The Scrum Master is a leader who serves the Scrum Team and the organization

We can say that the Scrum Master exercises a type of leadership that serves the Scrum Team, so as to empower its work and the organization as a whole (SCHWABER; SUTHERLAND, 2020) in order to make it more agile. To better describe the nature of this leadership and to illustrate some practices that can help with this work, we will use some ideas that are already recognized and have been applied. From its 2011 edition until the 2017 edition, the official Scrum Guide openly identified the servant-leader model as the correct one to be followed (SCHWABER; SUTHERLAND, 2011, 2013, 2017). While this prescription has been toned down in the 2020 edition, it remains useful as a recommendation. I also include the models of the skilled facilitator, event facilitator and self-managed team leader, which are often useful to us in our work.

Servant-leader

In the model created by Robert K. Greenleaf, a servant-leader primarily serves, always ensuring that the highest-priority needs of the followers are being met (GREENLEAF; SPEARS, 2002). Unlike traditional leadership, where people work to serve their leader, a servant-leader works to serve the people. His status as a leader derives from the free acceptance of his followers in response to his role as a servant. A servant-leader seeks to involve those being led in the decision-making process, is strongly supported through ethical and caring behavior, and promotes the growth of others while improving the well-being and quality of organizational life (SPEARS, 2010).

The Scrum Master serves the Developers, the Product Owner, and the organization as a whole. As a servant-leader, he puts the needs of the Developers and the Product Owner first and encourages, supports, and enables them to fully develop their potential and skills, perform better and become more autonomous at the same time while being inserted in an organizational environment that favors these results.

Ten essential characteristics of a servant-leader are recognized (SPEARS, 2010):

• Listening – Listens intently to those being led, understand what is and what is not being said, seek to identify their goals and help them to clarify those goals.
• Empathy – Empathizes with those being led so that they feel accepted and recognized for who they are. The servant-leader always assumes the good intentions of those being led, not rejecting them as people even when he considers certain behaviors or results to be unacceptable.
• Healing – The servant-leader has the potential to heal individuals and their relationships with others. This healing is an important transformational and integrative force.
• Awareness – General awareness and, in particular, self-awareness allow the servant-leader to have a systemic view and to be alert in order to perceive and understand situations involving ethics, power, and values.
• Persuasion – Influences, convinces, or builds a consensus to promote decisions in the organization, rather than using authority, coercion or any kind of formal power.
• Conceptualization – Faces problems or the organization from a perspective that goes beyond day-to-day realities and short-term goals, also encompassing a broader-based conceptual vision in a balanced way and thus defining a future to be pursued.
• Foresight – Predicts the most likely outcomes from a situation or decision based on an understanding of past lessons, present realities, and intuition.
• Stewardship – Committed to serving, above all, the needs of those being led and the common good, acting as their guardian.
• Commitment to the growth of people – Nurtures the personal and professional growth of those being led within the organization, believing that they have an intrinsic value greater than their contributions to the work.
• Building community – Identifies ways to build a communal coexistence among those being led, encouraging a sense of belonging and the sharing of social norms and common goals.

Skilled facilitator

In Roger Schwarz’s (2002) classic definition, group facilitation is: a process in which a person whose selection is acceptable to all members of the group, who is substantively neutral, and who has no substantive decision-making authority diagnoses and intervenes to help a group improve how it identifies and solves problems and makes decisions, to increase the group’s effectiveness. Based on this definition, Schwarz created the model of the “skilled facilitator.”

We can use the model created by Schwarz to describe and justify some characteristics that we expect from the Scrum Master in his work with the Developers and the Product Owner – who, together with the Scrum Master, constitute the Scrum Team. In particular, I adopt here the approach in which the facilitator teaches the team to improve its work processes and to depend less and less on him, which Schwarz calls “developmental facilitation.”

The facilitator enables the team to increase its effectiveness. The Scrum Master’s main role as a facilitator is to help the Scrum Team increase its effectiveness. To this end, he helps enable the Developers and the Product Owner to improve:

• their processes: how they work together – that is, how they communicate, what their creative process is like, how they identify and solve problems, how they deal with conflicts and how they relate to their environment.
• their structure: relatively stable characteristics that are important for the functioning of the group, such as the existence of clear goals to be worked on, an adequate team composition to carry out the tasks, motivating tasks, consistent values and beliefs with an effective team, explicit norms or agreements derived from these values and beliefs and with sufficient time to carry out their work and improve the way they work.
• their context: how the context in which the team is inserted (for example, its organization or sector) influences its effectiveness, such as the existence of clear organizational goals, an organizational culture that supports the use of Scrum and management practices that make the team more effective, rewarding team (and not individual) behaviors consistent with the team’s goals, information needed to perform the work, feedback on their work, access to training and consulting services that maybe needed to allow them to resolve problems, increase their knowledge and develop the necessary skills to conduct their work, access to the necessary material and technology and an adequate physical environment.

