Mentoring advice to our younger selves

Because Scrum Masters need to be the mentors we wish we had

The idea of this post is that the four Serious Scrum editors (Paddy Corry, Willem-Jan Ageling, Sjoerd Nijland, and John Clopton) wanted to have a conversation about mentoring, and the advice we might give to new scrum masters.

In this post, we look back at how we ended up in scrum master roles, and try to be the mentor our younger selves didn’t have when we were starting out. We agreed to take turns writing one paragraph at a time, and see what we could come up with. It’s definitely an experiment, and maybe a kind of a retrospective :) As ever, your feedback would be great. Please clap, respond, or follow if you find this experiment useful, we’d really appreciate it.

Paddy Corry:

The thing that strikes me now about my start as a scrum master is that my decision to switch from a development role almost felt like it was a single conversation. At the time, I was a full-time developer, but in my heart of hearts, I wasn’t sure if I would ever be a great developer. I had studied business, not engineering or IT, and if I’m honest, I was more interested in psychology than design patterns.

So, one day I was asked to take a scrum master role and the next day, I said yes. That was it. I was a scrum master. In my memory, it was a single, almost absurdly short conversation. Literally, one day I was a developer, and the next I was a scrum master.

However, it didn’t really pan out like that, as to me, I still felt more… useful to engage with the team as a developer than as a scrum master. It took me some time to leave a development role behind, stop jumping in to write code, and really embrace the role of scrum master.

So, what advice would I give myself, knowing what little I know now!

1. First piece of advice for myself: avoid hybrid roles. Insist on that. You can’t be a coder and a scrum master at the same time. Do one thing, and focus on mastery.
2. Second: get involved in the community right now. Don’t limit your sphere of experience to just one group, and don’t feel like you should wait until you’re more experienced. All good conversations benefit from a range of perspectives, and you’ll learn far more rapidly with the support of the community as a bedrock.
3. Third: Show gratitude, even online. Thank people for things that help you on your journey, everyone appreciates it. This is part of your new role as scrum master, being an example to others.
4. Fourth: get ready to read, and I mean a lot. As a new scrum master, you have some ‘core texts’ to digest, and pretty fast if you want to become literate. Also, find those core texts. Learning now needs to be a part of your everyday routine. You’ll be facilitating it in teams, but you also need to get ahead of it yourself.
5. Fifth: write more. If that’s your passion, just do it. Creativity breeds invention. Write often, have conversations.

Willem-Jan Ageling:

Before I started as a Scrum Master I was a Project Manager (before that I was a Software Developer). The company did Waterfall using Scrum. An impossible combination. I soon resented how the ideas that we had at the start and the plans that where created based on the ideas were seen as immutable by many stakeholders. Every new insight that lead to a change in scope (and as a result in budget and timelines) was met with resentment. I got push-back for doing proper project management.

I was happy with the radical shift to ‘Agile’ with Scrum as our framework. But it certainly required a shift in how I did my work as well, from a Project Manager to a Scrum Master. From being more directive to being a servant leader. My advise to my younger Scrum Master self would have been:

1. Aim to understand the core of Scrum. You can do all the events, have all the roles, use all the artifacts. But if you don’t know what Scrum is about you will get very frustrated soon.
2. Give the power to the Development Team and facilitate. Give advice, but let the team make the decisions and learn from those decisions.
3. Experiment. Don’t be afraid to try something out that can fail. Instead see it as an experience that gives you insights and from which you learn.
4. Be brave and stand your ground. You can expect a lot of push-back from stakeholders that have difficulty understanding the impact of adopting Scrum. It’s the Scrum Master’s task to shield the team, even it it means standing up to people higher in ‘rank’. This is daunting, but required from the Scrum Master.
5. Don’t think you know best. Be humble. Listen. And learn.

Sjoerd Nijland:

I worked for almost ten years in a global product marketing driven organisation. Developing a global online platform and managing the implementation of worldwide e-commerce, requires close collaboration with pretty much every single department and numerous external vendors, both locally as internationally. Coming from a background in Media Production, Software Engineering and Web Development, it was challenging, but necessary, to grasp the full scope of global operations of an international enterprise. It’s too dynamic and complex to be effectively executed through traditional project management approaches using roadmaps and steering committees. Switching to cross-functional (e-business) teams, working on short weekly objectives, truly changed the game. Teams were formed with specialists from multiple departments, offices and organisations from worldwide locations.

That said, this new formation introduced its own new set of challenges. We were all totally unexperienced to working in such a dynamic setup. We needed some kind of framework to align. So we started to ‘Scrum’. Or so we thought. We sucked at it, but didn’t know it (or admit it). No one really took it seriously as no one understood the true scope of Scrum. Sure, we enjoyed a one day hyper-interactive Scrum Training and all sorts of dark micromanagement practises were introduced to whip our devs out the door. Even though we had a cross-functional team, our web developers were still being discriminated from other team members with practises like time-tracking and ticket-timeboxing.

