Being a Scrum Master Part 3: The End is just the Beginning
“We grow with our tasks.” I said, moving a Jira ticket in my impediment backlog from “to do” to “in progress”. Slightly giggling, I close my laptop and pack my stuff.
I quit my old job in my agency to head off to new horizons. Now I work as a Scrum Master for a company that has more than half a billion euros yearly revenue. Leaving my safe space and my beloved old team behind, I wanted to leave a crumbling environment for a new challenge. Although the accomplishments of my team were great, especially in the scope of the possible, in the end too many things went bad for too long. Things no Scrum Master, no team could repair by themselves.
I wanted a new challenge and I got one. And as before, where I switched from studying heritage conservation to becoming a full time Scrum Master, I have no clue what would await me this time eventually.
Spoiler alert: After a week of talking to various developers and project managers or leaders in my new company, I can already say it’s about to get very (very) challenging and exciting.
What I want to do in this blog post is to pass on my current learnings and give a farewell to my first job as a Scrum Master.
Disclaimer: All of these topics are kept simple. Actually you could write a whole article about each of these topics … which I eventually will.
The Good:
- It is a relief to see that already today people can enter industries that might at first seem to be outside of someones subject area.
The need for facilitators, new intersections in corporations and coaching opens the door for people with soft skills often needed developed humanities for example. Being able to communicate properly, to gather information empirically and be as objectively neutral as possible are crucial in environments where subjectivity and politics often are the daily schedule. However all that has a bittersweet taste to it: These soft skills are hard to measure or grasp. That results in a lot of insecurity from staid roles regarding the role of a Scrum Master.
- The cultural change that is currently happening in the working world is worth pursuing and fighting for.
Coming to work in the clothes you like to wear, trust-based working times, activities outside of the usual work but with working colleagues, working and connecting with people on a daily basis overall, accomplishing goals together, being able to make ones voice heard and forming strong bonds in teams is (at least in my opinion) the very core of “New Work”. Sure, more than one half of working with agile frameworks is about delivering complex but high quality products whilst keeping in touch with the stakeholders but a large portion is also about changing the way we see work and job descriptions, hierarchies and leadership.
- It’s a passion driven Job with a lot of freedom.
Sure, you can have your Dailies and Retros. Sure, you can have some backlogs for impediments and improvements. Sure, you can go to conventions and repeat the buzzword driven mantras everybody so readily absorbs. But you can do so much more. You can reach out and formulate new ideas, you can form your role into a more technical driven or sociological role (maybe even psychological role). You can try and break the boundaries of only caring for your team and maybe look for greater structures in your company that could need change and you can try improving them. You can fight for flatter hierarchies, you can even try implementing a whole new organizational structure in your company or department. It isn’t said that you are successful in doing so but your role allows you to try.
The Bad:
- Buzzword-Bingo.
As soon as you enter the world of IT and agile, you’re greeted with an avalanche of new “words” or neologisms. Soon you will encounter something I like to call Buzzword-Bingo. At every convention, at every workshop, at every pitch, at every keynote — your ears will bleed because every second you hear a new fancy word for something that has in some form existed before but now has well … a fancy tag to it. This helps with selling but not with understanding what is actually behind the meaning of these blown-up words. That leads to people chattering about Vuca-World, agile this and agile that, design thinking, OKR, “sense and respond” … you name it. But when given the task to participate in or even execute one of those Buzzwords most people don’t even have clue about the practical and basic stuff. And what sounds so fancy at first can get very out of hand if there is no substance to these words.
- The Kindergarden
Well, there is no getting around this one. If you like it or not you will (and should) hear a lot of whining from all sides possible, as it is part of your job to be the voice of your team. Logically to be the voice of many different people you need to hear their concerns, their opinions and yep, their constant complaints. I don’t know of one company where talking behind ones back, not talking to each other at all and not bringing your complaints to the right person but often the exact wrong person isn’t pathological. The thing that saves you however is the way you moderate so that meetings can’t get out of hand or become too subjective. But that has to be learned through experience.
- The comfort zone
We love our comfort zones, we really shouldn’t lie to ourselves about this topic. But in order to accomplish something of significance for ourselves as well as others we have to step out of them. As a Scrum Master the comfort zone can become your team you work with every day and the company environment. At some point the motivation you had in the beginning will be gone and you won’t or even can’t pay attention to all the blindspots that hinder progress just because you have become too embedded in the structures. You go blind after a while to things only someone from the outside will see. Thats a natural process. The countermeasure can be external coaching in different environments and real exchange with other practicing coaches.
The Ugly:
- The lie about leadership
People want to be led. The twist that hasn’t taken hold as of now is that the leadership hasn’t to be anchored in titles, personal hierarchies (or egos). But the dance between leading in the old and common way and giving people “freedom” often ends in chaos. The excuse of giving people or teams “freedom” is often just a disguised: “I don’t want to take care of that, they will sort everything out themselves.” But nonetheless there will always be someone standing ready to blame if the performance doesn’t fit the conception of some CEO or management board. The common misconception is the idea that no leadership means flat hierarchy and self-organized working. So what seems to happen often is that there is someone who doesn’t take care about the company/product/project visions, daily business, internal and external problems or just someone how has the right leverages to change significant things, but nontheless still is there to complain.
People still do need roles and most importantly transparent representation of those roles that is visible for them.
- Theory vs. experience
“I’m certified Scrum Master!”
“Cool for you, I can read a guide too.”
Everything orbiting consulting and coaching etc. has this “I have to show off my accomplishments on paper” vibe to it. Think about LinkedIn, where being a bartender sounds like having led Apple for a few years. Sorry to say that but 80% of what happens there is w*nking each other off. My notion is that it’s even worse at these great agile conventions. A Developer still has to learn complex hard skills which take years to refine and yet many of those “consultants” demand absurd daily rates for their part-time activities in companies where Developers are often underpaid. But enough salt.
What annoys me the most is that everybody who has heard of agile frameworks or mindest seems to think they’ve understood it completely in under five minutes and can add their simple but significant opinion to it, so it will finally all work without problems.
Go out and do efficient and effective workshops. Handle the balance between people who are overly verbal and always want to decide for the rest and people who don’t give a flying f*ck about every effort to better the situation or improve a team. Crush against the walls of the management level that is ego driven and hinders every bit of change that is so desperately needed. Good luck with trying to implement structures when leadership has alienated from its employees so that people can work again properly and have actual outcome.
All those things are driven and pushed forward by a passionate agile coach.
So this is what I learned until now. I’m more than eager to see where I will fail in my new Job and with what solutions I will come up (that will probably will fail at first too). Fail harder, fail better.
Then you may become agile enough.
