Creating Safety And Overcoming Fear In Agile Teams | Ramya Shastri

Summary

Summary of "Creating Safety And Overcoming Fear In Agile Teams | Ramya Shastri"

Podcast Information:

• Title: Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
• Host: Vasco Duarte, Agile Coach, Certified Scrum Master, Certified Product Owner
• Episode: Creating Safety And Overcoming Fear In Agile Teams | Ramya Shastri
• Release Date: December 3, 2024

---

Introduction

In this episode of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, host Vasco Duarte engages in a deep conversation with Ramya Shastri, an experienced Agile Coach and Scrum Master. The focus of their discussion revolves around the critical themes of creating psychological safety and overcoming fear within Agile teams. Ramya shares her insights and real-world experiences, offering valuable lessons for Scrum Masters and Agile practitioners aiming to foster a healthy and productive team environment.

---

Influential Resources for Scrum Masters

Ramya Shastri begins by discussing the resources that have significantly influenced her journey as a Scrum Master. Initially relying solely on the Scrum Guide, Ramya emphasized the importance of thought leadership and online platforms like LinkedIn for her professional growth. She candidly admits,

"When I had started my journey as a Scrum Master, for me, I just followed this Scrum guide... I didn’t even know anything about this earlier"
[00:47]

As her understanding deepened, Ramya recommends the book "Driving Value Through Sprint Goal" by Martin Dalmi, highlighting its transformative impact on Scrum practitioners across various roles. She asserts:

"Any Scrum practitioner... must read that book. That's a game changer."
[01:56]

---

Identifying Team Dysfunction: A Real-World Example

Ramya recounts her experience working as an Agile Coach who transitioned into the role of a Scrum Master for a specific project. Upon joining, she observed troubling team dynamics characterized by:

• Extended and Ineffective Daily Scrums: The team held Daily Scrums at 9:00 AM, stretching from 45 minutes to an hour, far exceeding the recommended 15-minute timeframe.

• Silence and Lack of Engagement: Meetings were notably silent, with team members keeping their cameras off and remaining on mute. Only the manager actively participated, often reprimanding team members without fostering open dialogue.

• Managerial Overreach: A manager overseeing four to five teams subtly assumed Scrum Master duties without fulfilling the role's true essence.

Ramya describes her initial assessment:

"I was sensing that the vibe of this team is not at all good. So I was literally thinking, how do I break this ice?"
[02:31]

---

Intervening to Foster Psychological Safety

Recognizing the pervasive fear within the team, Ramya implemented several strategies to dismantle the existing barriers:

1. One-on-One Connections: She initiated individual meetings with team members to understand their perspectives and identify underlying issues. Ramya noted:

   "There would be at least one person who is courageous enough to talk about some things that are going wrong... I was just trying to test waters who that person was."
   [06:02]

2. Encouraging Video Participation: To humanize interactions and reduce the anonymity contributing to fear, Ramya encouraged team members to turn on their cameras during meetings. Initially met with resistance, persistence led to gradual participation:

   "One person started coming on video, then another person started coming on video this way."
   [08:00]

3. Team-Building Activities: Ramya delegated ownership of team-building activities to team members, fostering a sense of responsibility and creativity. She shared:

   "Each sprint we will have a team building activity... Let’s see how creative you can get."
   [08:15]

These interventions aimed to create an environment where team members felt safe to express themselves without fear of retribution.

---

Outcomes and Insights

The combined efforts led to significant improvements in team dynamics:

• Enhanced Communication: Team members began to engage more openly, turning on their videos and participating actively in discussions.

• Breakthrough in Long-Term Team Cohesion: Ramya discovered that the team had struggled with poor interaction for two years, highlighting the profound impact of sustained fear and the absence of courageous leadership.

Ramya reflects on the importance of courage within teams:

"If they could have been a little bit courageous... this situation wouldn’t have happened."
[09:25]

She emphasizes that often, the lack of a courageous leader to challenge the status quo allows fear and silence to persist, leading to prolonged team dysfunction.

---

Host's Perspective and Key Takeaways

Vasco Duarte underscores the significance of Ramya's approach, highlighting the role of Scrum Masters in empowering teams:

"Sometimes our job is just to give people permission to talk about the things that they already want to talk about."
[09:25]

He commends Ramya's method of gradually transferring responsibility to team members, enabling them to take ownership of their interactions and address underlying issues independently. This strategy prevents teams from remaining passive recipients of a manager's narrative and encourages proactive problem-solving.

