For years I’ve been asking and coaching Scrum Masters to partner with the managers/leaders of their team members. To sit down with them periodically, weekly perhaps, and over coffee, to discuss their teams. For example—
Sharing stories of success for their reports
Sharing the challenges (delivery, mindset, performance, etc.)
Sharing the team’s vision, goals, impediments, etc.
Discussing alignment with organizational goals
Asking for help or looking for guidance
All with an eye towards giving each manager a window into the dynamics of the team and how their direct reports are “doing”.
But this isn’t a performance report or a status report. It’s a partnership, as the manager and Scrum Master are in a unique collaborative relationship to build the overall maturity and performance of the overall team AND each individual.
And the discussions should be focused on continuous improvement and actions the manager can take to coach each individual. Which is, in fact, their job.
I came across a video the other day that had this catchy title – Radical Candor. I watched it and was intrigued by the talk AND its implication to agile teams, organizational transformations, and sustainable cultures.
Kim Scott was the presenter in the video and she was sharing lessons she’d learned in her leadership journey at Apple and Google. In a nutshell, she was advocating radical candor for leaders in communicating with their direct reports.
The stories she told made me think about my own career and leadership journey. A couple of which I’d like to share with you.
I’ve been presenting at conferences for years. Over 20 years to more precise.
One of the common occurrences is that someone points out a typo or grammatical error on one of my slides in the comment section of the feedback form. I recently had this happen in a Certified Agile Leadership class. One of the feedback post-it notes on the first day pointed out a few typos. While I appreciate the feedback, I often wonder if there is more feedback than simply minutia…
If you read the feedback on Amazon for my Scrum Product Ownership book, some of the reviewers say the same thing. They talk about copy edit quality and the errors. These folks are right. I should have spent more time and money on the editing process. But if you look at the vast majority of the reviewers, they seemed to have overlooked those mistakes and received great value from the book.
And the detractors really seem to rate the book much lower based on the simple errors, simply overlooking the real value of the book. It’s as if they can’t see the forest for the trees.
