The Paradox at the Heart of Scrum
Scrum delivers iterative customer value by having self-managing teams decide how to best build their product or service, while inspecting and adjusting how they work together along the way. Scrum’s power derives from the strength of an engaged team of diverse people that continually validate their solutions with their customers. It’s by far the most popular Agile methodology because it’s simple to learn and has so many documented successes.
But it’s not perfect. Especially in large companies, teams can struggle to work effectively in Scrum. Some of these problems are perhaps inevitable when you scale a process designed for a small team. Multiple scaled Agile frameworks exist with different types of alignment and planning meetings across all levels of a company to keep individual teams in sync with the company’s evolving strategic goals. Still, there are challenges.
It gets me wondering: why is something so simple to learn so hard to master? I’m convinced that it’s because there’s a paradox at the heart of Scrum.
An important factor in implementing Scrum is the need to move accountability from an individual (e.g., a manager) to the team. Scrum requires that the team own and manage their work in a way that unleashes their creativity and passion for solving business problems. In other words, the team alone decides the best way to accomplish their goals during each sprint.
The problem is that it’s difficult to build self-managing teams in a corporate environment without a few people leading the way. Call them coaches, guides, or teachers, these people need both a credible and deep knowledge of Scrum and an ability to inspire people towards change. Without some initial direction, most engineers just want to get better at their craft. Without someone leading the team through the forming and norming stages of a high-performing team, many engineers become frustrated with the inevitable disagreements and ineffective meetings, retreating into their individual work. Agile coaches set the vision for what’s possible, while mentoring and teaching the team to explore what techniques work for them. In other words, you need a strong leader that cultivates the inherent self-management skills in the team. It doesn’t happen automatically.
The challenge is that not everyone is good at this type of work. Many companies tap their technical leaders, but unfortunately technical acumen alone does not provide the skills needed to take teams from individual to group accountability. In fact, knowledge workers are taught, both implicitly and explicitly, that they are valued for their technical skills. For example, most compensation packages reward people for individual accomplishments, not what their teams achieve. While much of the Scrum and Leadership training is excellent, cultivating the craft of fostering self-direction takes a long time - usually more time than the company is willing to invest.
A more effective approach is to select or hire leaders with a proven track record. These people combine a deep knowledge of group dynamics and effective facilitation to guide teams that can truly own their work. They nurture an environment of trust where everyone on the team can experiment and fail without fear on their path to high-performance. Scrum thrives with these types of teams - even at scale.
Perhaps the most important skill for Agile leaders is knowing when to change their approach, as detailed by the graphic for this post. At first, a leader might need to direct a team to adopt Agile practices. Once the team knows the processes but struggles to do them effectively - a coaching approach helps the team self-organize around what works best for them. When the team is self-managing effectively, the leader assumes a mentoring stance, looking for the opportunity to step back into just delegating to a high-performing team. The biggest danger is a leader that doesn’t know when to step back and let the team do things on their own.
It’s difficult to navigate through the Scrum paradox. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Leaders with an true, humble Agile mindset are key to unleashing the power of a truly self-directed Scrum Team in large organizations. Without it, any Agile Transformation will struggle.
Coaching Agile leaders is my specialty. I’d be happy to talk to you about the best way to do it in your organization: schedule a free, 15-minute, conversation with me here.