teams Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Aki Salmi: Learning Decision-Making without Explicit Leadership, A Key Skill For Scrum Teams

In this episode, Aki reflects on a highly effective team, drawing inspiration from Google’s Project Aristotle on high-performing teams. He recounts the story of a team that operated without a designated leader, relying on consensus-based decision-making. However, this approach often hindered progress and experimentation. Aki highlights the importance of bringing up such systemic issues in retrospectives. He advises teams to step back and critically evaluate their working methods and their implications. Aki also touches on concepts like “double loop learning” and emphasizes the significance of considering core tasks, emotional climate, and effective structures in the work environment.

Featured Book For The Week: Dare to Lead by Brene Brown

In this segment, Aki talks about Brene Brown’s book “Dare to Lead,” emphasizing its transformative impact on authentic self-expression in the workplace. He highlights the value of embracing one’s humanity, including emotions, and underscores the importance of vulnerability and visibility. Aki also references books like “Agile Retrospectives” by Larsen and Derby, and “Atlas of the Heart” by Brene Brown. He discusses trust-building, echoing the idea that trust is built in small moments. The episode encourages listeners to prioritize trust and genuine self-presentation in professional environments.

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches – Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM’s that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!

About Aki Salmi

Aki is a software crafter and shares the joy of coding and the value of empathy at work. That is, Aki works on ones and zeros (code) and everything else (humans).

You can link with Aki Salmi on LinkedIn.

Lorraine Chambers: Dismantling Silos, A Critical Aspect Of Helping Scrum Teams Succeed

In this episode, Lorraine explores the story of a midsized team within a larger organization. Operating in silos, the team members juggled disconnected tasks, leading to significant carryover between sprints, and an inability to fulfill sprint commitments. The silos led to limited collaboration which, in time, further hindered progress. Lorraine addressed concerns with the Product Owner and manager, but changes were deemed unfeasible at the time. This situation impeded the team’s ability to self-organize. As reflection for Scrum Masters, Lorraine advises reflecting on the organizational team model and strategizing how to foster collective participation in sprint planning, shared goals, and self-organization within the team.

Featured Book of the Week: Radical Candor by Kim Scott

Lorraine discusses a pivotal book in her career: “Radical Candor” by Kim Scott, emphasizing its guidance on effective communication and feedback provision for coaches. The book advocates candidness in delivering both praise and criticism, underscoring the significance of nurturing relationships. Lorraine recounts an illustrative story from the book where a lack of candor led to performance issues. The lesson: timely, candid feedback is crucial.

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

About Lorraine Chambers

Lorraine’s vision of excellence is summed up in the words of philosopher, Lao Tzu — “A leader is best when people barely know he exists … ” She’s held several roles in the Fintech industry, including Product Owner and Quality Assurance. She’s a native New Yorker that loves travel, music and museums.

You can link with Lorraine Chambers on LinkedIn and connect with Lorraine Chambers on Instagram.

Tom Siebeneicher: A Deep Dive into Agile Dysfunction, And The Journey Back To Healthy Scrum

Tom shares the story of a team that slowly drifted away from Scrum, and it’s values, but without noticing it themselves! The team followed the rituals, but their retrospectives pushed them aways from Agile and Scrum principles. The team inadvertently, and over time, adopted a waterfall approach. To avoid this in your teams, Tom advocates for digging into root causes instead of symptom-fixing. Eventually, Tom helped the team do a “scrum reset” which realigned the team, prompting a valuable tip: conduct resets every six months. Tom emphasizes double-loop learning, urging a focus on long-term improvement amidst day-to-day challenges.

Featured Book of the Week: The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries

Tom delves into the transformative impact of Eric Ries’ “The Lean Startup.” The book revolutionized his perspective on Minimum Viable Products (MVPs), emphasizing radical experimentation and learning over rigid planning. It liberated him from the constraints of plan-driven approaches, emphasizing the dynamic nature of execution. Tom underscores the criticality of continuous measurement and learning, a principle he now prioritizes in his approach. He shares valuable advice: never underestimate the power of measuring and learning in the pursuit of agile success.

