How Does a Scrum Master Handle A Tough Individual?
Dealing with difficult personalities
Handling A Tough Individual
In fact, this was a mentee’s problem, and I think it precious to be viewed as a lively tutorial for any scrum masters to learn from the story. Last week, I had a consulting service with a mentee, Mark, who was a scrum master and he shared his story of handling a tough member in the team.
There were 3 primary roles, Mark, Jacky, and Jimmy. Mark was a scrum master, and both Jacky and Jimmy were developers who collaborate together. And there were other testing team and 3rd-party team. Jacky was a thoughtful individual who always took his time on stuff and was sliced over several projects, and Jimmy was a skillful, productive folk who had deep understanding to the company’s systems.
However, these two were often at each others’ throat as they worked together from the first day working together. And inevitably the atmosphere impacted the collaboration with other teams. Jimmy often blamed other for not designing well, and proposed his own solutions without considering others’ feelings, which worsened how different teams collaborated.
What He Did?
Mark, as a scrum master, had to both protect the team from unnecessary interference and help it stay productive along the sprints. He tried to find a respectful way of getting them work together but failed. So he decided to seek support from the management and separated them apart.
Furthermore, he moved Jimmy off the team to recover the working atmosphere because although he was talented and productive, what he did was not compatible with the collaboration model of different teams. He found the experience did leave him with fairly deep scars about trusting his abilities to work with people and a kind of sadness and anger about the pain of not jutting the team. He still blamed myself for not being able to stop the situation sooner and more definitively.
Similar Experience On Me
I remembered when I was a software engineer for the first job. I had collaborated with a skillful engineer from Russia. Let’s call him Denise. He was excellent in programming and often tried many new things on his own. For example, when we were developing the fitness app, he was able to craft a VR feature on it that made us surprised.
However, we all felt he was not talkative to collaborate with. When we asked him some development questions about improving the design. He stayed silent and sent us a “Google page”, which meant “Find it yourself”. His behavior impacted the collaboration of the team and our scrum master cannot neglected his behavior.
In order to keep the team from being influenced by him, the scrum master just had a private talk with the technical manager, and finally remove hime from the team and let him handle some POC projects that won’t affect others. At that time we fully appreciated what our scrum master did. And this was the first time I saw how to handle a tough individual.
Solution Pattern — Thunderbolt and Bodhisattva
No matter from the mentee’s or my experience, we could find similar patterns of handling a tough individual who damages the collaboration of a team. Basically, we could state the solution pattern with 2 steps.
- Get sponsorship of the management
First of all, the scrum master needs the sponsorship of the management. In fact, a scrum master needs to communicate with many stakeholders to build relationship. For one thing, he has to know the requirements or goals from different departments. For another, he has to eliminate unnecessary risks that might endanger the sprint goals.
So when anyone’d like to become a scrum master, what I tell them do to is not coaching the team to know what is Scrum, but following the existing working pattern to build relationship with various colleagues, so that he would know how to make good use of the ceremonies to boost a team’s productivity.
I’ve once been surprised by a sentence from the book, as below
The product owner needs the sponsorship of the management.
In fact, for any agile transformation, it is the management that matters to determine whether it could continuously improve themselves. And when tough conditions occur, the management plays an important role to make critical decisions.
Whatever cases, the management’s support helps the scrum master make tough decisions to ensure the team is still productive and is kept away from interference.
- Remove tough individuals from the team
Secondly, it is a scrum master’s accountability to do this once he gets the support from the management. In fact, anyone is replaceable, not to mention an engineer. Once there is an individual who damages the collaboration among teams. The scrum master could initially have a private talk with the manager to cope with his behavior.
For example, they could address the issue and have a talk with the person; get him aware of the seriousness and seek improvement plan. If the situation is not relieved, the manager should consider if the individual should be allocated to independent work or POC projects, or remove him from the organization.
Sometimes we really need to consider tough approach to doing this, because once you don’t actively solve the problem. The team would feel you cannot manage their expectation, gradually lose trust with you, and get passive to their work.
Coach’s Murmur
Different from previous articles, the topic focuses on a practical issue a scrum master would encounter as they are working with members. I know there must be other similar cases in many readers’ environment but they have no idea how to do that. I hope the material could give them some insights and reflections.
Also, I really appreciated the mentee could share his experience with me, and let me know there is similar experience at the corner of the world. If you want to talk about some real pain points in agile transformation, feel free to reserve a web call with me.
Let Me Help you
Now I provide free, 1–1 online consulting service. If you have any agile related problems or project management issues, please reserve a web call with me. I would answer your questions as possible as I could.
👉 Book now: https://calendly.com/uragilecoach/consulting
⚠️ Remember to send me a message through one of social platforms (LinkedIn, IG, Twitter, Reddit) within 1 hour, otherwise the reservation might be canceled.
🎁 Anyone who reserves for the web call would be rewarded with a secret gift that helps you grow on project management skills.
If you acknowledge the value I share with you, do as below:
1. 👏 the article
2. subscribe me for latest contents
3. follow me on other platforms for further information
- IG: @ur_agile_coach
- Podcast: Agile Rocket
- Youtube: Your Agile Coach
- LinkedIn: Tsung-Hsiang Wu
- Twitter: @ur_agile_coach
