SCRUM MASTERY
5 Essential Facilitation Skills for Scrum Masters and How to Develop them
Scrum Masters are in a unique position to remove impediments in teams and organisations with facilitation skills.
The goal of the advice in this post is to offer tangible, actionable ways to develop 5 specific facilitation skills: Preparation, Understanding your Role, Time-keeping, Involvement and Wrapping Up.
My story
I’m a Scrum Master with around 20 years’ experience in Software Development and I’m also a certified mediator, so I believe I know a little bit about disagreements in teams and organisations. Put it this way: when people find it hard to agree, progress slows down.
When I started as a Scrum Master, I initially struggled to commit to the role. I perceived that I was not directly adding value any more, the way I did as a Developer. I used to do the work, now I just seemed to talk about the work! A friend offered me some advice.
She said “you’ve actually got a great choice: either you can make great things, or you can make things great.” It really stuck with me as an important difference between the doer role of Developer and the Servant Leader role of Scrum Master. They both add value, just in different ways.
Facilitation helps teams reach agreement. It is one area where development teams often need help, and is a way for Scrum Masters to add value and help make things great.
“you can make great things, or you can make things great.”
The hints and tips in this post were learned over many years. First I observed the positive impact of facilitators as a developer. Then I learned how to become one myself by giving it a try, and I was lucky enough to have colleagues along the way who coached me and gave me feedback. For this feedback, I am eternally grateful. Some of it was painful to hear, but it all helped me to learn and improve.
I still facilitate regularly. Co-located, remote and big room facilitation are all challenges to grapple with, and the process of learning never stops. Advice such as that contained in this post might help, but practice and feedback are the most likely ways to improve.
The advice offered in this post is not intended to be complete. Indeed, I am always looking for more advice myself! I would be appreciative of anyone who wants to discuss this post or suggest additional advice.
Ok, that’s the pre-amble done. Let’s begin with a definition of facilitation, and why it is relevant to Scrum Masters.
Facilitation
Meetings pretty much suck in general, but here’s the thing: they really don’t have to. With effective facilitators at the helm, meetings can reach productive outcomes more often, and suck far less often.
Without effective facilitation, meetings can lack clear outcomes, end in deadlock and feel like purgatory for participants.
To put it another way, ineffective meetings are an impediment to progress.
The Scrum Master Role
The spider sense of Scrum Masters should be tingling at this point:
The Scrum Master serves the Development Team in several ways, including: […]
* Removing impediments to the Development Team’s progress;
* Facilitating Scrum events as requested or needed
The facilitation role of Scrum Masters is called out in the Scrum Guide specifically in relation to the Scrum Events, but I believe effective facilitation skills can be deployed in many more contexts to help remove impediments in organisations.
By design, Scrum Masters have no rank in an organisation: this puts them in a unique position to facilitate conversations in an impartial way.
The list below is not exhaustive, but it is all advice that I learned through feedback and practice. Let’s begin:
1. Preparation
Invite the right people and know your audience
Scrum Masters don’t just dwell inside teams, they traverse networks across teams in order to remove impediments. This means that effective Scrum Masters know how to build and navigate relationships at all levels of the organisation. Relationship building skills are needed, one interaction at a time.
Zuzana Šochová describes relationships as the second level of Scrum Masters. When Scrum Masters have put in the groundwork at this level, they will know meeting participants, understand the relationships in the room, and be equipped to facilitate consensus between participants, even if the meeting involves stakeholders or people outside the normal context of the team.
Scrum Masters: the strength of your relationships in the organisation will only help your facilitation.
Design your session: location, time available, activities, outcomes
These are the basics. Where will the session take place? Sometimes we need to get out of the office to get creativity going.
How much time can you book in busy people’s calendars? Again if you are working on your relationships in the organisation and you know your audience, you will know the answer. If not, ask. Respect the time of others, it is a prized asset.
How about experimentation with facilitation techniques? Is your audience open to exercises like liberating structures, or should you run the meeting in a more conventional style with an agenda, time-boxes and a wrap-up?
Crucially, the desired outcomes of the meeting should be clear to everyone before arranging a time for the meeting. These desired outcomes should be circulated to the people you are inviting so they understand why they are investing their time in your activity.
Will you use flipcharts, whiteboards or powerpoint?
Visual Facilitation is powerful: preparing flipcharts to guide the conversation might be helpful.
A Scrum Master should have the ability to facilitate for all kinds of audiences, and this requires the ability to use a flipchart, whiteboard or, yes, even PowerPoint.
Developing your visual facilitation, whiteboarding or PowerPoint skills will assist your facilitation skills. Facilitators need to be able to use many different tools. (But try not to use PowerPoint if you can avoid it!)
In those situations where you really must PowerPoint, avoid boring the pants off people with long decks of text-heavy slides. That is not facilitation: it is death by PowerPoint! #deathByPowerPoint :)
Check out Sharon Bowman’s 6Trumps from the Training From the Back of the Room for some great tips on how to liven up your facilitation. If you absolutely have to use PowerPoint, try to involve as many of these as you can. Your audience will thank you for it.
