In general, the Scrum Master role is poorly understood, and the skills required to be a great Scrum Master are hard to find. Coaching is perhaps the rarest skill of all.
There are many potentially great Scrum Masters, unfortunately most organisations lack the awareness and capability to ‘grow their own’.
Scrum Mastery is a highly skilled, highly nuanced job. Servant Leadership with a focus on creating a sustainable high-performance delivery capability.
After 10 years of playing the role and helping others to play it, I’m still learning. Nowhere is this more so than in the skill of Coaching.
What is Professional Coaching?
ICF defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential. Then holding the client responsible and accountable.
Think about a time you were given a solution and told to implement it. Now think of a time you were encouraged to come up with your own solution. In which example did you feel most motivated? In which example did you learn the most? Which example yielded the best outcome?
When you choose your own path, you become responsible, accountable, and motivated to achieve it.
The Trouble with Scrum Masters that don’t Coach.
Agile teams are self organising. They do not rely on a manager to tell them what to do or how to work.
Many Scrum Masters fall at the first hurdle, telling teams how to self organise. The end goal can’t be achieved, as teams are not learning to solve their own problems, they are still being told what to do. We move from one form of dependence to another. Fragile, unsustainable and low performance.
instinctively, teams themselves know this isn’t right, and the relationship between the team and the Scrum Master breaks down.
A Skilled Mentor is a Skilled Coach.
It’s not surprising Scrum Masters fall into this trap so easily. Most new Scrum Masters have no coaching experience and are freshly minted by a certification which tells them exactly how Scrum should work.
The first thing they want to do is to go and implement it as exactly as they have been taught it, from the textbook.
We even have some misinterpreted Japanese words to excuse this behaviour, Shu-Ha-Ri, or very roughly; ‘learn the rules, bend the rules, become the rules’. More on that later.
A skilled Scrum Master also understands how to use mentoring to help teams learn how to organise themselves. Mentoring is very closely related to coaching.
A coaching conversation and a mentoring conversation may start in the same way, using open questions and clean language to understand the problem the team or individual have and want to solve. The difference being that once the mentor understands and recognises the problem, they can then choose to offer the benefit of their knowledge and experience with that problem and give the individual or team options on how they would like to proceed. Offering potential solutions and a choice, but still a far cry from telling a team how to organise themselves.
The coach may choose not to play the mentor and maintain a ‘coaching stance’. At which point they will start to illicit the options from the team or individual and ask them to choose a way forward from options they themselves came up with.
Setting Up For Success
Success can only come when the Scrum Master has built the right relationship with the team.
Consider Shu-Ha-Ri again. This originates from Martial Arts. In Martial Arts, a student chooses to work with a master to learn. This relationship works as the student has given the master permission to teach them.
Coaching and mentoring only work with the permission of those taking part. As the ICF described it, it’s a partnership. Coaching and mentoring without permission will build resistance and dysfunctional relationships.
Coaching and mentoring best support Scrum teams when the team has had a good foundation of Scrum knowledge already, as such training is important at the outset. While mentoring and coaching, we may also discover the team is struggling to solve problems as they lack the knowledge or mental models to help themselves. This is a good opportunity to return to some training.
When working with a team new to Scrum, it’s important to agree how this partnership will work, and explain the concept of Shu Ha Ri, so that the team can make an informed decision to go ahead with that approach, and not simply impose it upon them.
If we cannot build this kind of partnership, it’s better to stop and have a conversation about what we could do instead, than it is to press ahead with something that will only create dysfunction.
This often happens when we’ve skipped ahead to talking about a specific method (Scrum), and not started with the problems we are trying to solve, and how we might go about solving them, and if Scrum is even the right solution. If we can, start there.
It’s unfortunate for Scrum Masters that they are often hired after that decision has been made by management, which can make them look like an instrument of management to the team.
Even more important to be building partnerships, then.
Does a Scrum Master Need to be a Professional Coach?
It’s surprising how much value can be added with only a basic understanding of coaching.
Simply by being aware of the difference between teaching, mentoring and coaching, and setting yourself up in the right stance for the conversation at hand, we can steer clear of slipping into management behaviour.
With this awareness, we will begin to hold back from offering solutions, know when to step into a mentoring stance, and give the team opportunities to self organise that we may have otherwise accidentally denied them.
You don’t need to be offering yourself out as a professional coach with a list of executives for clients.
Not yet anyway.
Building a Coaching Capability
It’s important to build communities of practice within organisations so that they can sustain the growth of skills and knowledge.
A great way to practice coaching skills in a safe place is to run a coaching ‘DoJo’ as an activity for a Scrum Master community.
A DoJo is a space for immersive learning, traditionally in the field of martial arts.
In the coaching DoJo, participants will take turns at being coach, coached and observer, and practice giving each other clean feedback, building the muscle memory to avoid slipping back into old habits. It is something you can run repeatedly to gain more and more practice.
If you would like to talk to me about helping to build a coaching capability, or any other aspect of Agile transformation, delivery or coaching, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
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