The Scrum Master as a partner

And can we partner with ourselves?

As we grow into the Scrum Master role, our perspective on what it’s about changes.

Thanks to Barry Overeem, most of us learn about what roles we should and shouldn’t try to play as Scrum Master close the to beginning of our career.

Stances of a Scrum Master include:

• Teacher

• Coach

• Mentor

• Facilitator

• Impediment Remover

• Change Agent

And the misunderstood stances we’re taught to avoid:

• Admin

• Scribe

• Chairman

• Secretary

• Hero

• Team Boss

• Scrum Police

• Coffee Clerk

This is great guidance to get us started as Scrum Masters. I can say absolutely that I have been in almost all of the misunderstood stances, and while they are often what your team thinks your job is and they feel like they’re helping the team… it’s when you start to fulfill the real stances at the top that you can really make a difference.

But I’m not here to rehash Barry’s work. Instead, I want to talk about something I learned directly from Mark Burville, another great Agilist whose contributions to the community continue to grow and be recognized.

Mark and I were in a training together, and at one point he articulated that he thinks of all of his work as a Scrum Master as “partnering” with the people on his teams.

This is a brilliant way of thinking about the work. When looking at the correct and misunderstood stances above, I had classified them as being about “what I can do” versus “what you can do.”

But after hearing Mark’s perspective I realized that the better stances are actually about “what we can do.”

If you’re a Scrum Master, I hope this shift of perspective helps you find more effective approaches to your teaching, coaching, mentoring, etc.

But I want to explore this idea further in terms of Scrumifying Your Life - can we get more out of it if we’re partnering with ourselves?

If we can, this would represent a major change in what Scrumify Your Life means. Thus far, it’s been based on pretty mechanical and simple parts of Scrum, like applying Sprints to your personal projects so you have a manageable structure.

But if we’re partnering, that means finding strategies to effectively teach, mentor and coach ourselves. That sounds like kind of a weird thing to do, but I can see some typical Scrumify goals that could greatly benefit from this kind of perspective.

• relationships; breakups

• career advancement

• building a side hustle into a business

• health improvement; weight loss

• high-stress events like weddings or moving into a new home

I have some little ideas floating around in my head about what this might look like. Maybe there are concrete things we can do for ourselves to be good partners. Or maybe it’s more about adopting a mindset of flexibility, self-assurance and confidence.

To be perfectly honest… I don’t know yet.

But I think that it’s what I need right now, so I’m going to experiment and try to figure it out.

I’ll let you all know as I learn new things.

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