How Do Scrum Masters Rethink Their Role On a Team to Avoid Extinction

Start doing these 4 things today to master your craft.

“If the Scrum Team is self-managing, why do we need a Scrum Master?”

Sound familiar? It should. The Scrum Master accountability is in dire need of a reboot.

If you have been paying attention to the news, Scrum Masters have lost their luster. They have suffered layoffs, endured Delivery Manager relabeling, or otherwise faced marginalization. Even if an organization has kept them, they are in short supply and spread thin across many teams.

Scrum Masters are on a life raft afloat on treacherous seas, in need of rescue.

Why has this happened?

Many things have led to this predicament.

• Mistaking the role for a project manager.
• Putting certificates ahead of experience.
• Managing the teams rather than being a leader.
• Making administration their primary responsibility.
• Handcuffing agility in favor of following a framework.
• Driving teams to deliver more, better, faster, and cheaper.
• Staffing folks without technical chops or product know-how.
• Removing Scrum Masters from the day-to-day work of the team.

Given this, it’s no surprise that Scrum Masters have lost their place.

Scrum Masters should master the craft of Scrum. But we have a void of craft in today’s Scrum Masters. This is at the core of the issue.

To become a Scrum Master, you have to put in many reps.

I’ll never forget my first stint as a Scrum Master, fresh-minted. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.

My knowledge was surface deep. I had read the Scrum Guide and had seen a few other Scrum Masters in action. But I had no experience apart from being on teams as both a developer and a project manager. I was a fish out of water.

My instincts were backwards.

I thought we needed a detailed plan. My gut reaction was to assign work to all the team members and check status during the daily. I fell into the patterns I knew. Wrong move.

The team put me in my place. It was swift. And I felt like an outcast.

So, I sought a mentor for help. This turned out to be the best thing I could have done. My mentor had deep experience and worked with me for a year as I learned and applied the craft. She was patient but did not cut me any slack. The bar was so high I could not reach it most days.

This was the kickstart kick I needed to learn the craft and build a solid foundation. But the real value: I became a crucial component of my team. I now had the right moves to enable flow.

We don’t have enough craft building or mentors like this today.

---

4 Ways Scrum Masters Can Pivot to Practice Their Craft (And Become Indispensable)

My mentor taught me 4 crucial aspects of great Scrum Masters.

I am going to walk you through them. Keeping them to myself does no good. If these seem useful, you can steal them and use them to reorient your path. You, too, can become indispensable to your team.

Let’s reignite your Scrum Master journey, starting now.

Before we get started on what to practice, here’s a list of what to stop doing.

• Don’t take orders; protect the team instead.
• Stop being absent from the work of the Sprint.
• Quit policing the Scrum Team on the Scrum Guide.
• Stop relying on the role name; build mastery instead.
• Don’t dictate how the team behaves; let them decide.
• Stop hiding the truth; embrace transparency with courage.
• Don’t drive the team to output (stretch goals, velocity, etc.).
• Quit holding on to the way things are; embrace change instead.

You may be wondering what in the world you should do if you aren’t behaving like this.

Fair question.

Scrum Masters exist to enable flow. They help the team practice the empirical nature of Scrum and build great products together. Ready to learn how? I thought so. That’s the spirit.

Let’s go.

1. Helping the team learn to self-organize in different ways (“I do,” “We do,” “You do”).

Self-organization does not happen by itself.

It needs nurturing.

Nurturing does not happen by chance. You won’t get it by waiting for the team to come to you.

A passive stance is the wrong early tactic.

You could wait for the team to figure things out on their own, but this process will take much longer. The vast majority of teams have succumbed to taking orders, not deciding on their own. A guide during this time makes all the difference in breaking this bad pattern.

I compare this to learning any new skill. Having a mentor made all the difference in my confidence when I was a new Scrum Master. The same is true of a team learning to think and act for themselves.

Autonomy requires a guide, a nudge, in the beginning.

You need to roll up your sleeves at first and jump in with the team.

Show how it’s done with active modeling of the way. This means you will guide by example to jump start new habits.

• Show the team how to decide and act with safety.
• Show how to focus on finishing one thing at a time.
• Model behavior for transparency when things go wrong.
• Show how to own your improvement to make things better.
• Teach the team techniques for collaborating with each other.
• Show how to own end-to-end delivery of value, not just a small part.
• Act with edge and push through obstacles instead of avoiding them.
• Show how to care for solving customer needs, not simply building stuff.

Without a guide, these behaviors are tricky, but with one, teams grow fast.

But don’t stay in this mentoring mode for long.

Model the behavior and then move fast to let them practice it with you. Co-create with them. Help them stay in the boundaries when they go astray.

You let your team take the reins as they gain confidence and capability.

And then, they can take flight.

This is how you help self-organization emerge.

Be a mentor. Be a guide. Then, get out of the way.

You will find that some things your team can’t solve on their own. This leads us to the next element of your craft building.

