How to hire the Wrong Scrum Masters and Set Them Up for Failure!

When I got certified as one of the earliest Scrum Masters in Canada in 2006, there was virtually no job market for the role that you would apply to and hence no job postings that would specify what is expected of a Scrum Master and what qualifications and experiences you should bring to the job.

When I got my first ever call for that role, it was from the employing organization directly in response to my online resume and they did not have any specific list of skills in mind, except for their candidate need to be a Certified Scrum Master.

To their credit, even though they did not have a clear laundry list of what I was supposed to know and be able to do – apart from hosting the ceremonies and tracking velocity – they turned up to be the most by-the-book, clean Agile workshop I ever experienced in my career. An experience that never repeated itself anywhere else … ever!

Amazing that now, after almost one and half decades since then, and despite the fact that Agile has become the most adopted methodology and most of these organizations have Agile Centers of Excellence and even Agile Coaches onsite, I still hardly find a Scrum Master hiring job posting that has a proper job definition and skill set that relates to the specialization, skill set and true responsibilities of a Scrum Master.

Let’s take a look.

Hiring the Wrong Person

It is quite common that when hiring for a Scrum Master role, the HR department (or in its more recent fancier name, the People’s department), take ownership of the Job ad creation.

Judging by what is on job sites, it seems the HR staff pick the job description from other roles they believe to be similar and simply copy and paste the context of the ad into their new posting.

The most unfortunate cases are when HR assume that Scrum Masters are the same as Project Managers and copy over the expectation. 

If you know the difference, you should already have raised the alarm on this big mistake. In fact that wrong acceptance criteria will gather resumes on Project Managers who mentioned the word Scrum in a few places.

When Waterfall organizations are trying to embrace the Agile methodology and step into the new era, in many cases do so in a gradual, half-cooked manner since not all of their management staff is trained or has learned about the differences and how to create the cultural shift needed to truly transform.

This is a much larger issue than HR choosing a wrong job description as it may reveal that the management is also not savvy on who they should be hiring as Scrum Masters.

Let’s take a look at some samples:

1. The “Scrum Manager”: In such cases, not only the job description is visibly a wrong copy, even the title is a mix of two schools. Titles such as “Agile Project Manager” of “Scrum Master / Project Manager” are common in these cases. It shows that the hiring manager – and HR – have no idea what they are hiring for and what is the expectation from this person.

2. The “Upgraded Developer”: In this model, they are looking to hire one person for two roles. They need a lead developer who can also do the “Scrum Ceremonies”. This is an example of a company whose management do not truly understand the workload of a Scrum Master and why that role should not be mixed with the Development Team.

3. The “Scrum Owner”: Not understanding the vital importance of having a proper Product Ownership in place who would liaise between the Scrum Team and business, many organizations try to hire one person to do both jobs. This shows clear confusion within the management ranks of that organization that cannot differentiate between ownership of Process, versus Ownership of Product.

4. The “Scrum Slave-Master”: The expectation here from the newly hired is to “dictate” to the team what management has dished down to them to do, and enforce the work regardless of what the Development Team feels they can deliver and achieve.

5. The “Scrum Flock Master”: In these cases they are hiring a “Flock Master” to run a small army of Scrum Teams, probably spending 30 minutes on each team per day. This is usually about saving money based on lack of insight about the depth and complexity of a Scrum Master’s responsibilities.

6. The “Scrum Sacrificial”: This poor soul is hired to get the blame for anything that may not go right in case the risky initiative that they are experimenting with would fail. It would not go the other way and there will be no reward or recognition if they manage to step out of that hellfire alive.

7. The “Admin Master”: This Scrum Master would be hired – usually for a very low pay rate – to just be team’s admin and project controller. Keep track of documentation, make sure Scrum board is updated and ceremonies are booked. No other expectations in the sense of Agile process coaching or teams’ guardianship or removal of impediments, would be expected.

8. The “Dual Citizen”: In this case the hiring manager needs both a Scrum Master and a Project Manager and thinks the Scrum Master would have enough free time to cover both roles and take projects alongside his / her daily Scrum responsibilities. Some hiring managers are in the process of forming a Scrum Team out of their existing Waterfall teams and think it would be a good idea to have someone run the Waterfall team and add some Agile flavor to the work as time goes by so the Scrum Team can organically grow in that cauldron of bad ideas!

9. The “Appraisal Master”: This person is expected to validate and confirm the Dev Team’s estimations for Stories and EPICs and to debate with the team on how much work they can bring into a Sprint. The hiring manager has not yet grasped the idea of letting the Dev Team self-organize and be trusted with their estimation and time management and need someone to supervise that for them.

10. The “Agile Unicorn”: This one is hired as the solution to all Agile problems the hiring manager is dealing with, from Scrum Team’s lack of maturity and Product Owner acting as a Sr BA and not owning anything, to the large gap between executive management’s constant demand for cost reports and scheduled deliverables vs market testing and having the flexibility to respond to change to market demands. Naturally these poor Unicorns would be marked as failure and get fired and the next Unicorn is hired to follow the same fate.

Whichever of these types (or other deviations that exist), would only lead to hiring the wrong person (with the wrong qualification and experience) for the wrong expectation.

Since these flawed expectations are essentially Agile Anti-Patterns in the making, they have no where to go but into the quick sand of failure and damage team’s morale, dishearten the poor Scrum Master and create a bad experience in the organization as a failed Agile trial (which of course has nothing to with Agile).

Considering the very slow pace of organizations in building up Agile maturity and the ever shrinking R&D budgets enterprises have in this market, we can assume it will be a very long journey for them to reach the needed corporate maturity level to avoid these pitfalls and bad choices.

Cheers

Arman Kamran