change is wanted, needed, and possible)
- Embody agile values in your daily work (when you learn to lead, you have to embody what you stand for)
- Serve your companies purpose (in order to do that you have to identify with its purpose. But when you do, be sure that all decisions pay off the purpose)
- Go out (plain and simple, go to agile meetings and gatherings, even when it’s just to see how much BS is currently trendy)
“The most enjoyable thing for me is the chance to maybe accompany these individuals on their journey of becoming an agile team.” is what I wrote in my last Being a Scrum Master article.
Today I would only change one word:
“The most enjoyable thing for me is the chance to maybe accompany these individuals on their journey of becoming more than an agile team.”
Apart from all that, as long as the Agile Industrial Complex exists, agile is made fun of and sceptics rise... WE AREN’T AGILE ENOUGH *waves fist*
