Scrum Master, you are the leader without authority: Can you please Assure Success?

Once upon a time, leadership and authority used to consistently coexist, but more and more individuals are being appointed to leadership roles without having positional authority, which is the authority that comes from title, rank, and status.

A study done by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) discovered that many errors by flight captains were not challenged or corrected by crew members with less positional authority. One airline determined to check their crews via flight simulators, having the captains make fatal mistakes at a critical moment. The results of the experiment showed that 25% of the flights would have crashed because no one would have questioned the position of the one with the highest positional authority, the plane’s captain.

As a scrum master, you do not own the team members, but you are working with the scrum team members to get the work done.

How do you manage it? If you are in command, it was natural!! just scare the people! As that privilege is not there,in the new way of working, you require to implement something else. 

What else can you do? and this how it will be always

Should you complain? should you escalate to your boss when things are not functioning?

Just give it a thought 

“The farmer has patience and trusts the process. He just has the faith and deep understanding that through his daily efforts, the harvest will come. And then one day, almost out of nowhere, it does.”

― Robin S. Sharma, The Leader Who Had No Title: A Modern Fable on Real Success in Business and in Life

There are 10 steps which Scrum Master are doing and have to keep doing all these, perseverance is the password to success.

Most of the time, we realize nothing is working, but an escalation, complain is not the key, experiment with various steps to find better of doing things.

Building Trust: You as a Scrum Master need to establish trust with the team members, it will take time, but you have to invest a lot of effort. Once trust establishes the team can achieve everything for you. With trust you can influence your team members.you grow into the natural leader when they trust you, they will listen to you.

Build purpose and establish shared objectives: With the team in collaboration, establish a bigger purpose which inspires all the team members to contribute. Everyone should get motivated by shared goals. This will enables individuals to go beyond extra steps. You do not have to force the team members, they will figure it out. Once you keep inspiring people you naturally turn into the leader.

Build transparency across: It is your obligation to build transparency with facts, data, and in decision making. Put all the practice in the common wall where subjects are visible to all. The Why on a regular basis is evident. People know why they are performing what they are accomplishing and how those activities affect all the stakeholders.In a process you develop into a legitimate leader

Collaborative and democratic decision making. Involve all in the decision-making process. Take feedback from all the team members, they should feel they have been heard. It is their judgment, and they were also involved whatever may be the outcome appears. That ownership feeling will encourage the individuals. as you are with them, you grow into a genuine leader. They require to understand that you care about them without exhibiting any complaint sign in your face.

Establish the belief that you are the person to go for all trouble. You ensure any issues team members are seeking; you are offering your 100% to fix it. All the team members know you are the go-to person for everything and you are dealing with those issue with your level best.

You are passionate: You are demonstrating your passion in your endeavors. It comes out in your performance. You do not have to explain that you are performing hard. It is revealing in your body language, your deliverable and your day to day work.

Listen and understand others, you have a genuine interest to helps others. You spend time with the team members to figure out what they are presently working on and how can you aid them. You are curious to actually discover if anyway you can serve. That is a sincere interest to help the team.

You practice daily to enhance your EQ, everyday morning in front of the mirrors you rehearse how to adjust your various emotions. At work, you ensure you observe and moderate your emotional intelligence. You are continually polishing all your emotions sense and correcting those regularly. You also look at the feedback where emotion is out of control. Helps others also to do so wherever demand for.

Optimistic attitude: People prefer to be around with the individuals who can look at the bright side of the work. You are already an optimistic and constantly seeking to learn from the circumstance. People will make you as a leader when you have this style in your personality.

Appreciate often: You have the ability to diagnose the smallest great action accomplished and highlight those as an achievement in community. People choose to get recognize however may be the minor task . You ate not miserly in recognizing others; it inspires others to do these small great things more and more. They will come to you and ask for your advice.

These are all from my observation, you might have experienced something else, which you can share for others to learn.

Nurturing ourselves to align with Nature

In my book, The Agilist Guidebook - a reference for organizational agile Transformation, I spoke about Pancha Bhoota Model.

We all composed of 5 bhoota.

Five forces which drive everything. The same five forces we can identify within the Organization to obtain Organizational Agility.

According to the ancient theory of life on earth came into existence because of these elements

Look at your organization, How strong or weak all these forces are? What can you identify as a coach?

Is Air is pure enough ? or Polluted? Air governs the movement of all things in the universe, Air in the organization is like Agile leadership. In the Pancha Bhoota model, I consider Air is equal to Leadership. We all thrive with good quality air. Once Air quality degrade we get into many troubles.

