Why most Scrum Masters suck

In my experience, most Scrum Masters are usually:

• Ex-Prince 2 / ex-Waterfall / ex-Dark Side
• Ex-developers who gravitated via Darwin to be a Scrum Master due to having a greater level of social etiquette
• (There's no polite way to say this) Massive wimps

In my opinion, this is what Scrum Masters SHOULD be:

• A people-person first and foremost
• Drenched in emotional intelligence and empathy
• Able to divorce themselves from technical detail
• Thick-skinned
• Willing to stand for the courage of their convictions when everyone around them loses their rationale.

And yet most Scrum Masters are terrible. 

Yep, you heard me right. They suck. 

Why? Because they lack the necessary character traits (shown above) that enable them to be effective in the first place. I know this because I’ve interviewed around two hundred candidates in the last couple of years – and around five or six of these two hundred I’d hire (recruiters hate me).

As a Scrum Master, I work within the Tech department and yet I always tell people that 90% of my job is People orientated and non-tangible. My job tends to do one of two things at all times:

1)     Encourage good development behaviours (from all sides of the Project cycle)

2)     Erect and maintain framework Boundaries.

The two points above are all people related and nothing to do with Tech; they just happen to sit within a Tech industry. Because Techies aren’t great socially it’s doubly important that your Scrum Master is a big personality. More, I’d say you can tell everything about your delivery team and project framework just by interviewing the Scrum Master for thirty minutes. I’ll talk about this at some other point.

You’d be better off converting your confident / big personality team member into a Scrum Master as opposed to converting your Scrum Master into a confident / big personality person. It’s much easier and fifty times more effective (in my experience) to do it this way and yet the opposite is always attempted by most tech teams. This is nuts. Scrum is easy to learn – but it takes the right person to deliver it. Most places aren’t Agile – they just think they are – it’s not the Devs fault and it’s not the product guys fault.

The buck stops with the Scrum Master; this is why they are so important and this is why most of them suck.