Chapter 59. The Scrum Master as Coach

Geoff Watts

Coaching has forever been a part of the Scrum Master role. This is because servant-leadership of a self-organizing team has always been a part of Scrum. However, back in 2001, when Scrum first began getting traction, few understood what “coaching” meant.

Despite great advancements, there is still confusion about and many inconsistencies in the coaching aspect of the Scrum Master role.

According to the International Coach Federation (ICF)—a leading professional coaching body not associated with Scrum or any Scrum organization specifically—coaching is:

Partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.

The ICF goes on to say, “The coaching process does not include advising or counseling, and focuses instead on individuals or groups setting and reaching their own objectives.”

I find this definition important because to become an effective Scrum Master, I followed a professional coaching pathway, and many great Scrum Masters I have coached have done similarly.

It is my firm belief that any coach should actively work toward the independence of their client—a great coach does not create a need for their services. Similarly, in my book, Scrum Mastery (Inspect & Adapt Ltd, 2013), I expressed two fundamental pieces of advice for Scrum Masters:

  1. Ask the team.

  2. Make yourself redundant.

Scrum is designed to help teams and organizations deal with complexity. In complex work, where it is difficult to predict what we need to do or how best to go about doing it and where changes occur regularly and rapidly, we need autonomy. There simply isn’t the time for a decision to be escalated up the chain of management responsibilities and back down again.

In such work, it is also unlikely that the person at the top of that chain of command will know more about the work than those doing the work—in fact, it is almost certain that they will know less than the combined brains of the teams doing the work!

Therefore, the job of management is to provide servant-leadership. They need to create an environment where the people who have the skills to get the job done also have the confidence and support to make the necessary decisions and experiments to find out how to do it.

This comes through coaching. Asking the team and the individuals within it questions to help them think it through and make decisions. In my book Product Mastery (Inspect & Adapt Ltd, 2017), I talk about asking CHILD questions: questions that display a genuine Curiosity and Humility, questions that help Illuminate the situation for the team, Limitless questions that challenge assumptions about our constraints, and Direct questions that get to the heart of what we are doing.

A Scrum Master who can engage a team as a coach will thrive in our complex, unpredictable, fast-changing world of work.