---

Notable Quotes

• Ramya Shastri:
  "I just chant upon this role as a Scrum Master. I didn't even know anything about this earlier..."
  [00:47]

• Ramya Shastri:
  "If they could have been a little bit courageous... this situation wouldn’t have happened."
  [09:25]

• Vasco Duarte:
  "Sometimes our job is just to give people permission to talk about the things that they already want to talk about."
  [09:25]

---

Conclusion

This episode offers profound insights into the challenges of fostering a safe and open environment within Agile teams. Ramya Shastri’s experiences and strategies provide a roadmap for Scrum Masters to identify and address fear-based dynamics, emphasizing the importance of courage, open communication, and team empowerment. By creating psychological safety, Scrum Masters can transform team interactions, leading to more effective collaboration and sustained success.

Listeners are encouraged to apply these lessons to their own teams, fostering environments where every member feels valued and empowered to contribute freely.

---

Stay Tuned:
Join us in the next episode as we explore "How to Lead Change", featuring discussions on leading and participating in change programs from seasoned professionals. Don't forget to rate and share this podcast to support the Scrum Master community!

Transcript

[Vasco Duart]

Hi, I'm your host, Vasco Duart. Welcome to the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast where we share tips and tricks from Scrum Masters around the world. Every day we bring you inspiring answers to important questions that all Scrum Masters.

[Podcast Host]

Face day after day. Hello, everybody. Welcome to our team. Tuesday this week we have with us Ramya Shastri. Hey, Ramya. Welcome back.

[Ramya Shastri]

Hi, Vasco. Thank you so much for having me here.

[Podcast Host]

Absolutely.

[Ramya Shastri]

Good to be back.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, absolutely. It's great to have you back to talk about teams. But before we dive into the team story, do share with us. Ramya, as a Scrum Master, what was the book that most influenced you?

[Ramya Shastri]

Honestly, if I have to be really honest, I. When I had started my journey as a Scrum Master, for me, I just followed this Scrum guide, to be very honest. And as I mentioned, I just chant upon this role as a Scrum Master. I didn't even know anything about this earlier, so I kind of relied a lot on thought leaders helping me out, or maybe specifically LinkedIn helped me help me a lot, wherein thought leaders used to write about a lot of stuff and I kind of picked up on lot of things. So in my journey initially I did not kind of read much books or many books. But then now, if someone has to maybe read any book, one book I highly recommend is Driving Value Through Spring Goal by Martin Dalmi. So I think any Scrum practitioner, be it a product owner, developer, Scrum Master, or if there is a role outside that script, drum team, if there are any managers, everyone must read that book. That's a game changer.

[Podcast Host]

Absolutely. And we'll definitely put the link in the show notes for people to find both of those references easily. And now we turn our attention to teams with whom we work every single day. And because of that, we also know that teams themselves, they develop their own little behaviors or patterns that eventually lead to problems. So, Ramya, tell us the story of a team, give us a little bit about the context, and then walk us through the steps of how those small little things perhaps kind of grew and grew and eventually became a problem for that team.

[Ramya Shastri]

Correct. So I will typically give you an example or maybe talk about one of the projects wherein there was, I mean, a lot of fair culture within the team.

[Podcast Host]

Can you give an example of what that means?

[Ramya Shastri]

Yeah. Yes, yes, I'll. I'll tell you how. So when I had, I had been hired for that particular project internally within the organization, say as an agile coach, I was working there in Agile Coach, but then they said that we are following Scrum. So obviously even though you're an agile coach, you'll have to help us in the Scrum framework. So typically I had become a Scrum Master over there, right? So when I had been to that project and I had seen teams, right? So one of the peculiar thing that I had observed in that team was there was a pin drop silence in the, in the Daily Scrum, okay. And there was, they called it as a Daily Scrum and they used to run it for almost 45 minutes to one hour. And initially, obviously I was just trying to figure out what is going on with this team. Obviously I cannot just go there and change things randomly, right? So I was just observing what is going on, what are the team dynamics like and so on and so forth. So I just, I was observing. It was just, I think one week into the project or week and half or so, and there was, there was a manager within the team who was kind of managing all, I think four to five teams under him. And that manager was kind of playing the role of a Scrum Master very subtly. I mean, he was not even a surface level Scrum Master. He was just given that title as a Scrum Master and not playing really as a Scrum Master. And the, they used to have daily Scrum at early in the morning. So for us in India, what we prefer is we start our day late, maybe typically after 10 o'clock or maybe from 11 onwards, because most of us clients are from the west, right? So we need to kind of manage the time zone differences. So we start our day late. And I was observing that this team is having daily scrum at 9:00am and it was lasting for like one hour, sometimes one and a half hours. So I thought, I mean, why is no one raising this point? I was clearly understanding that something is. I mean I was sensing that the vibe of this team is not at all good. So I was literally thinking, how do I break this ice? How do I kind of open the people up? I mean that was one of the biggest things at least. To get that entry within the team and also to let them talk was a very difficult thing. And even the Daily Scrum, just the manager was talking. None. No one, I mean everyone was on mute initially. No one on the camera, I mean no one on the video, just the manager, whoever name he used to call out, that person will answer. And this manager used to bash left, right, center the team members. Why this didn't happen, that didn't happen all those things. So I somehow started having one on one connects with them.

