The Scrum Cheer Phenomenon

I have a friend who was a college rugby player. Even thirty years later, rugby is still a big part of her identity. One day, she shared her team's pre-game ritual, which involved a song and a cheer. She tried to sing me the song but broke off with emotion. Shaking her head, unable to get a word out, she shed a tear. When she regained speech, she said, "You have no idea what that pre-game ritual meant to this group of young women. We are forever bonded. I can be in any city in the world, and if I bump into an alum of the team, we can say that chant or sing that song together, and we are sisters."

At the beginning of my engineering management career, I was tapped to join a "tiger team." A tiger team is a temporary, cross-discipline team that tackles a particular, complex task. The official team lead was still onboarding onto the contract and would be delayed, so an interim was assigned. However, I was soon designated the substitute interim for a month due to delays and the interim's planned month-long vacation. It was the perfect opportunity to begin developing my management style and skills.

My regular team on that contract had developed an amazing, unique, fun, and productive culture. This team could DELIVER, and we had fun doing it. I began to believe that culture and productivity were closely related.?

However, I found the ends of daily standups to be very awkward. How do you adjourn a standup on a Zoom call? Just drop off? Say, "Ok, if there's nothing else…" or just a chorus of "Byyyyyyyyyeeee."? I did not find it satisfactory.?

One day, at the end of the tiger standup, I spontaneously said, "GRRRRRRRRRRR TIGERS!".? I'm a goofy guy, and I wasn't sure how this would fly with such a somber group. There were some smiles and nervous laughter. The next day, I invited everyone to join in. We growled and cheered together for the first time.?

A couple of weeks into my interim leadership of the team, I?had to take some time off, and when I came back, I decided not to prompt the cheer to see what would happen. Had they adopted it? To my delight, they did it independently and had been doing it every day in my absence! One guy had even changed his Zoom icon to a tiger! When the permanent lead finally joined, he adopted it wholeheartedly and began to lead it like a true coach. "Alright, team! Let's break it down on 3,2,1 GRRRRRRRRR TIGERS!"

This transformed our culture. We gained familiarity with each other. We learned to laugh with each other. It got people out of their comfort zone. Ultimately, we became a team instead of a collection of people with a task. We gained a sense of identity. On rough days, "I think we need some extra growl this morning. Dig down deep!" It lightened our moods and strengthened our resolve for the day. Whatever tensions and pressures were building among us, the cheer helped us shake it off and reset because we Tigers were together no matter what happened.

When I helped form another team, I wanted to try it again. I was nervous. I was new to the company and was still learning about its culture. What would they think of it? What would they think of me as a manager? Would they take me seriously? I held a contest for the best cheer. People were apprehensive; perhaps one or two never fully embraced it, but others were enthusiastic.?

However, I did not truly understand how meaningful the cheer was to some people until I had to move one of my engineers to another team. We celebrated her at happy hour. She shared that what she would miss the most about being on our team was the team cheer. I did not expect this.

I've since helped form another team at the same company. The tech lead said they wanted one of our team values to be "having fun." Once more, I took a chance. We started throwing out cheer ideas until a strong one emerged. After doing it the first time, the response was joyous laughter and a quick identity formation. One of the engineers shared that he was asked by someone outside the company what his favorite part of working at the company was; he replied, "My team's morning cheer."?

There is an emotional component to this. Why is that? Why have team cheers had such a personal impact on people on these teams? I'm thinking back to my rugby friend and her tears. We are a communal species. We need to have a greater sense of community than our individual selves. We need to know that we belong somewhere. We must be acknowledged as more than a "resource" but a human being.

In the high-pressure, fast-paced consulting world, have we not left ourselves room for humanity? Is this cheer phenomenon a reflection of simply not feeling like a human in a workplace where every day is an urgent effort to help a company surmount its existential challenges?

In reading SCRUM: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, written by the co-founder of SCRUM, Jeff Sutherland, he talks about the ferociousness of a rugby team and the warlike cheer before every match. I realized then that this was very much in the spirit of Scrum methodology. This is how Scrum is supposed to work in some regard, and something has been missing. How can we build a transcendent team experience (as Sutherland calls it) without rising above the ordinary into the realm of the extraordinary? Winning athletic teams understand this.

That is Scrum! Software engineering ceases being an individual sport and becomes a team endeavor. Each sprint is our series, and each day is our match. And each game deserves a cheer to fortify, unite, and humanize us in this software engineering work that we love!