The Dreaded Scrum Lord

The Scrum lord is a Scrum master who acts like a dreaded team boss. These Scrum masters bring the hammer down on slacking team members. They assign tasks, set deadlines, and manage to arbitrary metrics. Servant leadership is replaced by a command-and-control mentality.

Scrum teams are self-managing and self-organizing. Using force doesn’t play well in Scrum.

Here are the kinds of results that happen when the Scrum master acts like a Scrum lord:

• Decrease in quality: A team that has an imposed metric and unrealistic deadlines is forced to cut corners to meet the new demands. Quality is the first thing to go in these types of situations. It becomes very easy for a team to decide that, in order to meet an unrealistic deadline, they must stop writing unit tests. Or even worse, stop testing altogether.

• Increased technical debt: A Scrum team that’s under continual pressure isn’t likely to make good decisions. Over time, a series of compromises in quality and architecture will lead to increased technical debt. Ironically, additional technical debt will reduce velocity as the system becomes too fragile and complex to change easily.

• Demoralized Team: At its core, Scrum empowers the development team. Self-organization removes the traditional command and control levers from software development. Adding those levers back in through forcing task assignments and technical direction takes away the Scrum development team’s ability to own their work. This is an excellent way to kill morale and cause your employee retention metrics to plummet.

Scrum masters are in a position of servant leadership. You’re tasked with managing the Scrum process, not the team members. Part of your role is to promote self-organization.

Scrum explicitly gives power back to the developers. Respect this! The development team members know what they need to accomplish the sprint goal. Trust them to get the right work to the right people. Enable them to determine how to do the work. Rules and mandates that come from outside of the team often end up as impediments during the daily scrum.

The next time you give direction as a Scrum master, pause and ask yourself, “Am I serving someone else’s needs right now or my own agenda?’’. It takes a lot of self-awareness to answer that question. It’s vital that you avoid Scrum lord behaviors and thoroughly embrace servant leadership.

As an exercise in self-introspection, write all the activities you perform in a sprint on separate sticky notes. Then, being open and honest with yourself, create two sections on a whiteboard: one for service to others and another for service to yourself. Place each activity in the section that’s most applicable and ask yourself:

• What can I do to better serve others?
• What activities must I stop doing?
• How can I change my approach?
• Are there any activities I could be doing that would lead me to better serving others?

If you’re feeling brave, invite others to join in this discussion.