2. Understanding your role
Facilitator versus Participant
A hard lesson for me was to avoid participating in the meeting I am facilitating, unless absolutely necessary, or unless requested by participants. Facilitation is about helping others in the room have a conversation. In some respects, this is another way to view servant leadership.
Some tips to avoid participating at the expense of facilitating:
- Value keeping the conversation moving over adding your own view.
- Value listening over speaking.
- Value involvement of all voices over hearing your own voice.
- Talk less. Smile more :)
Active Listening
Active Listening is just like Scrum: easy to understand and difficult to master.
“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” — Stephen R. Covey.
By demonstrating an ability to listen actively as a facilitator with the intention of developing understanding, you will help all participants to be heard.
You will also be able to ask questions on behalf of others in the room. Sometimes people aren’t comfortable asking questions that might make them seem foolish: a facilitator should ask clarifying questions often.
Practice active listening by resisting the urge to respond. Instead, ask questions to clarify what participants have just said. Strive to eliminate ambiguity from the room: it is an impediment to clarity.
Ambiguity is an impediment to clarity.
The Scribe Role
Barry Overeem’s paper on the stances of a Scrum Master describes how a Scrum Master can be effective acting as a scribe, but could add more value by playing other roles, such as coaching.
A Scrum Master can demonstrate core skills such as acting as a Scribe in a meeting, and at the same time coach these skills in others: for me, this is another demonstration of servant leadership.
By effectively documenting conversations, perhaps with visual facilitation skills, and by effectively sharing output of meetings to participants, a Scrum Master can show what a good scribe looks like and does. For me, this can be a form of coaching if a Scrum Master is helping develop these skills in others. First, you need to learn how to be a good scribe yourself.
3. Time-keeping
Be early
Being early implies that you have the luxury of time available to you. You may need to develop a few time management skills in order to make this happen, so the skill here is actually being able to arrive 5 minutes early.
Many Scrum Masters support multiple teams, so this is not as easy as it sounds. Consecutive meetings with no gaps between them are difficult to manage.
However, there is a correlation between preparation time and the effectiveness of your facilitation. If you don’t take it from me, how about Warren Buffet?
As a facilitator, a simple way to get to the room five minutes early is to set your meeting start time to five minutes past the hour.
Let your invited guests know the start time, so they don’t arrive dead on the hour. If they also have busy schedules like yours, they’ll appreciate the five minute break before starting. They might even use it to prepare for your meeting too!
If you are in a position where this kind of time management is just impossible due to the number of teams you serve, then you may have a different problem to solve first in order to improve your facilitation skills…
Prepare your venue
Getting there early will also help you get the room ready. As my Serious Scrum colleague Marty de Jonge puts it, there are 5 Ps: Perfect Preparation Prevents Poor Performance. Or, as famous Irish philosopher Roy Keane once said: ‘fail to prepare, prepare to fail.’
Some simple ways to prepare a room for a meeting:
- Distribute required ‘stuff’ around the room — stickies, pens etc
- Simply write the name of the meeting on a whiteboard
- Prepare / show flips or whiteboards to guide the meeting, an agenda, a parking lot or a working agreement
These small elements help your invited guests to get oriented quickly. In addition, if you make a habit of starting on time and preparing your rooms in this way, your participants should naturally reciprocate by arriving on time and with an idea of why they are attending.
Finish on time
The second part of respecting other people’s time is making sure that the meeting ends at the time previously agreed. This can involve allocating a time-keeper role to someone in the room, which is another great form of involvement.
For example, you can ask the room to give you a 10-minute and a 5-minute warning before the end of the meeting. This is a great way for the time-keeping responsibility to be distributed, and to involve the participants in owning their valuable time, rather than you taking it from them, you rogue!
By consistently finishing your meetings 5 minutes early or on time at the very least, you will help others to manage their time more effectively. Avoid running over time, as it is disrespectful and sends a tacit message to participants that their time is less important than yours.
If you only work on one facilitation skill in the next 12 months, make it the ability to finish on time.
4. Involvement
Remote participants
Remote Facilitation is a whole topic unto itself, but in this simple paragraph, let’s just say that every Scrum Master must quickly get to mastery with the tools available to support it, and fast. Fully remote and co-located teams are a reality. So to is the need to get familiar with Skype for Business, Zoom, Slack, Bluejeans and any number of communication tools on your laptop.
You will also need to build your network in your organisation by making friends with your IT Helpdesk, because guess what: meeting rooms have AV systems too. Your ability to involve remote participants does not just depend on how to use Zoom. It depends on your ability to call remote participants on Zoom, and then involve them in the meeting at the same level as everyone who is in the room. This requires knowledge of how to use meeting room A/V systems, and is another reason to get to the room early.
