Who Do You Want Your Team to Become?
Maybe you know the scrum values and principles so well you can cite them all without skipping a beat. It won't be enough to be successful at scrum.
Maybe every pocket you have is packed solid with dozen of tricks and teases to draw out and engage a team of introverts and score a decent retrospective. They won't be enough to make the team successful at scrum.
Maybe you have a ferocious tenacity for overcoming the frustration after re-re-re-re-explaining what a story point is and why it's important. It won't be enough to make your team a solid performer in the ways of Agile.
Until you begin to gain mastery with understanding the human element to your role, you'll be little more than a well-equipped and versatile task master. A cheery-faced perky drill sergeant for a softer version of command and control.
The team reports for daily role call. They just don't have to stand at attention at the stand-up.
Bi-weekly inspections and reviews conducted for the benefit of superiors.
Bi-weekly after action reports to decompose what went wrong and what needs improvement.
A lot of shops settle for this level of integration. It's good enough and it's an improvement over what they were doing before. It's enough they can add the phrase "Agile Shop" to their marketing material. But much of what makes a scrum master or coach successful long term involves understanding what makes a team and its members tick or tock, the nature of the relationships between people within the organization. All those fancy techniques and tools will fall to the ground unused unless the scrum masters and coaches find a way to understand the people on the teams. A underappreciated set of skills for facilitating this understanding are found in sales, marketing, and persuasion.
Every scrum master and coach leverages these skills. It's just that most of them are incredibly sloppy and haphazard at it. They cannot not do these things. By declaring they aren't going to "manipulate" their teams, they are saying they are gong to purposefully make sloppy work of understanding what motivates and excites their teams. They will repeat the fundamentals as many times as it takes, drilling and re-drilling the pattern until everyone gets with the program, marching them across the Agile parade ground until the muscle memory is as close to hardwired as possible.
I often encounter evidence of this approach when I'm brought in to "fix" a broken Agile implementation. Teams involved with maintaining legacy code or small DevOps teams forced into practicing scrum when they would have been much more successful with Kanban and better cross-functional communication. High performing teams forced into a daily stand-up cadence when twice a week would have been more than adequate. ("Daily stand-up means daily!" barks the scrum master sergeant.) Backlog refinement sessions that spent more time quibbling over the proper color to sticky note to use than working out usable acceptance criteria.
If it's early in your tenure as a scrum master or coach, it will pay dividends if you work to answer a simple, but difficult, introspective question: Who do you want your team or organization to become? Yes, the question is a little awkward. It's supposed to be. The objective is to think of your team or organization as if it had a unique personality, an autonomous agent capable of evolving into a better version of itself. A better version that needs your skillful guidance to realize.
Setting and continually refining the answer to this question gets you moving in a direction and helps you establish how your going to measure progress. Your driving purpose, your fundamental raison d'ĂȘtre is to transform the team or the organization from who they are and what the can accomplish today into something even better tomorrow. To do that, you have to know what "better" actually looks like.
It's important to help your teams establish a coherent identity. But answering the question of who you want your team to become is something you need to do for yourself. I would also suggest the answer not be shared since it is a perpetual work in progress. Stating the answer tends to fix it in the world and limit your ability to alter it as you learn and grow with your teams. It will also in all probability invite debate or dissent as team members or others in the organization will not agree with or understand your long term vision as stated. There are other, more productive approaches to eliciting feedback so that your goals and vision for the team or organization are aligned with the company objectives and mission.
Photo by Bao Menglong on Unsplash