“A Scrum Master should be a benevolent dictator”

Are you serious? — episode 32

Someone once told me: “You are our benevolent dictator”. When he said this I was truly shocked. Here I am, trying to coach the team towards self-organisation. I was told that I am a dictator.

He then said: “Well you aren’t, but I think a Scrum Master should be. A Scrum Master knows best what’s good for the team and should implement improvements in the best interest of the team.” This made me feel slightly better. But still… here’s a team member who thinks that the Scrum Master calls the shots. That still got me worried.

Servant Leader

The Scrum Guide says:

“The Scrum Master is a servant-leader for the Scrum Team.” — SG

Here’s a fitting depiction of what this entails:

“Instead of the people working to serve the leader, the leader exists to serve the people. “ — Vaneet Kashyap; Santosh Rangnekar

The servant leader does this as follows:

“A Servant Leader shares power, puts the needs of the employees first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible” — Sen Sendjaya; James C. Sarros

A servant leader shares the power. This is crucial. This makes a servant leader the opposite of a dictator.

Scrum Master services

The Scrum Guide is also very clear about this. The Scrum Master coaches, helps and facilitates as services for the Development Team. The pivotal part of her/his services is the coaching in self-organisation.

Bottom Line

When a Scrum Master is being perceived as a benevolent dictator, know that there’s something very wrong. Either the Scrum Master doesn’t understand the role or the person making the statement has a wrong perception. Perhaps this is a sign that more people within the organisation don’t understand Scrum well enough. Then this could be a symptom for something even worse: the fact that the organisation adopted a form Dark Scrum.

A Scrum policeman can add value, but only to immature teams or teams brand new to scrum for example. Eventually independence is key. This requires a coach, not a dictator.

Did you like the article? Then it would be awesome if you’d clap 👏🏻. I am also very keen to learn what you think about this topic.

My twitter profile is https://twitter.com/WJAgeling

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