How is the vastness of space? which I am comparing with an individual mindset. Do we have all growth mindset? or all stuck with a fixed mindset?

How is mother earth? how strong it is? Organizational development activities are rooted in the strength and fertility of the earth.

Are we all coaching each other, Leaders are acting as a coach? in the Panch bhoota model, it is like pure water, the life of all the creatures in the earth. Is it contaminated?

How is the fire? that is vital for everything, without fire, we can not do anything, that is the first human discovery to build the better life, to live a better life, same in the organizational context it is High-performing team,

All these pancha bhoota , how well they are balanced in the organization?

Five elements in the Pancha Bhoota Model are the enabler which will contribute to the organization to promote agility.

The old paradigm: Organizations as machines, The new paradigm: Organizations as living organisms. When living things appears, we need to take care of the organization like Panch bhoota takes care of our body.

In my forthcoming book, The Scrum Master Guidebook- A reference to obtain Mastery, I highlight, 7C Chakra Model.

We all have 7 chakras in our body, In yogic philosophy, Chakras are represented as energy vortex or houses of pranic energy that are found lying dormant in specific areas in our subtle body.

Energy centers or chakras filter and feed the human body with the essential energy from the chaos of the surrounding environment.

7C Chakra model, Communication, Creativity, Companionable, Competent Team, Change Management, Charismatic Leadership, and Catalyst --

• The Crown Chakra – All about Communication

• The Third Eye Chakra - All about Creativity and Innovation

• The Throat Chakra - All about Companionable skill

• The Heart Chakra - All about Competent Team

• The Solar Plexus Chakra - All about Change Management

• The Sacral Chakra – All about Charismatic Leadership

• The Root Chakra - All about Catalyst

The 7C Chakras in the human body are a gate that transmutes energy downward from the spiritual planes, which are the highest frequencies that enter into a person’s energy field. Energy from the physical body can be transmuted upward for being used in higher bodies.

When all these chakras are balanced, we become healthy and it reflects our personality.

7C chakras when strengthen Individual attains Obtains Agility.


When we combine these forces and takes care, we become powerful and ready to handle any challenges thrown upon us.

When all these energy chambers are disturbed , we fall sick and degrade our performance.

Let us give it a thought .....It has been a thousand years old truth!

Many roles of Mother in Law

How my mother-in-law wears many hats when she is here with us?

She is an extremely talented cook, Passionate cook, chooses to cook with many experiments. She is 75 now and stayed far away from where we are living now. 

I am not a good eater, so she is annoyed most of the time but my kids like eating delicious foods.

Every time she visits, she will do something different with the new recipes.

I have noticed she has applied many hats to explaining the cooking. Which is her favorite subject, BTW she was a school teacher. Now retired.

Some time is she is a coach, sometime mentor, sometime counselor , sometime consultant, and sometime trainer!!!

How? I am sharing this same description in my training to explain these points distinctly.

Sometimes she would ask you questions about what end result you choose and check if you had everything you required, what other material/ ingredients you might require and check with you that it matched your preferences. She is coaching for cooking. 

Sometimes she would share his or her recipe with you and his or her experience of how he or she does it. She is mentoring for cooking. As mentors, she brings their range of expertise, knowledge, and experience.

When we have to cook for many guests, she would examine any anxieties we had about cooking the foods, she is counseling. Counseling supports individuals in working through emotional distress or anxieties that prohibit them from functioning as well as they’d like to.

Sometimes she would check out the situation, provide three or four recipe options and examine which was appropriate for you. She was a consultant. Consultants bring knowledge and expertise in their areas of work and pass advice on to their clients.

Sometimes she would demonstrate how it was done, give you the equipment and ingredients you need, and observe while you were cooking it, giving feedback when required. She has become a Trainer. Great training is about preparing individuals with new skills and knowledge to help their personal and/or professional development.

We learn maximum when we perform it ourselves.90% of learning comes when we teach others. At the end of the day my mother in laws wants us to learn fast.

According to the coaching ladder, leaders will assure we reach to self-sustaining state, in our situation, my wife is equipped enough to run the cooking for several guests at any point of time, of course, we all have passed through these phases.

I am sure you have also observed similar type of scenarios and helped your team by explaining when to coach , when to mentor and when to delegate.

Tools for Coaches

All these tools I am actively applying for my coaching engagement.

The expectations of life depend upon diligence; the mechanic that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tools. - Confucius

• Spheres of Influence: 

3 part of this tool

Subjects we can control

Subjects we can influence

Subjects we can’t influence, either right now or at all times

Helping them determine what is within their control, what is in their sphere of influence, and what cannot be controlled. 

