The two most important skills to being a great Scrum Master
It seems to me that the Scrum Master role is becoming quite common. Unfortunately, it’s fairly uncommon to find a truly great Scrum Master. Why is that? For one thing, I suspect there has just been a surge in popularity with “agile” becoming part of the business landscape’s vernacular lately. Everybody wants to be a Scrum Master. Invest a weekend of your time or just pay to take a test online and you too can be a certified or professional Scrum Master. Add that straight to your LinkedIn profile and resume and — presto — you’re a Scrum Master!
What does it really take to be a great Scrum Master?
We (Agile Coaches and other experienced Scrum Masters) tend to toss around the term Agile Mindset in a sometimes judgey kind of way. If you don’t got it, then you’re not there yet. Has it clicked for you yet? What do we mean when we ask if you have the mindset? It’s a lot of things, which is why it’s hard to describe. But mostly it’s a way of thinking. I realize that’s also really abstract. The Agile Mindset, if you googled to try to define it, is described by four values, defined by twelve principles, and manifested through a myriad of practices. All this means is that you need to really understand the philosophy behind the Agile Manifesto and learn through doing. The mindset, unfortunately, takes a while to develop. It usually only comes with a level and breadth of experience. Like, how much hands-on experience do you have in the role? And if it’s only been with one team for 2 years, I might still wonder if you’ve really learned all of the lessons or not. Instead, I’d like to know what variety of experience you’ve seen. For example: given a choice, my suggestion is to hire the Scrum Master who has the widest array of experience from different companies, with different cultures, building different kinds of things, using different approaches and strategies… and someone who has some great learned-through-failure stories.
But even all of that amounts to only some of the mechanics… some of the knowledge; the things you might read on someone’s resume. We still haven’t talked about the most important things that make a Scrum Master great. These two important ingredients are even more important than everything else combined.
Is the person coachable and are they passionate?
Are you coachable?
If you can teach a growing Scrum Master things that will help them better grasp the Agile Mindset, how to facilitate and better work with teams… And if the person earnestly attempts to apply the things they’ve learned in a deliberate and evaluative way… then, they are coachable. If they are coachable, they will learn the skills to make them a great communicator, diplomat, empathizer, and observer who notices the things that others miss. This is the first skill that will give you a tremendous advantage and the potential of becoming a great Scrum Master. If you are a noticer, diplomat, empathizer, and communicator, you might call yourself a “gentle instigator”: One that helps nudge the team in exactly the right direction that helps them learn through doing.
Being coachable, and being more open minded in general, is the key ingredient, but that in itself may not be enough. A person set in their ways, holding on to old ways of thinking, for example, will either take a lot longer to become a good Scrum Master or may not ever be cut out for it. So one big assumption I make in calling out being coachable as a key character trait is that you also have a mentor or Agile Coach to work with you on your learning journey. If you are coachable and have a good mentor, you will drastically improve your chances of becoming a great Scrum Master.
Are you passionate?
Being coachable is often predicated by another character trait, the most important of all. And that is whether they are truly passionate. The real role of Scrum Master is hard to describe well in a rigid job description. Clearly, the Scrum Guide defines the basics of what it means to be a Scrum Master, but I posit that it should have a broader definition. If you perform the role well, you will frequently do things that would have been hard to predict in advance, and you will often go without being thanked for doing them. As my friend Phil says, you must be “motivated by a burning desire for selfless service and [be] a serious student of leadership.” Being a great Scrum Master requires dedication to servant leadership and a certain kind of selflessness.
The passionate Scrum Master loves what they do, and truly loves to help humans build products, solve problems, imagine improvements to the system, eliminate obstacles, and through instigating the team to improve and create, inspires them to be greater than the sum of their parts. This requires passion. A passion for people, but equally a passion for learning. Any great Scrum Master you meet will be a voracious reader with an insatiable curiosity. This passion fills their joy tank, giving them more knowledge, skills and techniques to help their team and their company. This, coupled with being coachable, creates a mind that is constantly evaluating the world and the people around them, looking for ways to improve themselves and others to solve both big picture problems and the minutiae that makes their team members tick.
It is more than the mindset or a period of time that makes you a great Scrum Master. If you’re serious, you will be coachable, passionate, a diplomat, a communicator, someone who notices, a great empathizer, and a consummate learner with an insatiable curiosity, looking for ways to gently instigate and change the world around you.
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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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