The Scrum Master, as a facilitator, intervenes directly in the Scrum Team’s process, structure, and context to help it become more effective. At the same time, the Scrum Master encourages the Scrum Team to reflect on how it can improve its processes, structure and context and teaches it to develop the necessary skills to act on its own, since the responsibility for increasing its effectiveness belongs to the team itself.

These changes, however, can only take place if the Scrum Team has the necessary authority to make them and if all its members share accountability for these changes. Although the Scrum Team does not have direct control over its context, it can influence it and bring about changes that enable it to become more effective.

The facilitator is neutral. As a facilitator, the Scrum Master is a sufficiently neutral person who aims to increase the group’s accountability and ability to solve its own problems. In this sense, he does not directly interfere in the content of the group’s discussions. In order for this neutrality to be possible, the Scrum Master preferably should not accumulate the responsibility of a Developer or the Product Owner, who have their own opinions and interests and, therefore, are invariably biased.

Situations in which a decision is required could quickly expose the bias of a Scrum Master who is also a Developer, weakening his ability to act as a facilitator. Imagine a situation where the Developers have different opinions, and this developer-facilitator shares one of the opinions. Will the other Developers who have different opinions to the facilitator, accept this well?

Situations of conflict involving such a facilitator-Developer – which will invariably occur – could become even more problematic, as he will inevitably be biased and unable to act as a facilitator to help resolve the issue.

The facilitator enables the team to increase its autonomy. An important part of the facilitator’s job is to enable Scrum Team members to jointly make their own choices and decisions based on sufficient information. As they make these free and informed choices, they naturally become committed to them, while at the same time reviewing them and keeping them up to date. As a facilitator, the Scrum Master’s work is key to enabling self-management.

An important element to enabling free and informed choices is transparency. To ensure this, the Scrum Master avoids making arrangements with certain members of the Scrum Team or with third parties, whether to withhold information from one or the other, or to conceal behavior. Instead, the Scrum Master actively helps the Scrum Team members ensure the transparency of all available information.

In general, the team is more effective if it is internally committed to its choices. Nevertheless, even if the Scrum Master is doing a proper facilitation and even if there is sufficient information available, the team’s decisions are free and thus can be bad. And even if the Scrum Master believes that a certain choice is not appropriate, his intervention is not, in principle, recommended. His role in this case is to encourage the team to reflect on the consequences of their decisions and adjust them accordingly. By intervening with his own opinions or, worse, making the decision for the team, the Scrum Master reduces both the team’s autonomy and his own credibility as a facilitator.

To increase the Scrum Team’s autonomy and develop its effectiveness, the Scrum Master’s interventions as a facilitator should always seek to reduce the Scrum Team’s dependence on the Scrum Master himself. In this way, we can say that the Scrum Master works towards becoming less and less necessary, including enabling Scrum Team members to act as facilitators themselves.

The facilitator is not an intermediary or representative. The Scrum Master also does not act as an intermediary between the other members of the Scrum Team, or between the Scrum Team and people external to it. To the contrary, he encourages Scrum Team members to develop their own skills to communicate and deal directly with whoever is needed.

The Scrum Master also does not act as a representative of the Scrum Team or any of its members with respect to other members or external persons. In this sense it is not the Scrum Master, for example, who presents the results of the work or the performance of the Scrum Team or any of its members to the rest of the organization.

He does not have the authority to use any information obtained from the facilitation to influence external decisions regarding the Scrum Team members, such as bonuses or punishments. If he did, the trust of the other Scrum Team members in the Scrum Master would be compromised, not to mention his neutrality and, consequently, his effectiveness as a facilitator. This type of information, if necessary, is provided directly by the Scrum Team members themselves.

Likewise, the Scrum Master does not act as an intermediary between the Developers and the Product Owner or between different Developers. To the contrary, he encourages them to communicate with each other directly.

The facilitator is an expert in processes, not content. As a process expert, the Scrum Master knows which elements contribute the most to making the Scrum Team more effective.

