Figure 1. The behaviors for each stance
Although James McAvoy displayed 23 personalities in the movie Split, Hard Yards emphasizes four stances for agile leaders.
In Dead Poet’s Society, Robin Williams teaches his students to make their lives extraordinary while in Jerry McGuire, Tom Cruise coaches Cuba Gooding Jr. to “help me, help you.” In Ocean’s Eleven, George Clooney facilitates a complex heist with 10 other criminal specialists and in Star Wars, Yoda mentors a young Luke Skywalker to become a Jedi. Whether we recognize it or not, Scrum Masters shift stances between these roles often, sometimes multiple times within the same day.
As a servant leader, the Scrum Master “focuses primarily on the growth and well-being of people and…helps people develop and perform as highly as possible.” In order to maximize team and organizational performance, the Scrum Master will often choose different stances depending on the situation and desired outcomes. Let’s investigate how leaders can analyze the environment to serve as coaches, mentors, teachers, and facilitators.
At Hard Yards, the Scrum Master Accelerator breaks the external coach dependency model with a scalable solution where cohorts of Scrum Masters move beyond Agile theory to learn and apply best practices. In our “Four Stances for Scrum Masters” Accelerator module, we introduce several common behaviors and request our learners match each behavior with the quadrant’s objective. For example, the “follow public speaking best practices” behavior would align with the “sharing my knowledge with a group” quadrant (Figure 1).
During this exercise, Scrum Masters realize some behaviors are more obvious than others. We observe a fair amount of overlap between quadrants, especially among the behaviors of “active listening,” “share observations,” and “build consensus.”
“The Reveal” demonstrates how each quadrant aligns with one of the four leadership stances of coaching, mentoring, teaching, and facilitating (Figure 2).
Figure 2. The four stances
Figure 3. A team’s mapping of the four stances in their agile ceremonies
In taking the concept into practice, Scrum Masters reflect on how they use each stance in Agile ceremonies. Another enlightening moment occurs when a Scrum Master takes a mentoring stance when the situation calls for facilitation or coaching. In these cases, the Scrum Master learns to “check the ego at the door” since their input is not valued and could be counterproductive. Building an extraordinary team requires these four different stances, and Scrum Masters walk away from this Accelerator module ready to put these concepts into practice.