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Sunday, May 31, 2015

How to build resilient Scrum teams ?


Some time back I attended a session on raising resilient kids. I learnt that building resilience is all about building the ability to bounce back and learn from all kinds of adversity—including setbacks, threats, stress and trauma.   





Here are some notes from the session.


How to build resiliency in kids?


1. Providing unconditional love and acceptance
2. Trust them
3. Provide safe environment for them to fail
4. Trust their problem-solving skills
5. Encourage independence and let the child solve its problems
6. When they are hurt, listen to them calmly and provide them comforting feeling
7. Let the child know the consequences of bad behavior
8.Set the expectations and rules of the game
9. Provide enough freedom to be creative
10. Accepting your kid as he/she is the key to making them resilient

In fact as part of coaching engagements, this is exactly what we encourage Scrum teams to be.  A Scrum Master should work towards building resilient Scrum teams. 

How do you build resilient Scrum teams ?
Just replace “kids” with “scrum teams” :-)  in the above section and you have the answers.
Bottom-line is, a Scrum team should be trusted and encouraged to solve their problems.  

There is a huge misconception in the Scrum world that “Scrum Master”(SM) is there to remove the blockers/impediments, and I would strongly discourage this characteristic. 

As long as Scrum Master is solving all the challenges, the team stays crippled and dependent on SM. Sometimes the SM must consciously step back and allow the team to struggle to solve their problems.


With the right environment and boundary conditions in place, the team should be allowed to work on the goal. The team should be trusted and encouraged to figure out the solution. When they fail, instead of punishing them, they should be comforted, and support should be given.


Before I conclude this short post, What other characteristics have you observed in resilient teams?


Photo courtsey: https://flic.kr/p/qwbDN

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