Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Soft Skills of A Scrum Master
Soft Skills of A Scrum Master
Soft Skills of A Scrum Master
direction, and the Scrum Master can ignite this spark. Scrum Mastering can be visualized as an
art that requires a good amount of investment to master and excel. It comes with experience
working with teams on the ground and being present in the moment.
The Scrum Master is a constantly evolving role, which metamorphoses from a coach, facilitator,
and servant leader to a change enabler/influential cheerleader and an evangelist. My personal
experience is that the Scrum Master continually switches these hats, and many others, based
on the need of the hour.
The saying goes that a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor. A Scrum Master would not be
able to experience the richness of this role unless he or she gets an opportunity to wear these
different hats and live the role and experience the turbulence of change. Here are a few arts
that the Scrum Master must master for the ship to sail through turbulent seas!
1. Detect the team dysfunctions, as described in Patrick Lencioni's book The Five
Dysfunctions of a Team. For example, if you notice there is an absence of trust in the
team, focus on promoting constructive disagreements and try to foster an open culture.
If one notices there is a lack of accountability, focus on coming up with team-working
agreements.
2. Watch out for team behavioral problems, such as individual silos, heroism, resistance to
change, inhibitions, waiting for task assignments, looking up to the Scrum Master as a
problem solver, and management asking for status reports.
3. Watch out for team-practice issues, such as
o Never-ending meetings
o The team waiting for input from the product owners during Sprints
o Team experiencing many quality issues after Sprints
o Same patterns of problems arising within the teams
o Too much work-in-progress during Sprints
o Many interdependencies cropping up; managing dependencies becomes a
nightmare
o Dedicated hardening Sprints
o Sprint Planning meetings always ending in a surprise
o Occasional system crashes during Sprint Reviews
4. Check the health of the agile adoption by holding regular checks-ups.
5. Check the team’s cross-skills health and promote cross-learning so that team members
can swarm to complete what had already been started instead of starting with new
items.
A Scrum Master is more than a leadership role, as they lead the team by example and is
adaptive to the changing environment like a chameleon responds to changes. The Scrum
Master thrives on the philosophy of, "Don’t catch me a fish, but teach me to catch one."
There are five levels of Agile leadership, according to Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery
for Anticipating and Initiating Change: Expert, Achiever, Catalyst, Co-Creator, and Synergist, by
William Joiner and Stephen Josephs. Research shows that most of the crowd is at the Achiever
level, whereas the need for today’s environment is to transcend to the Catalyst and Co-creator
levels. The Scrum Master must be able to operate beyond the Expert and the Achiever levels to
be instrumental as a servant leader and a change agent.
Scrum Mastership is a journey, and it could take years to reach a stage of a leadership role! The
sooner the Scrum Master gets the teams self-organizing, the better they can watch out for
things beyond the team level, thus helping the organization and business units with their Agile
journey.
Scrum Masters can potentially coach organizations as they navigate through the organizational
turbulence of change and become versatile enough over time to handle any kind of turbulence
with ease. However, it takes time to get to this stage, but the investment is totally worth it!