2. Listening for impediments out of the team’s control and working to get those removed.

Now for the hard stuff—obstacle removal.

Many teams misconstrue this.

Needing a refill on coffee is not a team obstacle. This should never leave your lips, “Would you like cream or sugar with your coffee?” You are not there to wait on the team hand and foot.

The team should not throw all their needs into your lap, and you run around fixing them. A team has the control to fix many roadblocks on their own. No need for you to get involved with these.

But the ones you need to tackle are the ones out of the team’s control.

• Work stuck in approval queues.
• Extra processes not adding value.
• Decisions waiting on others to make.
• Unrealistic expectations on timelines.
• No space for the team to improve or learn.
• External pressure to start too much at once.
• Dependencies on other teams that need breaking.
• Customers or stakeholders not available to the team.

This is only a sampling of the types of the thorny issues teams face.

And your diligent removal of them may be your most important task. Many a team accepts uncontrollable obstacles as the way things are. But shoving all your obstacles in a corner and hoping they will go away or accepting them is not a recipe for flow.

For instance, I found my team was waiting on another team to deploy their code to a test environment. They didn’t have the proper authority. My team had accepted this as their painful reality. So, I worked with the other team to get the deployment automated through a secure mechanism. Problem solved. Flow restored. Team relieved.

You must master the fine art of breaking through obstacles.

You will have to learn how to work the organizational system and then change it. And you may not have the power to do this on your own. So, you will have to partner with others who do.

But it’s worth it for your team, your customers, and your organization.

Value can’t flow with a log jam of obstacles in the way.

The way to flow is through your obstacles.

You must master the swift removal of them.

Moving on to the next element of your craft, you also need to get ahead of problems.

3. Anticipating problems and helping the team avoid them.

Why wait until an obstacle surfaces?

Being proactive to spot the signs and avoid problems for the team needs to be your superpower. Have eyes for waste. Learn what actions lead to downstream issues.

Then, head them off at the pass.

Let me give you an example. I know that trouble is near when management sets deadlines without team involvement. It sets off several unsavory downstream impacts. These radiate in concentric destruction until team engagement plummets. As soon as I see fake deadlines used a motivation tactic, I do three things as a Scrum Master:

1. Tell the team to carry on. I ask them to ignore the deadline while I work with management.
2. Spend time with management. I seek to understand why they set the deadline. Then, I educate on how it works against them and introduce better ways to get results.
3. Meet with the team and management together. This allows the two sides to collaborate. Management presents their concerns. And the team decides how to meet management’s needs and co-create a solution.

This diffuses the deadline before it can spawn mass destruction. And it builds trust between managers and teams.

The art of spotting problem precursors will only come with practice and experience.

I’ve found you will gain experience to head off problems much faster than you think.

Today’s dysfunctional systems are ripe for your learning. Problems teams face are in high supply. You can use this widespread cruft to build your craft of spotting problems early.

It’s like that old saying, “When you have lemons, make lemonade.”

Studying your environment is your first step.

All you have to do is reflect daily on your experiences and start noting patterns. Reflect on why problems occur. Do a Five Why’s activity. Find the root cause.

Before long, you’ll spot the sparks and be able to dull the friction before a raging fire ignites.

Now that your team is self-organizing and you are clearing obstacles, it’s time to highlight their work to others.

4. Becoming equipped to radiate information about the team’s work.

You have to be part of the team to know what’s going on.

Showing up at the Daily Scrum to get a status update is not your job. Your job is to work with the team during the Sprint so you know as much as the team does.

Then, you can help radiate to the product community what the team is up to. You can find ways to visually depict the work and make it accessible to others.

Here are four ways I have done this in the past:

1. Form a goal-oriented roadmap of our now, next, and later focus.
2. Create a product learning canvas to explain my outcome journey.
3. Construct a Story Map to inform on how we are solving user needs.
4. Make an Andon board to show something is blocking my team.

An informed community is a happy community.

Don’t think information radiators fall on your shoulders to create alone.

Each of these artifacts should be a natural output of the Sprint and the way the team works.

But your guidance in creating these and then helping to make them visible is crucial. You help the team radiate what it’s doing. And this helps others see inside the black box, which reduces external anxiety.

External transparency builds trust in the team, and Scrum Masters work to do this.

---

That’s the basics of the Scrum Master craft.

Like me, you should seek a mentor to help you do this while you learn the ropes. Sure, you could try to read and teach yourself. But memorization is not knowing, and self-teaching is slow. A mentor will help you stand on the shoulders of those that have come before you. This speeds the development of your craft:

1. How to model and teach self-organizing behavior.
2. The ability to remove obstacles to improve the system.
3. The art of heading off problems early.
4. How to keep external transparency high.

The current plight of Scrum Masters does not have to be an extinction event.

Good luck out there. Trust in the pursuit of your craft. Help your team become unstoppable. And show others the force multiplier of a real Scrum Master.

---

➡️ Sign up for weekly tips like this on doing more with less while respecting people.