Sunita looked anxious when she met me a couple of months ago.
She has been a successful Scrum Master and enjoyed her work. Her team respected her and held her in high regard. She also had a good working relationship with the Product Management team and the functional managers of team members.
Team members were very participative in discussions and were not hesitant in sharing their thoughts in any relevant discussion.
Based on her performance, she was asked to take on some additional responsibilities of making a strategic program for the company, more Agile.
She set up a Scrum of Scrum platform for all teams in the program to get together, for planning, tracking and resolving any dependencies.
While the initial meetings were well attended, the attendance and participation started reducing gradually.
She sensed it and wanted to do something to make the Scrum of Scrums also as effective as her Scrum team.
What guidance do you have for her?
Suggested solution
Sunita can address this in 3 steps.
1. get the business representatives [or the POs] to articulate he superordinate goal for the teams, that will identify the business outcome expected
2. share this vision with the SoS having the user or business representative discuss that, to get everyone to understand the expectations and identify how they can create the impact as a team
3. enable the SoS to define the team norms, just as a scrum team would have. This will help the team push and pull each other towards the impact expected
9 Responses
An interesting “angle”! There is usually an emphasis on empathy among team members for better team work and self-organization. Would teams truly consider the manager/leader also as part of the team? Needs some mindset change. I think Emotional Intelligence training/coaching should bring out this aspect – that EI (Empathy being part of it) does not draw boundaries of applicability! Enjoyed reading a refreshingly different blog…
Thanks, Shiv. Yes, completely agree with your point on EI’s role in this regard. Gopal
Nice angle! And nice twist in the title of the blog!
Good perspective, which is normally missed.
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Nice article, Gopal.
We all know one filed where downwards empathy is hardly ever seen, but upward empathy is expected and demanded. Politics.
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Nice article, Gopal! Very good insight. Practicing Empathy needs an effort as it needs seeing the world from the perspective of the another person. It is all the more difficult when you do not see everything that the other person sees. I remember one instance in my life when a manager reporting to me was promoted to senior manager’s post and moved away from me on a new, higher level assignment. After a few days she came to meet me and I enquired how she was doing on the new role. She said, “Milind now I know the kind of pressure you faced from above. You never passed that onto us and kept us shielded. Now I know how difficult your role and life is. I am trying to be like you!” So, the true empathy comes out of having experienced similar situations yourself.
So, Milind is the message “a little empathy is better than a late empathy”?
Gopal,
Nice blog.
This is a very valid and necessary perspective that everyone should have.
Somehow, in most organizations, just like ‘agile’ is considered as something for the teams and team members, these may be labeled as management and only for managers – as part of the leadership development plans.
Some ways how I have contextualized this in some situations:
• At an individual contributor level: connecting to empathy as a key skill for design thinking [observing and understanding users]
• At a team level: the togetherness and one-team idea [teams making commitments, the huddles in cricket and other sports etc], to use daily standups, for example, to recalibrate oneself after sensing how the others feel on that day or in a particular situation
• For managers: understanding and doing what they can, to make their managers successful, particularly when the complaint is that my manager does not understand me or my needs