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

About Tom Siebeneicher

Tom is an engaging speaker, who has delivered presentations at conferences like the Atos DREAM Conference, the Agile Leadership Day, and TED XKE by Xebia. Their enthusiasm for discussing Agile is evident in those talks.

You can link with Tom Siebeneicher on LinkedIn.

Toby Rao: Helping a Team Go From Storming To Performing With Trust Building Strategies

In this episode, Toby shares his experience working with a once high-performing team that faced challenges after a leadership change and the introduction of new team members. The established team members, deeply bonded, struggled to share information with the newcomers who questioned team practices. The team found itself stuck in the “storming” phase of development, with trust being a significant issue. Toby emphasized the importance of creating new working agreements when a team undergoes significant changes and promoting collaboration with a “yes, and” approach. He highlighted the need for trust-building interventions, engaging retrospectives, celebrating small successes, and conducting 1-on-1 conversations to address the trust imbalance and improve team dynamics.

In this episode, we refer to the Tuckman Stages Of Group Development and TastyCupcakes.org.

Featured Book of the Week: “Atomic Habits” by James Clear

In Toby’s discussion about his favorite book, “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, he highlighted how the book transformed his perspective. He successfully encouraged team members and friends to read it by emphasizing its approach to change. The book’s principle of breaking down significant changes into small daily habits resonated with Toby. It underscored the idea that consistent small actions can result in substantial transformations. Toby also mentioned how the book influenced his coaching style, particularly by suggesting the effective question, “What’s your plan to solve that problem?” It emphasized the power of incremental changes and thoughtful problem-solving strategies.

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

About Toby Rao

Toby is an ICF-credentialed Coach and accredited IC Agile trainer, and practices as a certified Executive coach. With a dynamic Agile journey beginning in 2007, he’s an active contributor to the global Agile community. He is based in Washington DC Metro, and speaks at Agile events worldwide and co-founded the A20 Agile conference. Toby also co-founded two thriving Agile meetups in the Washington DC area, with a combined 1300 members.

You can link with Toby Rao on LinkedIn and connect with Toby Rao on Twitter.

Seye Kuyinu: Agile Re-Teaming For Scale, Restructuring Scrum Teams Along Value Streams

In this episode, Seye discusses an organization’s journey towards creating value streams and aligning teams accordingly. They adopted the approach of taking teams to the work rather than the reverse. This involved setting up teams for new features, but the structure changed after a few months, leading to reassigning team members. Seye refers to the Tuckman’s stages of group development to highlight the transitional nature of teams. In this episode, we also discuss how important it is to focus on setting up a robust infrastructure to make it possible to dynamically reconfigure teams, underlining the importance of adaptability in Agile environments.

Featured Book of the Week: The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship by David Whyte

Seye’s recommended book for Scrum Masters is “The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship” by David Whyte. The book explores reimagining work and relationships, emphasizing the need for a holistic view rather than strict work-life balance. Another impactful read is “Extraordinarily Badass Agile Coaching: The Journey from Beginner to Mastery and Beyond” by Bob Galen, which transformed Seye’s coaching approach. He suggests adapting language to the audience, shifting from software development jargon to business terminology. Seye advocates speaking the language of those being served, aligning communication for more effective collaboration.

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

About Seye Kuyinu

Seye has been a Scrum Master for about a decade now. He first connected to Agile, frustrated with the lack of adequate communication that plagues traditional complex projects. He finds People and Interactions over Processes & Tools cannot be overstated, while seeing that everything is a fractal- our individual, team, organization and societal challenges are the very same. The solution in every layer is the same- an understanding of ONENESS!

You can link with Seye Kuyinu on LinkedIn and connect with Seye Kuyinu on Twitter.