Practicing servant leadership as a ScrumMaster requires a great deal of empathy and patience. This includes suppressing actions that would otherwise cause harm to team morale and self organization if unchecked.
One trait in particular that is extremely counterproductive to the role is passive aggressiveness.
As someone who has been known to be snarky on occasion, I’ve had to practice my facilitation skills over time in a real team setting.
While I do feel as though I have several qualities that make up a good servant leader, I have traits that can make it more challenging as well. This is especially true if I’m simmering under the surface because the team has recently:
- Missed their iteration commitment by a large margin
- Verbally fleeced one another during a daily scrum or retrospective
- Stopped showing up for daily scrums
- Pulled random stories out of the backlog to work on
- Told me I have no idea how to do my job
- Decided they didn’t like Scrum and tried to get me fired
- Performed a myriad of other actions that drive ScrumMasters crazy
Note: most of these will happen to you at some point along the way if you work with enough teams
To address issues such as these you have to take a very zen-like approach to your role, and serve as a mirror for the team without feeding into the negative energy. This requires you to think before you say anything to the team, which takes practice over time.
For example, even short comments such as “Well I guess we won’t make the commitment this time either” off the cuff can seriously undermine your team’s efforts. If they are stressed due to an unforeseen complexity in a story, then you need to simply note that and do your best to help them adapt. It can be addressed in a positive manner at the end of the iteration.
If after a while you feel as though you keep making these comments over and over, then perhaps you should step back and re-evaluate your role. Try to find a local user group to commiserate with, or reach out to an agile coach online. I’ve found this community takes a very collaborative and pay-it-forward approach so don’t go it alone.
Have any of you struggled with suppressing passive aggressive or other counterproductive tendencies while facilitating, and if so where did you turn for help?
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#1 by Mick Maguire on June 8, 2010 - 1:33 pm
Ack! You have uncovered my biggest “dirty little secret” I often struggle with this one. I dont play the role of ScrumMaster, I'm more coach / facilitator, but the same applies.
#2 by jasonlittle on June 8, 2010 - 2:11 pm
I think everyone struggles with this from time to time. We're all human! I recently experienced this with a team that was struggling with responsibility. I called them the 'victim' team. Everything was everybody else's fault and there was nothing this team could do. The team decided to “stop bitching” as one of their “stop doing” retrospective items then proceeded to bitch about how there was nothing they could do anything about. I got frustrated and took the sticky off the wall and said, “sorry guys, you aren't ready to stop bitching, you love bitching but don't want to help yourselves.”
This was the first time this happened to me and I was completely ashamed of myself afterwards.
I have twice taken the aggressive approach and had success in “kicking the team in the butt”, oddly enough with this same team. I'm an introvert so most of the support I reach for is within myself or reading blogs/articles.
#3 by David J Bland on June 8, 2010 - 2:16 pm
One source of inspiration for me was Lyssa Adkins' Powerful Questions: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfnhjnbt_7hbskcjd7
I try to refrain from using that 2nd column on impulse
#4 by max on June 9, 2010 - 12:20 pm
Great post. The danger here is that you can bottle-up what you truly feel about the situations and teams can instantly detect when you're saying something that you don't mean — which can come off as condescending. A scrum master should also feel safe to express themselves, just like the rest of the team — learning how to express frustration and disappointment is an important thing.
#5 by max on June 9, 2010 - 4:20 pm
Great post. The danger here is that you can bottle-up what you truly feel about the situations and teams can instantly detect when you're saying something that you don't mean — which can come off as condescending. A scrum master should also feel safe to express themselves, just like the rest of the team — learning how to express frustration and disappointment is an important thing.