5 Essential Skills for Scrum Masters

Let us discuss the essential skills for SCRUM Masters. The underlying principle in Agile leadership is “reduced trust deficit” between the team and the leader. Which means there must be no lack of trust between them. And for this to happen the initiative must come from the leader of the Agile team. In the case of a SCRUM team, it is a SCRUM master.

And so, a SCRUM Master is not your typical Project Manager or Team Lead. He or she would need some special People skills to keep in sync with the pulse of the team.

Who is a SCRUM Master?

In simple terms, a SCRUM Master is a servant leader. Servant Leadership is a topic by itself, but to keep it short, it is a people centric role that deals with all round people development. While an Agile team is self-organized, the leadership role here is more focused on greasing the rust so that the team meets their committed Sprint goals.

While the team is focused on the sprint goals and on a roll, there must be some one who pulls things together. He or she must support the team on all they need to achieve the commitment.

The 5 essential skills for SCRUM Masters

Let is talk about the essential skills for SCRUM Masters

#1 Lean Thinking

This comes from Lean methodologies, which in turn originated from Japanese car manufacturing companies. To put it simple this approach focuses on removing wastes from the systems and increasing value being delivered.

Agile practices are a subset of Lean thinking. Most of the techniques use in Agile frameworks have been either borrowed directly from earlier Lean practices, or implementation of Lean principles. If the SCRUM Master tunes himself to Lean thinking, he is genuinely agile in that sense.

#2 Emotional Intelligence

Here comes the people skills of the SCRUM Master. Simply put, Emotional Intelligence is the ability to:

1. Influence others emotions (Positively of course)
2. Control ones own emotions

And this skill is more important in this role because it involves a lot of people interaction. Emotional Intelligence is applied not only on the team members, but also on other stakeholders like the customers or people from other teams.

With this skill a SCRUM Master is more aware on what kind of response his decisions and communication may invoke. And he can be better prepared for those responses

#3 Systems Thinking

It is important for the leader here to understand the BIG picture. This can be handy for two reasons:

1. Any decision taken by SCRUM Master is thought with the BIG picture in mind
2. The SCRUM Master can help the team take a rational decision when they are stuck with ambiguity. Your understanding of the holistic scene, can guide them towards the right direction.

But be careful, you may end up subconsciously influencing the team with your opinions on the topic. The goal here is to help the team take decisions.

#4 Coaching Skills

Coaching is a long term professional relationship between a mentor and mentee. You often here this term in sports where the coach observes the athlete’s performance on the ground and gives him feedback and helps him or her improve.

Remember a SCRUM Master is an Agile coach at a team level. He would coach the team both at individual level and group level. Not only does he coach on Agile principles and mindset, but also on other aspects related to professional development.

#5 Servant Leader

We briefly talked about this earlier. To summarize it even easier, here is what a servant leader does:

1. Facilitate: Facilitates various formal informal ceremonies across various iterations.
2. Helps team overcome impediments: Team should only worry about achieving the goals that they have committed for the Sprint. Any unplanned or unexpected spoiler comes the way should be handled by the SCRUM Master, making the life of the team members easy.
3. Shield the team from distractions: Team can be distracted from anyone or anything. Most frequently it is from outside the team or even customer. A SCRUM Master should shield the team from these. Meaning, he must be the primary point of contact for anything other the committed goals for the Sprint. That way the team can only focus on their work.
4. Re-iterate the Product Vision to the team: With all the low level tasks being worked upon by the team, it is easy for them to lose sight of the complete picture. Constantly re-iterating the vision helps them understand how and why would their individual tasks impact the Vision of the product.
5. Coaches and helps in all-round development:

Pitfalls

A SCRUM Master should better Technical?

No! I might receive some brick bats here, but this is contrary to popular opinion out there. But good practice says that SCRUM Masters must be non-technical. This is primarily to do with the guideline towards “lesser influence of the servant leader” in decision making.

A good Agile team takes decisions with consensus. A SCRUM master can guide the team towards decision making but not influence them. Else it becomes Autocratic decision making and beats the very purpose of being a self-organized team.

Project Manager can play SCRUM Master?

No! As we touched upon earlier an Agile team with minimal “Trust Deficit” is well greased and moves faster. However if the leader comes with a lot of authority, then the deficit starts piling up. Particularly if the Project Manager comes with the authority to Reward good performance and penalize bad performance.

And then the team starts to play it safe by buffering their commitments. For example, Estimates from the team would include padding without your knowledge. Now you can no longer consider those estimated realistic.

SCRUM Master is a Part time role?

No! The team needs the complete attention of the SCRUM Master. Particularly the Emotional Intelligence of the leader would keep in preoccupied in understanding the ongoing dynamics of the Agile team during a sprint.

Conclusion

Though from the surface a SCRUM master might look like a trimmed down version of a Project Manager, there is a lot more to it. And mostly it has to do with people skills like Emotional Intelligence and Empathy. Unfortunately a lot of SCRUM Master interviews only focus the knowledge of Agile ceremonies and roles. And the above skills are overlooked. It is also vital that when a person is moved to this role, he must be trained or coached on above skills.