3 Killer Tips for Scrum Masters
Whenever I mentor a Scrum Master, there’s a variety of topics that come up all the time. But there’s a few in particular that tend to be more helpful and not often being used already. Most Scrum Masters, if they’re good, will already be working on how to best help the team with process and teaming challenges and they’re usually good figuring out how to connect with their Product counterparts and collaborate with partners and stakeholders outside the team. But here’s a few ideas you might not have on your radar.
Be Direct
This one might be surprising. Some Scrum Masters get stuck in the observing phase and don’t feel it’s their job to step in and say anything too forceful. And well, to some degree, that’s often true. A good Scrum Master is subtle and effective with the art of asking questions. But in some other cases, it’s much more effective to be direct, even blunt.
For example, if you have a hybrid or remote team, you have undoubtedly said something like “hey guys, can we all turn on own cameras, please?” which is fantastic, right? We all tend to do better work when we can see each other so we pay attention and stop (most!) of our multi-tasking. And worse, some team members slowly disengage over time even outside our team meetings while working remote and the rest of the team feels it. So, consider phrasing this completely differently. What if you said, “So team, I’d like to kindly remind you that if for some reason you think this meeting is a waste of your time, I would much rather hear that directly from you than to have you turn your cameras off and disengage from the team conversation. OK?”
In fact, anytime you have team members that are presenting some sort of behavioral challenge, whether it’s disengaging or being outright obstinate, you owe it to yourself and the team to try to resolve that challenge directly yourself before you escalate it to any of the teams’ leaders. This often requires being direct, usually in a 1:1 conversation.
Get Uncomfortable
We often tell our teams as they’re learning the Agile Mindset something like “get comfortable being uncomfortable”. It takes time for people to adjust to change and to learn the new ways of thinking and the new ways of working.
But what’s interesting, is that advice is something that we, as agilists, need to take seriously as well. What are you doing to improve yourself, embrace change, or unlearn old habits?
Maybe you wish you were better or more comfortable with public speaking, for example. Well, go do some! The first line of the manifesto says we learn through doing and helping others do it and it’s sort of true for almost anything. You, just like your team, also needs to get over their fear of failure. We learn best by making attempts at things and learning from our results. With public speaking, you might look for some ways to start small like taking more of a role during Sprint Reviews or maybe volunteer to speak at a local meetup. Choose the right experiment of an appropriate size for you.
Whatever you do, consider always having one thing you are working on that will develop a new skillset or improve something you’ve decided you need to work on.
Be Accountable
Do you ever get overwhelmed with the amount of things you need to do? Not the work on the teams’ board, but your own list of things to do. You said you’d help someone with something. You promised to follow up with a link after a hallway conversation. You can’t forget to get back to that other team next week. Maybe, like a lot of us, you’re trying to keep track of all of your personal work related to-do’s in your head.
You know there’s an excellent way to do this already. Create yourself a personal Kanban board if you haven’t got one. You can even do it in sticky notes on the surface of your desk. Whenever you get something new you need to do but aren’t going to start it immediately, but it in your To Do column. Look carefully at what you have in the In Process column. And celebrate the things you’ve done recently by moving them to a Done column. It’s easy, but create a lightweight process to make sure it stays up to date and isn’t the source of what makes you feel overwhelmed.
I hope you find some value in one or all of these three tips and continue your journey into becoming a better agilist.
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Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the practices and frameworks of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense. I offer fractional agile coaching services to help teams improve affordably. See more at FractionalAgileCoach.com
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