An important part of these elements is the Scrum Master’s own knowledge and skills in facilitation. As part of his work, the Scrum Master teaches the team to use facilitation elements in their interactions, thereby increasing the team’s autonomy.

Another important part of the work processes is the Scrum framework itself, which should be correctly understood and used by the Scrum Team. The Scrum Master thus teaches the Scrum rules, accountabilities, events, and artifacts to the team as a whole, whenever necessary, and to people in the organization who need this knowledge to be able to support the team’s work.

Therefore, while not interfering directly in the content of group discussions, the Scrum Master works with the Scrum Team at the process level, identifying these processes and teaching them to those involved whenever he considers necessary.

Event facilitator

Michael Wilkinson (2004), in his book The Secrets of Facilitation: The S.M.A.R.T. Guide to Getting Results with Groups, defines a facilitated session as: a highly structured meeting in which the meeting leader (the facilitator) guides the participants through a series of predefined steps to arrive at a result that is created, understood, and accepted by all participants. Also, according to the author, facilitation techniques are appropriate whenever a group needs to create a common understanding and acceptance to be successful in reaching a certain result.

In addition to facilitating the day-to-day work of the Scrum Team, the Scrum Master has the important role of acting as a facilitator during Scrum events. He encourages the attendants to actively participate in discussions, helping them stay focused on the event’s goals and reach shared conclusions.

We can understand any of the Scrum events as a facilitated session that has a specific path to be followed and a specific result to be achieved. The expected result from the Sprint Planning meeting, for example, is a plan for the Sprint – that is, the Sprint Backlog and the Sprint Goal. The expected result from the Sprint Review meeting is feedback from the customers and other stakeholders on the Increment or Increments of the product implemented by the Developers during the Sprint.

The characteristics of an event facilitator described by Wilkinson are very similar to those of the “skilled facilitator” described earlier. According to the author, an event facilitator does not interfere in the content of discussions, nor does he offer any solutions or his own opinions. In reality, he serves the group by guiding the participants through predefined steps to achieve specific results, using his knowledge of group dynamics and the steps of the process.

The facilitator creates an environment in which the participants feel comfortable in contributing. In general, he answers questions with questions and knows how to ask the right questions that will encourage the participants to reach their own conclusions.

The facilitator also seeks to prevent dysfunctional behaviors that may occur during the session, helping the group, for example, to establish its own rules of conduct. He is able to recognize and deal with dysfunctional behaviors when they occur, seeking solutions based on their real causes. In addition, the facilitator helps the group to keep its focus on the meeting’s results and build a consensus around the generated solutions.

At the end, the results of the facilitated session should have been created, understood, and accepted by all the participants.

Leader of a self-managed team

The works of Cummings (1978), Manz & Sims (1987) and Druskat & Wheeler (2003), based on research conducted on the practice – mainly in industry – identify a type of leadership that often emerges in self-managed teams. I used these references in my master’s dissertation (Armony, 2010).

Self-managed teams are adopted in different areas of work. Although it may seem paradoxical, practice shows that self-managed teams often have leaders. This person’s primary role, however, is to facilitate the self-management, not manage the team. The leader of a self-managed team, therefore, has the important role of leading the team towards the team leading itself.

The Scrum Master has many of the characteristics of a leader of a self-managed team. This type of leader facilitates self-management mainly by encouraging the team to self-observe and self-evaluate, so that the team itself monitors, becomes aware of and evaluates its performance; and by encouraging the team to self-reinforce, so that its members demonstrate to each other that they value good work done by a colleague and value the team’s high performance.

These encouragement actions are most effective when the leader is able to create a trusting and caring relationship with the Scrum Team members. And this relationship facilitates the collection of information that determines the types of actions that should be encouraged.

To be effective, the leaders of self-managed teams perform both internally and externally oriented roles for the team, working within the organization that contains them and constantly crossing the boundary between the two sides. The effective leader is able to build relationships with both the team members and other individuals or units of the organization that may affect the team’s performance (such as senior management, support areas and other groups), seeking to understand both perspectives.

In this work, the person leading a self-managed team has neither power nor gives orders but gains access to key information from both contexts through good rapport, political insight and skill in asking questions. He then uses this key information to align the team’s needs with those of the organization and vice-versa, in order to make both the team and the organization behave in a way that facilitates the effectiveness of both.

An example of this work involves preventing a decision made by the team, and which in fact belongs to the team, from being rejected by the organization. This also allows the leader to promote the team’s power of action and decision, leading it to assume greater accountability for its results.