Don’t be that person faffing with speakers and microphone settings in the first ten minutes of the meeting: master the A/V in the rooms that are used most frequently by your teams, and coach others how to do it too.
Check In
Starting with a check-in exercise is a great way to get participant’s heads into ‘the game’ and understand the purpose of the meeting. It also sets out a working agreement: the facilitator will not be doing all the talking, and participants will be involved.
Some simple and effective check in exercises are ‘the one word’ check in or the ‘yes, and icebreaker’ but there are many more out there.
One I like is ‘are we ready?’ Ask everyone one by one to simply answer the question ‘are you ready?’. If enough people aren’t prepared, unsure of the purpose of the meeting, or why they are there, ask the room if we should postpone, as we risk wasting time.
Invest five minutes in a check in exercise at the start of a meeting, and you will receive more engagement in return.
Building Consensus with Dot-Voting
Dot-voting is a way for a group to decide what to do next, and for everyone in the room to have a voice in the decision. Here’s how to do it with an example.
- Facilitator needs to ensure that everyone understands the different options on the whiteboard or flipchart.
- Everyone has 3 votes. Votes can be allocated any way you like: 3 votes for your favourite, 2 and 1, or 1 each for 3.
- Everyone silently writes the numbers of your choices on a post-it, and the number of votes for each, and gives their sticky to the facilitator.
- This helps avoids the bias that can be created from everyone just walking up and marking the flip chart or whiteboard, as nobody can see how the vote is currently going
- As votes are collected, facilitator adds them to the whiteboard / flipchart.
There is a visual example earlier in this post of how I used anonymous dot-voting to help a group prioritise the 12 agile manifesto principles.
5. Wrapping Up
Outcomes: achieved or missed?
At the end of the meeting, the facilitator needs to wrap up. This involves reviewing the outcomes that we wanted to achieve, and whether we hit our marks with the conversation or not.
Just like a check-in, a check out can give you an indication of whether outcomes were achieved or not. You can also ask participants to vote on this. To help build a picture of consensus at the end of a meeting, have a look at this visualisation idea.
Avoid Box-Ticking Agenda Points and Tackle Hot Air
Imagine you are facilitating a refinement meeting where 5 product backlog items are on the agenda. The duration of the session is one hour. 45 minutes have passed and the team are still discussing item 1 on the agenda. How do you feel about that?
It can be tempting as a facilitator to drive the room towards the outcomes of the meeting. This can be dangerous however, as we may end up simply box-ticking, and agreeing to be done just to get the hell out of there! We ma not actually achieve the goals of the meeting.
For a facilitator, wrapping up one agenda point prematurely, and moving on to the next just to get through the meeting is a Big Fat Waste of Time.
Only wrap up agenda points where there is consensus or you will frustrate your audience. Ask the room: “are we ready to move on?” See below for an ‘emperor vote’ technique to help you know if the room is ready to keep going.
This is also a useful way to tackle hot air: one voice waffling on and on. If you find someone is talking too much, set an alarm on your phone to go off after two minutes. When the alarm goes off, ask the room if we need to continue on this topic.
Again the emperor vote can be used, but this time you get to gently intervene with open questions like ‘have we got consensus on this point?’ or ‘Jim, let’s see if anyone else has anything to add on this one?’ Don’t hate Jim, he just needs a facilitator’s help :)
Measure effectiveness: solicit feedback
Scrum Masters demonstrate Openness and Courage by always being open to receive feedback. When it comes to your facilitation, the surest way to help develop your skills is to ask meeting participants what they thought.
Did they get what they needed from the meeting? Did we all collectively reach the outcomes we set out at the start? What worked, and what bombed?
Feedback should be requested as early as possible for it to be relevant. The simplest way, if time is against you, is with the ‘emperor vote.’ Thumbs up for good, thumbs to the side for ‘meh’ and thumbs down for ‘bad’.
Another simple way is the five finger death punch. Just kidding, it’s the ‘five finger vote’. Five is awesome, a fist is zero, and you can vote for all numbers between to rate the effectiveness of the meeting.
Both the five finger vote and the emperor vote can be done in less than a minute, and will give you good visual feedback about how the meeting went.
If you are feeling more ambitious, you can always request feedback in more structured ways with tools like Mentimeter or JotForm, but the more time it takes for people to give feedback, then the less you are likely to receive…
Closing
Facilitation is easy to understand and difficult to master. There are any number of skills that can be developed if you want to become more effective. Remote facilitation, visual facilitation, Big Room facilitation… there are big topics in this area that this post didn’t come close to covering in detail…
Happily, for Scrum Masters, this means that there are any number of facilitation opportunities available to hone your skills in different ways. Seek them out. Practice!
If you are looking for one piece of advice to take away on how to improve your facilitation skills, here it is… in two parts:
Build feedback mechanisms to help you learn what you’re doing right and wrong, and experiment.
Building your facilitation skills can be an empirical process. You will make mistakes before your natural approach emerges. But hey, this is kind of how Scrum works too…
Now go and help make things great :)
