The Greatest Scrum Master

The personality traits of the Greatest Scrum Master that enable him (or) her for a successful agile transition journey.

Opening Thoughts

The recent 2019 Scrum Master survey trends results indicate that 58 percent have taken part in an agile transition. 42 percent of participants have launched an agile transition. Of those who said they were a Scrum Master, 58 percent said that they have launched an agile transition. These statistics prove that the role of Scrum Master is a prominent role in transitions, likely a result of their mandate to remove impediments and build psychological safety for the Scrum Team to deliver sustainable work.

The above information serves as evidence and proves that the Scrum Master role is very vital for the successful beginning of an Agile transition and below explained personalities are significant for the effectiveness of the same transition.

Sociable

As we predominantly deal with people, who are the most important part and valuable asset of an organization. Sociable personality is crucial for the success of Scrum Master to empower, engage, motivate, and inspire the people by having a meaningful conversation using creative facilitation techniques explaining about the importance of empiricism which helps them to maximize the outcome of value delivered.

Leading and coaching the organization in its Scrum adoption; -Scrum Guide

Curiosity

Organizations trying to embark agility are failing miserably when they ignore to understand their current structure and systems before implementing the Scrum Framework, hence curiosity is more important than the knowledge possessed by the Scrum Master. It helps in understanding the impediments faced by people within the organization while performing their work on a daily basis. And also brings out the transparency about the internal and external dependencies etc. so those actionable improvement items are considered. As of result of that training, organizational values awareness workshops for employees and business alignment is sought to adopt new ways of working by appropriately planning across the organization before beginning their Agile journey.

The Scrum Master helps those outside the Scrum Team understand which of their interactions with the Scrum Team are helpful and which aren’t. The Scrum Master helps everyone change these interactions to maximize the value created by the Scrum Team.-Scrum Guide

Rhetoric

Rhetoric is the art of speaking or writing with the intent to persuade. Most of the organizations are still command and control in nature which is driven by the belief, culture, and action based on an individual rather than a community. A rhetorical Scrum Master will teach, mentor and coach all the individuals across the organization enabling them to identify and understand the potential improvements and value that might be beneficial for them by implementing the Scrum Framework across the organization when product development is performed in an empirical environment.

Helping employees and stakeholders understand and enact Scrum and empirical product development; -Scrum Guide

Unanimity

For an organizational culture trying to co-create cross-functional competencies among the team and to achieve sustainability, with self-organization requires a fair and authentic leader. He would consider views of the entire community pertinent to the decision-making process in a collaborative and transparent manner as per team dynamics by inspecting and adapting their progress of work done before considering every step forward in their professional Scrum journey.

Artifacts defined by Scrum are specifically designed to maximize transparency of key information so that everybody has the same understanding of the artifact. -Scrum Guide

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is the quality of being present with the experience of being open and aware of the present moment, without judgment or criticism. It is a very essential personality for the success of Scrum Master to deal with individuals in an empathetic manner who are very rigid to unlearn the old ways of working and learn the new ways of working and also while having a high stake or crucial conversations at the certain difficult situation during the course of their journey within the organization.

Coaching the Development Team in organizational environments in which Scrum is not yet fully adopted and understood. -Scrum Guide

Closing Thoughts

Although there are many other personality traits apart from the above-listed ones. I personally believe that these are very essential for the Scrum Master to begin a successful agile transition journey which helps him in evolving from good to greatest Scrum Master.

As always, I am always keen about hearing your valuable thoughts and feedback on this article.