“We shifted their thinking from my task to our work.” – Oluyomi Emmanuel
Oluyomi describes a destructive pattern many Scrum Masters will recognize: local responsibility inside a supposedly shared team. The team looked collaborative during Scrum events, but once the meetings ended, developers, testers, and reviewers behaved like separate specialists. Developers finished coding and moved on. Testers waited for the right context or environment. Pull requests sat in review.
Everyone looked busy, and everyone could explain their own behavior, but work was not reaching Done. The board already showed the queues, yet visibility alone did not change behavior because the team still spoke in individual language: “my development is finished,” “testing belongs to QA,” and “my task is done.” The change started in a retrospective, where the team stopped asking who caused the delay and began asking where work stopped flowing.
They tested small experiments: swarming around items waiting in testing, reviewing aging work together, and avoiding new starts when existing work needed help. The daily standup became a place to ask a better question: what does this item still need before value can be delivered?
In this segment, we talk about flow, team ownership, and work in progress.
Self-reflection Question: What language in your daily standup reinforces “my task” instead of “our work”?
Featured Book of the Week: Handbook of Facilitative Leadership by Pepe Nummi
Oluyomi recommends Handbook of Facilitative Leadership: Concrete Ways to Boost Performance by Pepe Nummi. The book helped him see that leadership is not always about having the strongest opinion or offering the solution. Sometimes leadership means designing the process through which a group can think, contribute, decide, and take ownership together.
For Scrum Masters, that distinction matters because the people in the room often already have the knowledge needed to solve the problem. The knowledge is just distributed across the team. Facilitative leadership helps bring that knowledge into the open.
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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.
