Developing your own Scrum Masters when they are nowhere to be found

When experiencing an organic growth moment, you run the risk of losing your identity in the process. When you’re looking to fill an open position in your company many options present themselves: recruiting, networking, promoting someone from within, training a junior employee, etc.

Scrum Master Mining is the one we chose to match our values, improve our learning and development strategy and identify the right candidates. With this process, we reinforced our culture and created the building blocks for long-term success.

Where to Invest

Today’s expected Scrum Master behaviour revolves around commitment, courage, focus, openness and respect. While it’s a tall order, many competing training offerings help you get started on your Scrum Master journey and earn the appropriate certificates.

To sustain our growth and identity, we needed to study other factors and the potential personal development of future colleagues during the recruitment process. At this stage, we asked ourselves a number of questions: should we invest at the recruiting time or within a growth process? Should we search the world to find the rare individual who perfectly matches our corporate culture or mine the nugget already inside? What will be more costly? What will bring the biggest benefits?

Let’s Go Lean

Your first step will be to convince your peer Scrum Masters to join you, then you can advertise for a potential one-year journey of engagement, learning and coaching.

To succeed we opted for a Lean process, where you must pave the way and point out the positives for human resources and operations since an uncertain number of employees could potentially switch roles. This is where the first agility check of your internal culture happens.

Once you agree on the vision, you can share your plan to run a formal training program with a focus on aspiring Scrum Masters. This is the fun part: Invite everyone in the company to find their favourite Scrum Master for a chat and schedule a two-hour Lean Coffee a month later.

When that Lean Coffee day arrives, you may notice that top managers are there to show their support and that you have twice as many interested people as expected. It’s now time to use your best facilitation skills and determine how well the role of Scrum Master within your organisation is recognised and understood.

During this session, you can discuss your potential training, respond to questions and interest, and collect feedback. This session will create the backbone of the mining process and complement your company culture.

To make this a true success, your team should set aside theory and focus on the Scrum Master’s role and contribution within your company presently. Let your candidates know that this isn’t a recruitment process, but a chance to gain both theoretical and field knowledge. By the end of the journey, they will be considered ready to transition toward a Scrum Master role. Mine first, invest later.

You can launch this first step within a month. Ideally, two experienced Scrum Masters will host the initiative. Meanwhile the Scrum Masters can create the custom program based on all the collected questions, feedback and answers.

Let’s See the Future

It typically takes about two weeks for ideas to settle.

After this first “open-door” phase, it’s now time to check with your management regarding each applicant and the potential operational impact your mining process can have if every participant switches roles.

Rather than trying to reduce the list to a fixed number of slots, instead focus on creating a human cohort that will grow. This isn’t an easy process and entails a culture of trust, since every candidate will start from a different position, motivation and preparation.

There is no need to overthink this. Every applicant has been part of your Lean Coffee and they should have been connecting with the Scrum Masters for several months.

To simplify the selection process, ask the following questions:

• Does a current Scrum Master trust the person can fit the job? And why?
• Does the Ops Manager trust in the value of this move? And why?
• Does the HR Manager trust in the value of this move? And why?

Asking these three critical questions and absorbing the answers allows for a common understanding of impact, the potential time and resources the candidates need to move into this journey, and the potential outcomes of the process.

Once the list has been reviewed, it’s time to plan an individual debrief, explain the collective decision and make clear the next phase objective:

• Allow the candidate to gain theoretical knowledge and participate in field activities
• Help Scrum Masters gain insight to achieve a collective decision concerning the readiness of each candidate.

Not every candidate will be ready at this moment and that’s OK. They can still receive useful feedback that supports their learning and development plan, and start to prepare for a future opportunity.

Let’s Learn Together

Take a deep breath and welcome cohort members willing to join the adventure. Ideally, you should carve two iterations of two to three weeks. A midpoint check point creates more clarity on the initiative, so more contacts are better than fewer.

To kick off the mining, organise a one-hour session with the committed Scrum Masters and the cohort members. Clarify how much time is allowed outside of normal work to focus on this activity to avoid too much or not enough of a time investment. Explain the ground rules, the group activities and the individual activities that will take place during these iterations.

Learning together simply makes learning better.

Common Ground

To create a nurturing environment, you can ask each participant to find one or two Scrum Masters to support them. At the same time, you can encourage everyone to create a logbook to take notes on their activities, discoveries and new points of understanding. Debriefing the current experience with an experienced Scrum Master has proven to be beneficial for all parties.

