Scrum Master as a Servant Leader

Empowering the team:To empower your teams, you will display the different skills of a scrum master and encourage your team to learn and manage the tasks by themself on their own. You will motivate your teams to make better and mindful decisions and suggest unique tools that will bring a change in their working style and help them work better on projects.
Creating a safe space: You will be responsible for creating a safe and growing environment, where your teams will participate in sharing ideas and learn from their mistakes. As a scrum master, you will make sure that no team member is getting the blame for an honest error or a mistake.
Focusing on Team Growth:You will focus upon team growth by sharing knowledge and information with your team members. This activity will help your team to streamline their work better. You will also try to embed knolwedge by finding them mentors, organizing training sessions and providing guidance during the times of need.
Promoting Collaboration:As a scrum master, you will ensure that your team is conversing with each other effectively. You will act as a medium for your teams to communicate with professionals outside the team such as managers and customers to ensure everyone is on the same page for project success.

Facilitating Events as a Scrum Master

You will also be held responsible as a Scrum Master to take regular meetings and ensure every team member’s tasks are on track. These meetings and events will help your team to keep up with a specific work rhythm and ensure that every member is aligned with their progress, as it is very important to keep project success transparent. As a scrum master, you will productively take these meetings, making sure to not waste too much time of your team members.

Aspect of the Scrum Master Role	Description	Key Activities/Responsibilities	What the Scrum Master is NOT
I. Servant Leadership	Focuses on providing, prioritizing the team well-being and growth instead of commanding them.	Motivating your team to manage on their own by creating a safe and trustworthy environment Concentrating on the team growth with mentoring and coaching activities. Boosting collaboration among team members and stakeholders	A manager or a boss who dictates or assigns task or solutions
II. Facilitating Scrum Events	Ensure that your scrum events are precise, productive, focused and meets the timeboxes	Sprint Planning: Here you will facilitate the definition of your team’s sprint goal and create a sprint backlog Daily Scrum: Help the teams to identify backlogs and work through the same Sprint Review: Execution and gathering of stakeholder feedback Sprint Retrospective: Work upon your team’s past work and identify the areas of improvement for them	Someone who will turn the discussion into a meeting or status report presentations
III. Coaching	Mentoring the product owner, organization, scrum team in understanding and using scrum practices and principles.	Coaching the Development Team on self-organization, cross-functionality, and continuous improvement. Coaching the Product Owner on maximizing product value and managing the product backlog. Coaching the organization on Scrum values and principles and helping to remove organizational impediments.	Someone who tells people what to do or how to do it.
IV. Removing Impediments	Identifies and removes obstacles that prevent the team from achieving their Sprint Goal.	Proactively identifying potential impediments. Addressing impediments quickly and efficiently, either directly or by escalating them. Protecting the team from external distractions and interruptions.	Someone who ignores problems or lets them fester.
V. Change Agent	Drives Agile transformation within the organization, promoting Scrum values and principles.	Championing the Scrum values (commitment, focus, openness, respect, courage). Working to remove organizational impediments to Scrum adoption. Educating stakeholders about the benefits and principles of Scrum.	Someone who resists change or maintains the status quo.
Overall Goal	To create an environment where the Scrum Team can thrive and deliver valuable increments of work consistently.	All of the above activities contribute to this goal.	A traditional project manager.A team lead who directs the team's work. A secretary or note-taker.

Basically, a good scrum master is considered to be very essential for a Team. By demonstrating many good qualities of a scrum master, you will help the team to work smoothly and create valuable results and improve constantly. You will help the entire organization to become more agile.

Understanding Agile Frameworks

As a scrum master, you are supposed to have a robust understanding of Agile Frameworks. This will help you guide your teams effectively. Here are a few frameworks that have their own unique applications and features.

Scrum: This focuses on regular sprints, iterative development and team roles such as product owner and scrum master
Kanban: This will focus on visualizing workflows and limiting work in progress to improve efficiency
Other agile methodologies: This includes such as Extreme Programming (XP), SAFe, Lean. These can also be tailored as per team’s projects and needs.

Facilitating Agile Processes: Guiding the Scrum Team’s Workflow

As a Scrum Master, you will play a crucial role in facilitating agile processes. You will have to ensure the team works effectively within the scrum framework, this involves a lot of leading activities, events, and promotion of agile adherence to principles and scrum practices.

It is important for you to note that “Facilitating” means that you will enable and guide your team towards project success and create an environment for the team to stay self-organized and collaborate with other members.

Here is a table for you to understand your steps and responsibilities in facilitating an agile process.