[Podcast Host]

So when I started with the whole team. The one on ones with the whole team.

[Ramya Shastri]

Yeah, yeah. One on one individual with individual team members.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Ramya Shastri]

So obviously, I mean with the experience that now I have as a agile coach, I know that when we say we are working in a team, not every team member is alike. Right. Even our fingers in on our hand are different. Right. So there would be at least one person who is, who would be courageous enough to talk about some things that is going wrong we cannot expect everyone to talk about. So I was just trying to test Waters who is that person who can talk about such things. And like I guessed there was one person who talked about it. I just happened to check with that person. Are you guys okay with this timing of the daily scrum? So and I asked this with to each team member and everyone like, no, yeah, it's okay. I mean that's how it has been and all those things. So there was one person who, who said, you know what, we are not fine with this timing. I said, why didn't you speak up there? Why didn't you tell your manager that you are not okay with this timing? So that person told that no one is talking about it, why should I talk? And I was like, no, there is something wrong with this team. So I started kind of peeling each layer of the onion and I discovered that they were fearing that manager so much that all the decisions of the teams were taken by that manager. So I used to just count dictate the terms and everyone used to obey because of the fear. So that's when I told. I started having an interaction more often and I started somehow breaking them up. I mean having some interactions. I insisted them to come on video, do some kind of activities together. And when I started doing that activity initially only I was on the video and none of them came. So I kind of started requesting people, it would be great if you can come on video, and so on, so forth. And one person started coming on video, then another person started coming on video this way. I told them that each sprint we will have a team building activity. And since they were like five, four to five teams, I gave them that ownership, saying that now you have to come up with the team activity. You design a team activity for rest of us. Let's see what how creative you can get. So that was a just a kind of a thing that I started saying. And one team started doing that, another team started doing that. By the end of the second sprint, people started opening up and I was surprised and shocked to know that those people were a part of the same team since two years. And they said, we did not even see each other. This is the first time we are seeing each other. And I was like, I don't know what is going wrong. So. And that's when I started then openly having a discussion. Then I kind of asked them that why is the environment of this team so bad? I mean, I'm, I'm getting such a bad vibe. Why don't, why don't you guys fall? And they told me that no one gave us this courage that we should be speaking up.

[Podcast Host]

And actually that's a very important point, that sometimes our job is just to give people permission to talk about the things that they already want to talk about. Right. And that example of coming up with those team building activities and then slowly passing on the responsibility to the team members and of course, with the hope of opening up the conversation.

[Ramya Shastri]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

To be able to address the topics that were hard to address, that is so cool. Because that's what we need to do. We need to help the team take over the situation where they are so that they don't feel like they are victims or passengers in somebody else's storyline. Like in this case, potentially even that manager's storyline. Right?

[Ramya Shastri]

Absolutely. And I feel that, I mean, had someone be courageous enough to maybe bring these people together, entire team together, and maybe put their feet down saying that, you know what boss, this is not how we should work. And they would have done this long bag, they would have not suffered this so much from last like two years. That's what they said, right? I mean, they were suffering so much for past two years, since past two years, because no one had a courage. So this is what I say that, I mean, if they could have been little bit courageous, if they, they could have made, I mean, that's bold step, this situation wouldn't have happened. And at this larger scale, right? Like no one is talking, everyone is quiet. Only people who have been asked to talk is they are speaking up and no one is even raising any questions. They are slogging, working over weekends. Nothing was right in that project. And typically when I went there as a Scrum master, this was that typical project where I had to counsel them. I know that that's not my job. Right. I mean, as a Scrum master.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Because they were probably feeling quite stressed out and frustrated and disconnected from their team members. Yeah, absolutely. I can totally see that. Ramya, this was a great story. Thank you for sharing all of those tips.

[Ramya Shastri]

Thank you. Thank you so much. My pleasure.

[Vasco Duart]

Tuesday is team Day here on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, but tomorrow we talk about something that goes beyond the work we do with the teams. We will talk about how to lead change and what our guests have learned from leading and participating in change programs during their career. See you tomorrow. We really hope you liked our show, and if you did, why not rate this podcast on Stitcher or itunes. Share this podcast and let other Scrum Masters know about this valuable resource for their work. Remember that sharing is caring.