As the host, you need to select public videos, internal presentations and online books to review twice a month in what has for us evolved into a regular “Scrum Masters Book Club” activity. The total cost is much lower than that of a formal training if we consider not only the candidate point of view but also the expertise and discoveries shared between all the Scrum Masters.

Group Activities

The second important topic is to create a set of formal 60 to 90-minute sessions around the Scrum Master role within the company. It’s up to you to decide how often group activities should take place, based on the number of Scrum Masters available.

With an eye toward mining and sustaining growth, you can see this as a learning opportunity. Focus on effective transformation experiences for your Scrum Masters and participants so time is never wasted. Your objective is to move the cohort members and the Scrum Masters, find topics where everyone can be involved, and ensure everyone feels the work is meaningful to their future jobs — then you will create new fresh insights. Always target a personal evolution, it’s the major difference between hiring and mining. Don’t forget to debrief sessions since one of the final criteria is to get all the Scrum Masters to achieve a collective decision concerning the readiness of the candidate.

In our experience, most participants were already engaged in Agile Teams but lacked the Scrum Master perspective; this switch can make all the difference.

Another more informal part of these activities is around the cohort members themselves. Allow them to self-organise. Support them as a facilitator and see what happens. Then you can adapt the iteration with this information.

Individual Activities

Individual activities are the most intensive part of the journey but also the easiest to set up. Remember: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

You can readily aggregate participants Scrum Master ceremonies and Agile events. For instance, it’s easy to create a common Wiki page with all the offered possibilities and ask every cohort member to register their preferences.

Then, let each cohort member contact a Scrum Master to shadow in their work. Request a few minutes before and after to discuss the team dynamic and their observations. Encourage them to log insights in their book for a second view with their supporting Scrum Master.

Rather than focus on participation figures, favour the demonstration of learning decisions to ensure a developmental discussion during the debrief. These activities should be moments of growth and opportunities to guide the individuals toward other teams to individualise their learning.

Midpoint Check

A midpoint check gives you a chance to catch up, determine how everything is going and, of course, check in. Organise a one-hour meeting between the cohort members and their Scrum Master support person. Investigate the difference between what they know and what they see. Discuss the outcomes and outputs of the first iteration. This meeting’s objective is to go beyond the log journal analysis and determine if it’s worth moving to the next iteration.

It’s also a good time to refine any skill gap analysis and to ask each cohort member to come with a proposal to improve during the next iteration. You can think of it as a personal development retrospective.

And Then?

And then…sometimes it’s time to stop. Did you invest for nothing? Is mining worthwhile or should you only recruit externally?

You should have spent around three to four months altogether interacting around the Scrum Master role within your organisation. The in-place team should have been challenged by fresh questions and the remaining candidates motivated intrinsically; this is already amazing added value! But wait, do you remember our target?

Our target was: Allow the candidate to gain theoretical knowledge, to participate in field activities and for all the Scrum Masters to gain insight to achieve a collective decision concerning the readiness of the candidate. It’s now time to answer these questions the easy way:

• Does the Scrum Master team trust the person can fit the job? And why?
• What’s the candidate missing, if anything, to be a Scrum Master?
• Does the candidate want to be a Scrum Master? And why?
• What’s missing from the candidate perspective to be a Scrum Master?
• What’s the candidate action plan to be moving toward a Scrum Master role?

With all this information, you can deliver to your Ops and HR managers a list of people, reasons and potential investment to transform these gold nuggets into world-class team members.

For us the final step is natural as the candidates are already part of the existing activities. We allow them to continue to learn until the best opportunity for them to be in charge appears.

Conclusion

Internal candidates and Scrum Masters can collaborate on day-to-day activities, reinforcing a cycle of knowledge transfer and workforce rejuvenation while stimulating and reinforcing the corporate culture as it develops. This is the main added value of Scrum Master Mining.

In our case, the invested time proved to be lower than for interviews, and the learning experience much more interesting. Scrum Master Mining won’t replace the external recruitment process but create more resilience. It promotes inclusion and readiness of candidates who can sustain our growth and reinforce the existing bonds inside the company.

When you create a culture that encourages people to be who they want to be and offer them support in that journey, you create an endless pool of talented applicants for every opening.