Most of the time , I explain this tool to my scrum master to apply this and check if they can do anything about the situation?

• Journaling:

Having a journal can be advantageous for many diverse reasons as a coaching exercise. Daily journaling facilitates observation and can stimulate useful brainstorming about how to better strive toward the objectives. Coaches can help ensure that their clients journaling is essential by maintaining some guidance.

We as a coach also maintain a journal about our observation about a team and reflect and help the team to become better.

• The GROW model:

The GROW model is a simple method for goal setting and problem-solving in coaching. It includes for stages:

G for Goal: The goal is what the client wants to accomplish. It should be defined as clear as possible. You could combine it with the SMART method described earlier

R for Reality: That’s the status quo, where our client is right now. The client describes her current situation and how far she is away from her goal.

O for Obstacles and Options: What are the obstacles (roadblocks) that keep your client from achieving the goal? Once these obstacles are identified you can find ways to overcome them – the options.

W for Way forward: Once identified the choices need to be translated into action steps that will take your client to accomplish her goal.

Identifying Limiting Belief:

Compose a list of all your limiting beliefs; the beliefs that stop you from moving forward. You start questioning your limiting beliefs you will start to create doubt which will lead to you changing your beliefs questions that you can ask yourself to challenge this belief.

It helps team members to come out with many assumptions which were bothering them.

• Wheel of life and how to balance it is :

All these are the below pillars of the Wheel of life

Health

Wealth

Happiness

Spiritual

Mental 

How balanced they are ?

As a result of this exercise, your client will have a visual map – which will look almost like a spider web. This visual map will give your client a general idea of their desired state of being in relation to their current state.

• SMART goals: 

SMART goals bring structure and accountability into goals.SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. Therefore, a SMART goal incorporates all of these criteria to help focus your efforts and increase the chances of achieving that goal.

• Powerful question:

Why, What, How, When and more open-ended questions.

Powerful questions are a reflection of engaged listening and finding out the other person’s viewpoint that is established through paraphrasing. This offers a progression from listening, paraphrasing for learning, and then asking powerful questions that provide clarity or mediation of thinking.

• Personal SWOT Tool.

Help clients analyze their Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. A Personal SWOT helps clients think about careers in terms of their strengths—and identify potentially “transferable” strengths.

• Working Agreement :

A Working Agreement is a valuable tool to employ for installing a shared understanding and way of working for teams. Also called a Social Contract, this practice is an excellent foundation for building high performing teams.

In coaching engagement , it is essential we form the coaching agreement and contract with the client.

• Value discovery and Purpose identification:

Identifying your personal core values is an anchor or turning point. When there is conflict or a boundary issue, it’s possible because someone has stepped on a personal value. Once we are connected with Value and bigger purpose , we become self driven and unstoppable.

I share this tool with the scrum masters to use this tool with their team members.

• Socratic Questions:

The Socratic Questioning technique is an effective way to examine ideas in depth. It can be used at all levels and is a helpful tool for all teachers. Question related to Conceptual clarification questions, Probing assumptions, probing rationale, reasons and evidence, Questioning viewpoints and perspectives, Probe implications and consequences, Questions about the question.

• Eat the Frog :

As Mark Twain once said “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.” Eating the frog means to just do it, otherwise the frog will eat you meaning that you’ll end up procrastinating it the whole day. Take the most important item first.

A good tool improves the way you work. A great tool improves the way you think. Jeff Duntemann

• Collaborate or not?

Because no two individuals have exactly the same expectations and desires, conflict is a natural part of our interactions with others.

The Thomas Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument is designed to measure a person’s behavior in conflict situations. “Conflict situations” are those in which the concerns of two people appear to be incompatible. In such situations, we can describe an individual’s behavior along two dimensions: (1) assertiveness, the extent to which the person attempts to satisfy his own concerns, and (2) cooperativeness, the extent to which the person attempts to satisfy the other person’s concerns.These two basic dimensions of behavior define five different modes for responding to conflict situations:Competing ,Accommodating ,Avoiding ,Collaborating and Compromising 

• Force Field analysis:

Force Field Analysis was created by Kurt Lewin in the 1940s.The idea behind Force Field Analysis is that situations are maintained by an equilibrium between forces that drive change and others that resist change.For change to happen, the driving forces must be strengthened or the resisting forces weakened.The tool is useful for making decisions by analyzing the forces for and against a change, and for communicating the reasoning behind your decision.

I am sure , you are already using these tools or more. Please do share if anything more , we can use.

It is essential to have good tools, but it is also essential that the tools should be used in the right way.

Wallace D. Wattles