The softer side of being a scrum master

Currently a lot is changing within my working environment, which has an immediate impact on me. Weird enough it has actually inspired me. It inspired me to think about the 'softer' value that I, and expectedly every scrum master brings to their team on a daily basis. Because it's not always easy to define how you actually bring value through putting your 'soft skills' to good use. People less familiar with the work of a scrum master often break the work down into facilitating scrum events or (and I love this one) 'implementing' scrum. Obviously scrum masters facilitate scrum events and teach about scrum, these are 'hard' defined responsibilities. Recent events however have made me hear my peers often say:

"I can't really express what it is I do, because it can be quite subtle and it's on the softer side of my work."

This made me wonder. Because it felt like I agreed with them while at the same time I also could not really put my finger on how I utilise my soft skills in order to bring value. With the following extensive personal example I aim to showcase the softer side of being a scrum master and what that actually means. I am really curious to hear your experience as well. So feel free to drop a line in the comments with your soft skill experience or challenge me on it, if you think I'm full of bull****.

Refinement

Both my teams were in a joint refinement. A rather large group of engineers with different perspectives looking at the same challenge they want to overcome together. As we delve deeper into the subject the conversation starts to slowly diverge. Some responses are about possible solutions, some are about further defining or expanding the actual problem and others are clarifying questions.

...Silence is golden.

As I observed the flow of this conversation, we seemed to be dancing around the goal we had set out to achieve together in this refinement. While listening to all the different responses, I am trying to unravel for myself what is actually going on. Questioning myself why it seems that we are not moving into the direction we were aiming for having this refinement. One team member took the lead in the refinement and is doing everything possible to get the conversation going into the right direction and simultaneously trying to engage everyone. During all these interactions I was proud to see everyone willing to help each other out to achieve our intended goal, even though there were quite some question-marked-faces and from time to time people temporarily zoning out.

Act now, talk later

As the conversation further unfolds I decided to interrupt after having made my initial analysis. I started asking a few check questions based on what I had seen and heard. Due to the topic being quite complex and certain names not having the same definition to everyone, it turned out we weren't on the same page to be able to discuss the actual challenge. Next to that, the topic was twofold where we wanted to discuss only one aspect of it. This was hard to achieve because both aspects were tightly coupled. In other words; because of the degree of abstraction it became too hard to talk about only one aspect without having any visualisation. Checking this with the teams it became clear to everyone what made our refinement so challenging. This created a lot of empathy and understanding amongst each other while also revealing what we need for next time to be able to discuss the subject effectively.

Thou shall scrum

Now as a scrum master it's not set in stone that you should always join a refinement. Neither does the scrum guide say anything about how to handle such situations. I do believe however that a good scrum master guides teams making sure they work effectively (doing the right things) and efficiently (doing things right). I want to stress that I have zero doubt about the teams ability to come to the right result without me. Although I do like to think that from time to time I'm able to help out, strengthening the connection between colleagues in order to make people and groups of people function better.

As I wrote earlier, I am very curious to hear your experience. I've tried hard to find the right words to convey my message on how I believe soft skills add value to teams. Let me know what you think and feel free to get in touch.

Thank you for reading and looking forward to hear from you.