As a Scrum Master, you will need to interface with four different aspects of an organization; business, technology, product, and people. This article will focus on the people aspects and required soft skills for Scrum Master.
A Scrum Master is a doer, teacher, trainer, mentor, leader, and coach. They display outstanding situational leadership. They play a pivotal role in Scrum by influencing every aspect of product development and organizational operations. And they do it by influencing the people on these varieties of issues. They will need superior soft skills to succeed, given their expectations.
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What are soft skills for scrum masters?
Soft skills are the interpersonal or people skills that allow for better interpersonal interactions. Such interactions are critical to motivating diverse people to share and work towards a common goal.
As the hierarchical organization structures become obsolete, replaced by flatter ones, soft skills become even more prominent. With the earlier command and control structure, one leader made the decisions and directed others to follow those. However, with creating and complex solutions development, this approach does not work. Hence, today’s leaders must influence, not “lead” or “manage” in the conventional sense.
The Scrum Masters are typical examples of leaders who ensure business and customer value delivery by influencing the Agile teams through superior soft skills. So let’s dig deeper into those skills and see how they create an impact for Scrum Masters.
Communication Skills
While general communication skills are essential for any role, there are a few specific aspects that a great Scrum Master will need to possess.
It would be best if you were a good and active listener. As a Scrum Master, you are responsible for understanding and removing impediments for the Scrum team. Active listening allows you to separate substance from the noise by separating cause from symptoms and then arrive at an optimal solution.
Active listening also implies that you are invested in the conversation and the other person. You are an equal participant to ensure that you have a meaningful and valuable discussion.
Another critical skill is asking questions. So often, the team members won’t be comfortable talking about the problems independently. But a Scrum Master with excellent interpersonal skills will ask the right questions to help them open up about the challenges they are facing.
Empathy
Active listening & empathy complement each other. Active listening skills help you be empathetic, while empathy enables better active listening as you are genuinely interested in what others have to say. Empathy is the ability to understand and share others’ feelings and experiences. You put yourself in others’ shoes and imagine what it is to feel what they feel. You know the situation from their perspective. This skill is an essential one for any leader.
Empathy can be an intrinsic nature of a person or developed. It will allow the Scrum Masters to create deep relationships with every team member by understanding their stories, skills, abilities, problems, challenges, goals, objectives, and others.
How can you develop empathy?
For starters, you need to listen and observe the other person’s body language during your conversations. Also, please pay attention to their voice and subtle shifts in their tone and energy. Focus on these things during your daily meetings and other casual conversations with your team members.
You can further develop empathy by developing your emotional intelligence. You can learn more about Emotional Intelligence from our previous articles.
Ownership of outcomes
One of the primary roles of a Scrum Master, apart from coaching in Scrum practices, is empowering the team to make decisions. The group decides how it will perform its work, including schedule, tools, and processes. Yet, a great Scrum Master would take ownership of the team and results. They demonstrate this ownership by influencing the team, processes, interactions, and outcomes.
Ownership is a skill where you are self-aware of your actions and take responsibility for the resulting outcomes. This includes your work tasks, decisions that you make, problems that you solve, delegation, and your behavior.
As a Scrum Master, you coach your team, influence to increase their productivity, help them collaborate with other project stakeholders, remove impediments, influence their decision-making, and help solve problems and conflicts. And whatever the outcome will be, you need to take ownership of your actions that directly or indirectly caused it.
Leadership Skills
There is a vast amount of content on leadership skills, what they mean, and how to master them. However, Scrum (and Agile in general) envisages a different way to demonstrate leadership skills. The term “servant-leader” is often used to describe these kinds of leaders. There is also sufficient debate on the term itself and its connotations, but we will not go into that but try to capture the essence.
The leadership for Scrum Master means acting in a way that helps the team make progress. It might be by inspiring them to do well and face challenges or actively participate in challenges mitigations and conflict resolutions, internally and externally. The primary motive is to serve the team, the organization, and the customers to achieve optimal value.
Another model that Scrum Masters can follow is the “Leader Leader” model that L. David Marquet described in his book “Turn The Ship Around.”
Conflict Management & Problem Solving Skills
When you work in a team on a project, you will have conflicts because a team comprises individuals with different ideas, personalities, working styles, skills, capacities, and experiences. Therefore, disputes and disagreements are bound to arise.
There are different conflict management techniques that a Scrum Master can utilize. First, however, they must know the stage of team maturity and employ the correct technique and approach that will be best suited for the given stage.
Indeed, a Scrum Master doesn’t make decisions for anyone. But you are still required to guide and influence everyone in the organization, including management, customers, stakeholders, product owners, and the developers. As the teams operate in complex environments and with diverse people, conflicts and problems are bound to occur.
One of the essential roles of a Scrum Master is to remove impediments and obstacles – problems. The problems can be issues with a particular task, lack of knowledge or experience with a specific topic, unavailability of resources, conflicts among the team members, and improper planning.
You help the team by bringing external assistance from another team, helping them rearrange the workload, establish proper communication, collaborating with the stakeholders and other teams, and so on.
Problem-solving involves analysis and evaluation too. Sometimes, you might not know the exact problem, but only the negative effect will be visible. In these times, you need to analyze various reports, team behavior, output, and other aspects to figure out the problems.
Coaching & Mentoring Skills
The main job of a Scrum Master is to teach and coach the team to implement Scrum and its various practices. That means you need to be a good teacher. But the role is not limited to just teaching Scrum theory. You need to impart practical knowledge too.
To do that, you must have coaching and mentoring skills. Implementing Scrum involves a cultural shift in the workplace. That means there will be some resistance to the changes. As a mentor, you not only help the team understand the Scrum framework but guide them through the transformation.
Coaching and mentoring are not limited to explaining concepts and implementing them. You need to observe the team, analyze and give them feedback to improve their skills. Coaching involves doing this on an individual level too. You help the team become self-organizing.
Apart from mentoring the development team, you need to help the other product stakeholders understand the Scrum framework. This might involve the product managers, project managers, other management higher-ups, and clients.
Wrapping Up
These were the essential soft skills for Scrum Masters – irrespective of the organization they are working in because they are not managers who assign tasks. But leaders who lead the team into developing high-quality products. They help the team increase their performance.
What are other soft skills essential for a great Scrum Master? Tell us in the comments below.
Great article, shame its so hard to convey this skills on a resume. Look forward to exploring the rest of your blog.
Glad that you liked the article.