Being a scrum master is more than just reminding a team to perform certain ceremonies, it’s about growing the best possible workplace.
To begin with, let’s clarify this whole thing about the “scrum master”. It’s the name of a role. It’s a relatively new and pretty ridiculous name by intent, because a change was needed in how we lead development work.
Every now and then we shake things up by inventing new names. Just remember that behind the term “scrum master” is the timeless idea of the servant leader. Someone who is there not to exert power over others, but to give power to others. To empower them.
I don’t know how long the term scrum master will hang around. I do know that I want what it represents to stick for the long run. For now, I’ll allow myself the use of the possibly even sillier expression “advanced scrum master”, but bear with me, at least for the length of this post.
After having served as the scrum master for a team some years ago, a newly hired person was assigned to pick up the task after I moved on. We talked often during the transition period, but I really only remember one of those conversations.
We were sitting comfortably and discussing the way we were working, when my new colleague asked me something that surprised me. He said:
“Tobias – I don’t understand how this scrum master thing can possibly be a full time job. I can see how I need to invite people to the meetings, and work a bit with the product owner – but that will hardly take upp all my time. What am I supposed to be doing?”
I was a bit stunned, because that thought had never struck me. From my perspective, the list of things you can choose to work on as a scrum master is endless. After all – how many teams have you met that were as productive, creative, and happy as they could possibly be? There’s always one more thing to address (including pacing the rate of change).
What I’m saying is this: the scrum master role is as challenging and rewarding as you make it. You can definitely improve your ability to create positive results by gaining deeper skill and insight. Here are some things that I can think of that I would expect from a more advanced scrum master. I’m sure you could add many more to my list:
- Mindfully asking powerful questions to assist learning
- Helping the team find the time for learning
- Supporting the team in increasing its skill
- Working with the team to grow clear and simple processes and agreements that truly help
- Looking far outside the scrum and agile canon to find new things to learn and try in fields such as agile engineering practices, psychology, organizations, testing, change, teams, learning, culture, consulting, systems, problem solving, and design (to name just a few)
- Spending a whole lot of time working with the people in the organization surrounding the team, since that’s often the most powerful force shaping the team’s behavior and results
- Gradually helping more parts of the organization to understand and make use of the scrum mindset of cross-functional and transparent work
- Helping managers understand how to serve better
- Constantly working on developing him- or herself, realizing that the most powerful tool you have at your disposal is yourself
Last but not least, I would expect to see the advanced scrum master working on helping others learn how to do all of the above, so that the power to lead can spread. After all, we can’t let the organization’s future depend solely on somebody called a “scrum master”, can we now?
How would you know that you had just seen an “advanced scrum master” in action? What would that person be doing, and how would it make things different?