Step	Description	Key Activities	Example
1. Understanding Scrum	Have a strong understanding of the Scrum Framework	Learning and byhearting the Scrum Guide Understanding its principles and values to perform scrum better Understanding the scrum events, roles and artifacts	Attending the scrum training, reading and learning the scrum guide or reading online articles on scrum
2. Facilitating Scrum Events	Guiding and enabling productive Scrum events.	Preparing: Ensuring necessary resources are available, clarifying event purpose. Guiding: Keeping discussions focused, ensuring everyone contributes. Timeboxing: Adhering to time limits. Capturing Outcomes: Documenting decisions and action items.	In Sprint Planning, helping the team define a realistic Sprint Goal. During the daily scrum, ensure the meeting is focused on the Sprint Goal During the Sprint Review, make sure the stakeholders are offering valuable feedback In Sprint Retrospective, help the team to identify concerns and find out actionable improvement areas
3. Coaching and Mentoring	Offer support and guidance to your team such as Product owner and Organization.	Take one on one coaching for individual guidance Take team coaching by facilitating workshops and discussions Provide training and education on agile and scrum	Help the team work on self development and organization Coaching the owner of the product to refine backlog Educate the organization with the benefits of scrum
4. Removing Impediments	Actively working to eliminate obstacles hindering the team.	Identifying: Proactively looking for potential problems Addressing: Resolving issues directly or escalating them. Preventing: Implementing changes to avoid recurring problems.	Removing a technical blocker prevents the team from completing a task. Working with management to resolve a resource constraint. Improving communication processes to prevent future misunderstandings.
5. Promoting Agile Principles	Championing Agile values and principles within the team and organization.	Leading by example: Demonstrating Agile principles in behavior. Facilitating discussions: Explaining the benefits of Agile. Challenging outdated practices: Gently suggesting improvements to non-Agile processes.	Emphasizing working software over excessive documentation. Encouraging customer collaboration and feedback. Promoting adaptation to change over rigid adherence to plans.
6. Continuous Improvement	Fostering a culture of learning and improvement.	Facilitating retrospectives: Guiding reflection and improvement identification. Encourage experiments: Create a safespace for your team to try new approaches Track their progress, monitor the metrics and use data for process improvement.	Make the team implement actions items from retrospectives Support your team to try new techniques and tools Make use of burndown charts and other metrics to identify progress and trends.

Removing the Roadblocks: Clearing the Path for Team Success

Another crucial responsibility for you as a Scrum Master is to remove impediments or roadblocks that are acting as a hindrance to the project development team’s progress towards their sprint goal.

Such obstacles can come in many forms, such as technical, resource, organizational constraints, etc. As a scrum master, you will have to act as a shield to protect the team’s focus on sprint goals and give them values efficiently so they keep working. Addressing these challenges in a productive and prompt manner is one of the key job roles for you as a Scrum Master.

Act as a Shield :

Find and filter unnecessary communications and requests and prevent distractions.
Manage your stakeholder expectations effectively and prevent the controllable changes to prevent any delays during the sprint.
Create a focused and stable work environment for the development team.
Push away non-urgent inquiries from the development team.
Negotiate with the stakeholders to defer new requests until the next sprint.
Make sure your team has a dedicated workspace to work freely without any interruptions.

Resolve Conflicts:

Practice and facilitate active listening and open communication with your team.
Help your team members to understand different perspectives and bridge the gap towards disagreements.
Guide your team towards a collaborative solution to address everyone’s concerns.
Escalate the conflicts to appropriate parties, such as management or HR, if your team is not resolving concerns internally.
Coach the team members to solve a conflict internally with the help of techniques to handle disagreements properly.

Addressing Challenges Promptly:

Identifying roadblocks in early stages with daily scrums, sprint reviews, retrospectives, and other channels of communication
Work directly with the impediments if needed whenever possible.
Escalate the roadblocks to the appropriate team, such as vendors, management, teams, etc.
Track the roadblocks to ensure they have closed effectively and do not occur again in the next sprints.
Update the sprint backlog to eliminate any pending impediment on the sprint plan regularly, such as budget adjustment, removal, or addition of any task.
Work with other teams and resolve the cross-team dependency if it is blocking the team’s progress.
Procure the necessary resources needed by the team, such as hardware, software, and training, when you need to overcome an obstacle.

Promoting Continuous Improvement: Fostering a Culture of Learning and Adaptability

The core concept of a Scrum Principle is to commit to continuous improvement. As a scrum master, your responsibility is to foster this concept among your team and the organization as well. You will work on delivering the increments of a task and align the teams consistently with their processes. You will help the teams to understand the areas of improvement and recommend ways to boost their work effectiveness. As a scrum master, you will cultivate the culture of learning and adaptability, empowering your teams to collaborate more in an efficient and a successful manner.

Here is how you can participate in your team’s growth and improvement as a Scrum Master:

Encouraging Reflection and Improvement with Each Sprint:

Take the retrospective meetings with a positive reinforcement, making it a safe and open platform for every team member. You will make it a safe space for your teams to be honest and discuss about the things that went well and how they can improve themselves to eliminate any foreseen hindrance during the project progress.

Motivate your teams to focus on improving themselves with different tools and agile methodology. This will help them improve their overall team performance as well.
Help your teams to find areas of improvement and items to create an implementation for the next sprint meeting.
Ensure that your team is following the agreed-upon action item checklist. You will also promote different retrospective techniques to keep your session engaging and productive as well.

Supporting a Culture of Learning and Adaptability

Keep your team encouraged so they experiment and take calculated risks. This will help your team to opt for new approaches and work with confidence.
Assist your team in growing and learning from their mistakes. Help them look at their mistakes as an opportunity to grow and learn.
Promote events that facilitate knowledge-sharing activities among the team and the organization.
Create opportunities for learning such as training sessions, technical conferences, workshops, etc.
Motivate your team to work on their tasks and adapt the feedback as per dynamic changes and circumstances.
Boost your team performance by embedding the idea of “Change being constant” and the importance of its adaption.
Support your team and help them identify the measures of project effectiveness to improve their overall efforts.

These practices will help you become an adaptable, efficient, and effective scrum trainer to create a positive feedback loop for your team to constantly grow, learn, and lead to high-quality results and greater team satisfaction.

Scrum Master Skills: Essential Guide