As a Scrum Master, your success bonded on coaching and facilitating others succeed. The main aim of the Scrum Master is to build high value-driven teams and develop an agile mindset in business. As a Scrum Master with coaching responsibilities, you must know what you bring to scrum teams and organizations and what you do not bring. One of the most valuable things a Scrum Master can do is sharing Scrum expertise which helps the Scrum team achieve their goal(s). To achieve this, you need to use your interpersonal skills to discover and known each team members personal and professional motivators and goals. The critical point here is that you should be aware (self-awareness) of your interpersonal skills to succeed in the first step. Lack of self-awareness can lead a scrum team to not self-managing.
What is self-awareness
As Ashley, G. C., & Reiter-Palmon, R. state inn their research, “Self-awareness and the evolution of leaders: The need for a better measure of self-awareness”, “self-awareness is an inwardly-focused evaluative process in which individuals make self/standard comparisons with the goal of better self-knowledge and improvement.” and “self-awareness is trainable”.
It all starts with you
As a Scrum Master, you coach the scrum team to be more productive and self-organizing to provide working increments and develop an agile mindset. To achieve these and be a great scrum master at creating outstanding results, you need to increase your self-awareness. But how? As a Scrum Master, how you can know and then increase your self-awareness?
My experiential self-improvement suggestions to be a great servant leader are :
- Be open and get feedback on performance to see how much you do for your team and organization.
Allowing the feedback to influence your view of the individual providing input is not a good idea. You must be open and responsive to gain insights that would support your team. The ultimate aim is to acquire information through feedback. The Scrum Master aims to teach the scrum team how to use input, which is stressed significantly in Scrum. Even if you think all is going well, make it a habit to ask for the positive feedback. Positive feedback will help you to learn more about yourself. You will learn more or even get familiar with your strengths, weaknesses and characteristics.
- Keep learning.
As Richard Gross says, “Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences.”. Learning is about pushing ourselves to try new things or build on what we have already learned. You will be better able to respond to sudden changes if you continue to learn. As Timothy Sykes says, “There are always new skills to learn and strategies for you to adopt, and you should never stop learning as it enables you to: Generate new ideas – do not just stick to what you know.”
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Reference:
- Ashley, G. C., & Reiter-Palmon, R. (2012). Self-awareness and the evolution of leaders: The need for a better measure of self-awareness. Journal of Behavioral and Applied Management, 14(1), 2-17.
- Richard Gross, Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behaviour 6E, Hachette UK, ISBN 978-1-4441-6436-7
- Timothy Sykes, Why You Should Never Stop Learning?, https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/333635
- The Featured image is under Creative Commons license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/), and all credit belongs to Alexandra Person (https://www.flickr.com/photos/k0librix/)
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