7 Essential Traits You Must Have to Be an Effective Scrum Master
By Ayodele Oyebade :
Scrum mastery is very challenging when you are initially transitioning from the role of a traditional project manager to scrum master, you must develop a totally new mindset which is hinged on the agile mindset to be effective.
This Agile mindset in contrast to the traditional waterfall approach, is a method that offers users new versions, or releases, of the product following brief periods of work. Those brief periods of work are often called sprints. Scrum is one of the popular Agile frameworks.
As a Scrum Master, you are playing a pivotal role in the Scrum framework. According to the Scrum Guide, the Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring Scrum is understood and enacted. Scrum Masters do this by ensuring that the Scrum Team adheres to Scrum theory, practices, and rules.
To be effective in this role, here are the seven essential traits you must have as a Scrum master
- Silence
Silence is a golden trait for great scrum mastery. When you are deliberately silent, you will effectively engage in active listening, which involves listening with all senses and giving full attention to your team. Never forget that Agile emphasizes people over process.
You must know when to stand in a corner, stay in the background, and listen. When you listen more, your team will trust you more. Earning their trust will give you the power to influence them in achieving the project goal.
2. Facilitating team spirit
Team dynamics can be a make or break factor in the success of a scrum team, this is because creating a high-performance team is more than just putting a bunch of smart developers together in one room. Having the right people on a team doesn’t mean they will know how to work together. They all need to have same understanding of the overall project objective, be fully committed and respect each other
3. Facilitating communication
Scrum Master must be able to ensure that there is a good communication flow within the development team. This is because transparency is one of the 3 pillars of scrum.
Effective communication in the scrum team builds strong team relationships, empowers collaborations and helps the team in achieving its goals.
Agile promotes open communication and active contributions from the team members this is achieved by encouraging and facilitating on-going verbal collaboration, both formally and informally
- 4. Lifelong learning
You must maintain a positive attitude to continuously learning everything Agile. Reading books, attending webinars and seminars. Continuous learning will give you expertise that will make you extremely valuable to your scrum team and your employers.
Subscribe to every valuable Agile community and keep learning.
- 5. Ability to Coach
One of the important roles of a scrum master is helping the team to fully understand the values and process of the Scrum framework.
The team need to be coached on how to have a sense of ownership of projects and view them as something they want to do rather than something they are paid to do.
The Scrum Master is often considered a coach for the Agile team, helping the team do the best work it possibly can.
- 6. Be a mountain mover
Removing impediments that can possibly inhibit the scrum team is a key scrum master’s role.
An Impediment is any event or factor that keeps the team from getting work done and that slows velocity. It is anything that keeps a team from being productive. You must be able to deal with anything that can slow your team’s productivity
You must also be proactive in identifying such impediments
- 7. Be a Servant Leader
Servant leadership is a conscious decision to want to serve first, it is an attitude that strive to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served.
While the traditional leadership generally entails the exercise of power and authority, the servant-leader shares power, puts the needs of others first without necessarily taking the credit for it.
The scrum guide describes the scrum master as the servant leader of the scrum team. Servant leadership is an essential trait that you must develop.
About the Author
Ayo Oyebade is a PSMI certified Scrum Master and PMP certified Project Manager.
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