I thought this couldn’t be right and thus started my journey to getting Scrum right. I was the only one to take Scrum seriously and later felt that resulted in me not being taken seriously. I followed the road to PSM III, worked with other coaches and Scrum Masters, actively involved myself in the community and started writing about my experiences.

I switched to the agency side, as I was eager to expand my experience to working with various organisations across various industries. This agency, lacking knowledge on Scrum, couldn’t yet determine if Scrum would be right for them. They somewhat conservatively asked me to pivot to Agile Coach. I naïvely agreed.

During this time I truly re-educated myself. It was highly valuable to experience all the challenges involved with changing to self-organising, cross-functional teams. Working towards changing the dynamics of collaboration with clients and establishing a continuous improvement routine. Oh, the struggles.

Looking back, the advise I would give myself (and those on a similar journey) is:

1. Deal with your own Ego first. Your Ego is your biggest impediment to awesomeness. It’s okay to speak up and say “I don’t think I can do this alone” or “I have trouble getting it right”. Don’t try to be right, learn why you are wrong. Teams will at times be looking at you to set the tone. During scary escalations, under high pressure, stay calm. Know when to step back and just be an active listener. In returning a ‘No’, explain what is needed to turn it into a ‘Yes’.
2. Being a Scrum Master, in no way means you master Scrum. The more you learn about Scrum, the more you know you don’t know. Knowledge of Scrum is worthless if not shared. How could I have possibly been so naïve to assume that my conversational partners shared the same understanding of the terminology I used?
3. Always level up. Enable yourself and your team to level up by enabling ‘continuous improvement‘ through experiments and training. Don’t allow your own personal development to be limited or dictated by the organisation you work for. Always narrow your focus down to what would be a good first next step. You won’t always get to where you wanted to be, but looking back you will often be happier for it.
4. Retreat and refuel often. People around you will likely tire of your seemingly tireless drive for change, quality, exposing anti-patterns, and dealing with conflict and failures. There will be moments during which you will feel completely overwhelmed. You will often feel insecure and misunderstood. As a Scrum Master you might easily compromise out of fear for job security. Step back at times. Become a more active listener.
5. Stop using e-mail… and Jira.

My last bit of advise to myself would be to ‘stay naïve’. Having written all this, I’m pretty sure my younger self would have stubbornly dismissed all of it. Oh, and my younger self would probably return the favour and tell me to learn how to keep it short.

John Clopton:

I fell into Agile, and before I became a Scrum Master, I made a living as a Front End Developer. I lived, and breathed HTML, CSS, and Javascript for well over a decade at a large, corporate IT shop. I fell into that as well. Before that, I planned to move to Los Angeles with my classmates to get into film. I studied film, and video, and had every intention of becoming a director. And before that, I’d hoped my time at Art School would lead to a gig as a graphic designer. Sheesh! Talk about change.

When I attended our mandatory 2-day Agile training, I had an “a ha” moment, and everything clicked. I dove head-first into learning more beyond the initial course, eventually leaving the corporate world, and started down the path of Scrum Master. Jumping in my time-traveling DeLorean, here’s what I’d tell my past self when starting that journey:

1. Find a mentor, and get involved in the Agile Community immediately. Someone else has already experienced the same struggles. Learn everything you can from others. You don’t have to figure out everything yourself.
2. Know what the hell you’re talking about. The Scrum Guide is regularly updated, so make sure you’re aware of each revision. You can generally tell when people studied for their CSM/PSM based on the language they use. That’s a dead giveaway for which version they used to study, and possibly how long ago they read it. Bookmark that mug, and refer to it often.
3. Don’t be a know-it-all, or a Scrum Bully. Like Confucius said, “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” Learn to actively listen.
4. Learn Kanban. It’s not Scrum vs. Kanban; they can play well together. While you’re at it, learn about other frameworks, and methods too. If you can’t speak intelligently on them, you’re not doing anyone any favors. Leverage whatever can to help your teams improve. Never stop learning.
5. Let people fail. When I say that, I don’t mean let the project fail, and cost the company millions. Like Scrum is about delivering in small batches, let folks fail that way too. Resist the urge to solve problems for people. Though it may initially may seem like you’re helping, you’re inadvertently creating an environment where you’re indispensable, and it’ll be harder for the team to be self-sufficient.
6. Like Kenny Rogers said, “You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em. Know when to walk away, know when to run.” I didn’t know it at the time, but some of the best advice early on in my career when dealing with people that refused to change was to consider finding another spot. I’m not advocating quitting your job, just to know what you’re in for. Part of a Scrum Master’s job is to be a pain in the ass, and disrupt the status quo. That has the tendency to ruffle feathers. If you’re up for it, and have the patience to wade through it all, you’ll come through the other side victorious. If not, you might be in for a rough ride with no end in sight.

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