agile teams Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Oluyomi Emmanuel: When Agile Team Trust Breaks Before the Scrum Master Acts

“Once that trust is broken, everything else, nothing else matters.” – Oluyomi Emmanuel

Oluyomi Emmanuel started his Scrum Master journey after a strategic move toward Agile ways of working changed his project coordinator role into something deeper: helping people communicate when the answers were unclear. In this episode, he shares a hard lesson from a newly formed software team of eight people, where tension between a tech lead and a new developer first appeared in GitHub pull request comments.

There were sarcastic replies, cameras switched off during the daily standup, and a growing distance when the team worked in the same office. Oluyomi initially treated it as a normal forming-stage conflict and waited for the team environment to absorb the tension.

By the time the tech lead escalated concerns to the developer’s line manager, trust had already deteriorated. A facilitated feedback session produced an improvement plan, but the developer experienced the feedback as judgment rather than support and left the team less than a month later. Oluyomi’s lesson was clear: a Scrum Master needs to name trust concerns early, first in one-on-ones, then together, before the relationship becomes too damaged to repair.

In this episode, we refer to psychological safety, conflict resolution, and team trust.

Self-reflection Question: What early sign of broken trust have you noticed but not yet named with your team?

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About Oluyomi Emmanuel

Oluyomi is a Scrum Master, Agile Coach, and Product Lead with over seven years of experience helping teams work better and deliver meaningful digital products. Having worked across energy, consumer platforms, and fintech, he is passionate about building high-performing teams, creating clarity, and turning Agile principles into real business and customer value.

You can link with Oluyomi Emmanuel on LinkedIn.

BONUS: Solution-Focused Coaching: The Game-Changing Method Every Scrum Master Needs With Ralph Miarka and Veronika Jugwirth

In this BONUS episode, we dive deep into solution-focused coaching with Ralph and Veronika, co-authors of “Solution Focused Coaching For Agile Teams.” This conversation explores how to shift from problem-solving to solution-building, helping Agile teams thrive through a forward-looking approach that empowers teams to find their own path to success.

Understanding Solution-Focused Coaching

“Solution focus, focuses on the goal itself. We are not talking about ‘how’, but first start with ‘what we want to achieve’.”

Solution-focused coaching represents a fundamental shift from traditional problem-solving approaches. Rather than diving into root cause analysis and retrospectives focused on what went wrong, this methodology centers on the future and desired outcomes. It operates as a communication system that recognizes the complexity of modern work environments where simple cause-effect relationships don’t always apply. In engineering, root causes make sense when dealing with predictable systems, but in complex organizational dynamics, solution-focused coaching acknowledges that we often can’t identify clear root causes and instead focuses on creating a “preferred future.”

In this segment we refer to Solution-focused brief therapy and the Cynefin model.

The Power of Not-Knowing

“Instead of suggesting solutions, we should start by asking questions. The “Not-knowing position” is about accepting this.”

The “not-knowing position” challenges coaches and leaders to resist the urge to immediately diagnose problems and offer solutions. When someone shares their story, they’re not sharing the version we think we know. This approach transforms coaching conversations by starting with questions like “What difference would it make for you to solve this problem?” This shift toward asking questions about a positive future can even help identify advocates among those who initially resist change, creating unexpected allies in transformation efforts.

Everyone as an Expert

“When we help teams change by themselves, they change much faster.” Continue reading BONUS: Solution-Focused Coaching: The Game-Changing Method Every Scrum Master Needs With Ralph Miarka and Veronika Jugwirth

BONUS: LIVE Q&A with Lisette Sutherland, #Remote meetings don’t need to suck!

#Remote meetings have been a topic that affects Agile teams for a long time. As many more teams go #Remote without previous experience, they become an even bigger topic for Scrum Masters who now need to facilitate online meetings almost every day.

In this episode, Lisette Sutherland (creator of the Work Together Anywhere Workshop) joins us to share her insights on how to make those remote meetings rock!

When going #Remote, it is harder to get the life/work balance right

Continue reading BONUS: LIVE Q&A with Lisette Sutherland, #Remote meetings don’t need to suck!

BONUS: LIVE Q&A on #Remote work with Katja Zorina

Katja is an Agile Coach in an organization that had to organize a distributed/#Remote Big Room Planning session in less than 24 hours! Listen in to learn how they pulled it off.

One of the key learnings from that effort was that a #Remote event will take a longer time (maybe 3-4 days) than a locally organize Big Room planning event. But there are many more insights that Katja shares on this LIVE Q&A

What have been the biggest challenges for you and for the teams that you support?

Continue reading BONUS: LIVE Q&A on #Remote work with Katja Zorina

SUPER SPECIAL: LIVE Q&A with Molood Ceccarelli on #Remote work

Molood joins us in the special LIVE Q&A episode to talk about Distributed Agile software development and many tools, tips, tricks, and techniques for teams that just recently moved to a #Remote-first work setting.

The POWER framework for successful #Remote meetings

Continue reading SUPER SPECIAL: LIVE Q&A with Molood Ceccarelli on #Remote work