“I had built up the trust quotient, but then I didn’t think about continually maintaining it.” – Nate Amidon
Nate had done everything right. As a junior Scrum Master on an internal software team, he started by building trust — showing up, listening, and letting the team know he wasn’t going to make things worse. He even managed to shift their reporting metrics from velocity to predictability, a move the team embraced because it focused on what they could actually control: how well they broke down and executed their plan. But then came the overconfidence. Riding on the capital he’d built, Nate proactively designed a “sprint churn” metric to track how much work swapped in and out of a sprint. The idea wasn’t bad — but he rolled it out without consulting the team first. The pushback hit hard. Engineers pushed back: adding more work mid-sprint shouldn’t automatically be negative, they argued. And they were right. The real failure wasn’t the metric itself — it was bypassing the collaborative process that had earned him trust in the first place. Nate learned that trust isn’t something you build once and bank on. It’s an everyday job. As he puts it, the Scrum Master’s role is to help the team, not direct it — and the moment you start solving problems the team hasn’t agreed exist, you’re directing.
In this episode, we also refer to Nate’s previous BONUS episode on the podcast, where he discussed the brief-execute-debrief cycle from military aviation.
Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you introduced a change to your team without first checking if they saw the same problem you did — and what happened to your trust quotient as a result?
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About Nate Amidon
Nate, founder of Form100 Consulting, and a former Air Force officer and combat pilot turned servant leader in software development. Nate has taken the high-stakes world of military aviation and brought its core leadership principles—clarity, accountability, and execution—into his work with Agile teams.
You can link with Nate Amidon on LinkedIn. Learn more at Form100 Consulting.
