Can you tell who will make a great Scrum Master?
Finding the connector of dots
The longer you work in an agile environment, the more it becomes clear that there are certain types of people who are perhaps more suitable for key agile roles like Scrum Master, Product Manager, and Agile Coach. And yet, I’ve not ever tried to write it down before. It feels like an indescribable instinct of some kind. Does that person have the, uh, je ne sais quoi?
And yet, now I find myself building a talk for a conference where I sort of need to write this down. I’m trying to answer that question, “What kind of person do you need to be in order to successfully pursue the role of Scrum Master?” And I get it, with some training and guidance, almost anyone could really do the role. And yet, perhaps you know what I mean, there are those that are exceptionally good at the role, like it was made for them, because parts of it come naturally. They have certain personality traits that line up perfectly for what the role requires.
So what are those qualities?
I first started writing this conference talk from my instincts, probing my brain for the shortcuts I notice or the obvious characteristics I see in people that serve as the trigger to say, “Hey, have you thought about becoming a Scrum Master?” But then I quickly realized this would be perhaps a little more powerful if I started with some logic and what I’ll call science.
So I started with the manifesto. The values and principles there are an obvious enough place to start. The messages there should resonate with people like it’s obvious, common sense, and not revolutionary. You value people, conversations, and know that face-to-face interactions are always better. You see the value in early, constructive feedback, so that you might always be striving to improve yourself and what you do. You welcome change and expect it. You believe in work life balance and the equality and respect among all team members. This one was easy enough and a great start.
Then I looked at the “8 Stances of a Scrum Master” and these are perhaps a little harder to summarize as succinctly. What kind of person is best able to be a Servant Leader? Or Facilitator? Or Coach or Teacher? I think what it comes down to is passion, communication, perseverance, and empathy. There’s also something I’m not sure there’s a great word for but it’s big picture thinking or systems thinking and generally being a connector who sees the potential impacts, consequences and connections in things. These five things feel like the personality or character traits of the 8 stances. Most people notice passion first; it’s an obvious ingredient for a Scrum Master. In order to rally a team and help coach them through any kind of change, a little leadership through excitement can give the team the encouragement they need. And with great communication skills, perseverance, and empathy the Scrum Master can persuade and negotiate around important conflicts or help the team overcome obstacles and remove impediments.
Passion, communication, perseverance, and empathy are easier to notice (or interview for) when identifying a potential Scrum Master. But the fifth trait I mentioned, being a “connector” or having systems thinking skills is a bit trickier. How can you tell if someone has great foresight or the ability to abstractly find the connections between unrelated events? This might be the “je ne sais quoi” I’ve never been able to put a finger on specifically.
And until I was looking for great quotes and inspiration for this talk did I stumble upon the best way to describe this connector trait. There are two quotes from Steve Jobs that I tend to reference often. His Stanford Commencement speech from 2005 and the other is from the Academy of Achievement speech from 1982. And put together, they complete his perspective on what makes for a great innovator, big picture thinker, and what he calls a “connector of dots”.
In the Stanford Commencement address, Steve Jobs talks about the path he took in life and how his seemingly random choices in life led to his future successes. For example, after dropping out of Reed College he stayed for another 18 months and took classes he was interested and passionate about instead of what was required by the university. He happened to take a class on typography which many years later inspired him and his early Mac team to build the TrueType font system into the operating system, literally changing the way text and fonts are used today around the world. He also told the story about how getting fired from Apple Computer, led to one of the most creative periods of his life where he started NeXt, Pixar, and met his wife Laurene. Apple eventually bought NeXt and fueled the renaissance of today’s modern Apple Mac OS operating system. His third story was about death — and how it inspired him and how it should inspire everyone to be passionate about what you do. When he first learned of his Pancreatic Cancer diagnosis, he was told he only had months to live… and went through getting his affairs in order, preparing to die, but ended up living 8 years longer. The lesson he shared, is that we are only here for a limited time so as he says “Do not live someone else’s life” and ended his speech with the quote “Stay hungry, Stay foolish’.
In the other speech, he said, “if you’re gonna make connections which are innovative, you’ve — to connect two experiences together, that you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does, or else you’re going to make the same connections, and then you won’t be innovative…”
In other words, if you have the exact same experiences as someone else, it doesn’t give you any advantage in connecting dots. The diversity of your experience, the path you choose, because of your unique passions and interests, is what gives you the advantage to be the best you can be. Systems thinking and strategic concepts brew in our subconscious and in order to improve results, you need a quagmire of very different abstract thoughts, notice the details in the things you see everyday, and ultimately be able to draw upon those things to offer insights and connections.
Steve goes on to say, “you might want to think about going to Paris and being a poet for a few years. Or might wanna go to a third-world country. I’d highly advise that…”
So, as you consider whether you have the secret ingredients to becoming a great Scrum Master, do not overlook the path you have traveled. The people you have met, the experiences you have accumulated, the diversity present in your background is what you will draw upon in the future to help others.
The very best Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches I have known all had incredibly different, verging on bizarre… and always some kind of unusual backstory that becomes an important part of what makes them great at what they do. Embrace it.
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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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