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Surprised to hear Organic? Why are we even talking about it? How is organic SM going to be different from just SM?
I am sure all these questions might be popping in your mind!
We have seen food industry rising with higher demand of organic because products in its most natural form provides higher nutritional value even in lesser dosage, but do we need to be organic in our professional roles too? Let’s dive in below 5 major areas to evaluate!
1. Peeling off Dysfunctions – First step to healthy change is recognition of nuances that prevents from reaching higher potential. Until unless team doesn’t majorly see the dysfunctions they possess and the impacts they are living with, it’s difficult to make a long-term change. It will be like a boat getting pulled in opposite directions ending up in tension.
Observe and enable team to diagnose the root causes from where these dysfunctions have stem. Often, CULTURE plays the biggest role in impeding or expediting the progress and it can be best established when leaders model humility, accountability, encourage autonomy and vulnerability.
2. Being responsible for team effectiveness, not just a reporter or task tracker – Although good customer deliveries are a non-negotiable KPIs tracked in form of tasks on the team board but are you also helping your team to channelize their energy with growth mindset in multi-dimensional way.
Do you really gauge whether members are going on auto-pilot mode of task accomplishment or are they also motivated to go out of comfort zone to explore newer stuff?
3. Advance and practice your coaching skills – Have you started coaching somebody and got a push back? You are not alone, welcome to the club! Not every moment could be the perfect time to coach!
Knowing when to coach is just as important as knowing how to coach. Unless the individual or team is open for the dialogue, you won’t be able to make a good impact with your coaching style. Observe and find approaches to embed coaching in-the-moment in your team culture. However, also have situational awareness of the moment that demands directive approach like just-in-time advise.
4. Being a mentor and a mentee – Remember the school days when we used to do combined studies because it helped us learn faster and stay in memory for longer? Things imprint better through something we can picturize or relate to a memory.
So, whatever you do, just never stop learning and never stop sharing. Use that curious energy to fuel the learning agility and it will open spectrum of perspectives for you.
5. Be a realist than to be idealist – One may seem more likeable to people when they are often agreeable, but your less valued seat of Scrum master (often misunderstood across industry) will require you to be untethered by opinions to bring out overall positive change.
Modelling change agent requires you to fail, share and embody the learnings from your failures in future. Any change faces friction because let’s agree, transformation is not an easy journey. So, knowing that perfection is only hypothetical you will need to depict lead by example to influence people for relentless improvement.
This may really tickle your creative nerves😊because human psychology is lot interesting than our limited knowledge.
Implementing these 5 recommendations will require a combination of soft-skills day-in day-out and every individual can have their unique style to approach.
Since these are directly from my personal experience as a Scrum master and learning Agile Coach, I hope this blog gives you enough insight to evaluate current state and see the possible capabilities to set you on the journey to be Organic SM.
Stay Curious, Stay Purposeful!
This article was submitted as part of the SogetiLabs India Hackathon’s blog and whitepaper contest.
Author – Meenal Rajput
Meenal is Scrum master and Conditioning Coach at Sogeti in India. Having developer background and carrying a decade of IT experience, she has worked to produce significant positive cultural changes in multi-vendor teams and induce transformations at program levels. She has manifested coherent knowledge of multiple agile frameworks (Scrum, Kanban, XP, SAFe) through break and create patterns to support journey of High Performance Teams (HPT) as she believes ‘Frameworks are for people, people are not for frameworks’. She has provided consultancy on Agile to teams across accounts for improving customer value deliveries.
Meenal likes to implement her learnings of human psychology to tap newness in her work style. Also passionate about organization transformation and content curation.
Great article.
Very apt when people have different way of thinking what scrum master s are. Generally they are considered as priest of rituals – instead of gods of agile practices.