“Trust is the foundation of empowerment. When you trust your team, they will deliver beyond your expectation.” – Aliu Adewale
For Aliu, success as a Scrum Master is concrete: the team is living the five Scrum values—commitment, focus, openness, respect, and courage—and the organization is getting real value from their work. Commitment shows up in how the team holds itself to a Sprint goal.
Focus shows up in how they protect that goal from noise. Openness reduces conflict because nothing festers in the dark. Respect, Aliu reframes powerfully: respect for someone’s background comes before respect for their skill set—because in a team where people come from different countries, religions, and skill sets, that’s the foundation everything else sits on.
And courage shows up when a team can tell a Product Owner or a stakeholder that no, this can’t be done in this Sprint, and we need to talk about it. But the values alone aren’t success—the test is whether the team is delivering value frequently to the organization.
The way Aliu keeps himself honest is uncomfortable but simple: he sends a survey to his team and asks them to tell him how he’s doing on communication, on risk mitigation, on empowering them to reach stakeholders directly. He starts the assessment cycle the moment he joins—asking the organization what success looks like in this role in the next three months—and he refuses to “get carried away” and stop asking.
Self-reflection Question: Have you ever sent your team a survey asking them to rate you—and acted on what they said?
Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Start, Stop, Continue
Aliu’s go-to retrospective is the classic Start, Stop, Continue. Three questions—What should we start doing? What should we stop doing? What should we continue doing?—and the team has the structure they need to pinpoint their own shortcomings and decide what to do about them.
The reason it works so well, Aliu argues, is the psychological safety the simplicity creates. There’s no jargon, no clever framework, no facilitator gimmick to hide behind. Experienced and self-organizing teams especially thrive with it because they can name what’s not working without you having to call it out for them.
As a Scrum Master, when your team starts pointing at their own gaps without your prompt, that’s the moment you should applaud yourself—you coached them into the space where they can do it.
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About Aliu Adewale
Aliu is an Agile Delivery Lead with over 10 years of experience empowering teams to unlock their potential and deliver meaningful value. As an author, Aliu simplifies Agile principles through real-life experiences, providing practical insights for professionals to apply Agile methodologies effectively in work and everyday life.
You can link with Aliu Adewale on LinkedIn.
You can also find Aliu and his book on agileinplainsight.com.
Olaitan Fashanu is a customer-focused professional with expertise in product management, technology, and coaching. He drives digital and agile transformation, builds collaborative cross-functional teams, and delivers high-quality products across markets. Curious and strategic, he explores AI and data intelligence while balancing technical depth, business goals, culture, structure, and long-term vision.
Felipe Engineer-Manriquez is a best-selling author, international speaker, and host of The EBFC Show. A force in Lean and Agile, he helps teams build faster with less effort. Felipe trains and coaches changemakers worldwide—and wrote Construction Scrum to make work easier, better, and faster for everyone.
