The Hidden Cost of "No Time for People Stuff" in Software Teams | Chris Sims

Summary

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile Storytelling from the Trenches
Episode: The Hidden Cost of "No Time for People Stuff" in Software Teams | Chris Sims
Host: Vasco Duarte
Guest: Chris Sims
Release Date: April 22, 2025

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, host Vasco Duarte engages with Chris Sims to delve into the often-overlooked human aspects of Agile teams. The discussion centers around the repercussions of neglecting "people stuff" within software development teams, highlighting how minor interpersonal issues can escalate into significant team dysfunctions.

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Guest Introduction and Inspirations

Timestamp [01:03]

Vasco welcomes Chris Sims back to the show, setting the stage for an in-depth conversation about team dynamics. The episode begins with Vasco inquiring about the literary influences that have shaped Chris's approach as a Scrum Master.

Notable Quotes:

• Chris Sims [01:26]:
  "The book that most inspired me, certainly most impacted me is The Elements of Scrum, because I was one of the co-authors and we actually used Scrum to write the book. It worked out really, really well."

• Chris Sims [01:26]:
  "If you want to learn something really well, teach it. I would add to that, write a book about it. Oh my goodness. My understanding got so much deeper by having to write about it."

Chris credits The Elements of Scrum, a book he co-authored, as a profound influence on his Agile practices. He emphasizes the importance of teaching and writing as means to deepen understanding. Additionally, he mentions Phil Jackson's Sacred Hoops, lauding Jackson's ability to transform strong individual talents into cohesive, high-performing teams.

Notable Quotes:

• Chris Sims [01:26]:
  "Phil Jackson is really well known for getting players who are individually very strong, but perhaps not good team players to play well together as a team. That was his magic."

Chris draws parallels between basketball team dynamics and software teams, setting the foundation for discussing team cohesion and the hidden costs of neglecting interpersonal relationships.

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Main Discussion: Team Dynamics and Toxic Behaviors

Timestamp [02:51]

Vasco steers the conversation towards Chris's personal experiences with team dysfunction. Chris recounts a past scenario where a team, laden with strong personalities and conflicting opinions, succumbed to toxic behaviors.

Notable Quotes:

• Chris Sims [03:17]:
  "There were a lot of back channel communications. So there were subgroups of the team talking trash about someone who wasn't there."

• Chris Sims [03:17]:
  "By the time I kind of really realized how toxic things had gotten, it was pretty dark. And eventually, some of the folks were behaving so badly that they ended up on performance programs and gone."

Chris describes how minor grievances and quirky behaviors escalated into overt resentment and malcontent, ultimately leading to team members being removed from the team. He reflects on his role as a coach, expressing regret over not addressing the issues sooner.

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Lessons Learned and Strategies

Timestamp [05:43]

Vasco probes into what Chris would do differently in hindsight to prevent the deterioration of team dynamics.

Notable Quotes:

• Chris Sims [06:06]:
  "I would have done more one-on-one coaching to help people see, like, hey, that thing you just did, maybe that's not so great. Let's really try to figure out what's going on there."

• Chris Sims [06:06]:
  "I would have initiated conversations about what kind of team culture do we want? And maybe brought those back to the Scrum value of respect."

Chris emphasizes the significance of individual coaching and fostering open dialogues about team culture early on. He underscores the necessity of aligning team interactions with Scrum values, particularly respect, to mitigate the buildup of latent conflicts.

Timestamp [08:54]

The conversation shifts to practical techniques for uncovering and addressing hidden tensions within teams.

Notable Quotes:

• Chris Sims [08:54]:
  "Perhaps opening retrospectives with check-ins, maybe even anonymous, to identify like the mood and the attitude that people are bringing to the retrospective."

• Chris Sims [08:54]:
  "One of the protocols is the check-in idea where people get to say how they're feeling and if they're ready to do the work or need to take care of something else."

Chris advocates for structured check-ins during retrospectives, allowing team members to express their current states and any underlying concerns. He suggests using role-selection tools to facilitate anonymous sharing, thereby creating a safe space for honest communication.

Timestamp [11:11]

Vasco introduces the "Super Chicken Paradox," which Chris finds immediately relevant.

Notable Quotes:

• Chris Sims [11:52]:
  "The Super Chicken model. Okay, I'm going to be reading that."

Chris acknowledges the value of the Super Chicken Paradox, which posits that teams composed of "superstars" can paradoxically underperform compared to teams of competent, albeit less individually outstanding, members. This reinforces his earlier point about prioritizing team health over individual prowess.

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Related Concepts and Further Insights

Vasco briefly mentions the Global Agile Summit, promoting it as an event where Agile professionals can gain fresh perspectives and connect with like-minded individuals. Although this segment primarily serves as a promotional interlude, it aligns with the episode's theme of fostering Agile excellence through community and continuous learning.

Notable Quotes:

• Host [12:02]:
  "At the Global Agile Summit, we're bringing you real-life first-person stories of Agile succeeding out there in the real world that will inspire you to take action and transform the way you work."

This segment underscores the importance of learning from real-world experiences and narratives, which is the essence of Agile storytelling discussed throughout the episode.

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Conclusion

Throughout this insightful episode, Chris Sims and Vasco Duarte explore the intricate dynamics of Agile teams, highlighting the often-overlooked costs of neglecting interpersonal relationships. Chris’s reflections on his past experiences serve as a cautionary tale, emphasizing the critical role of proactive coaching, open communication, and fostering a respectful team culture. The strategies discussed offer practical guidance for Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches aiming to cultivate healthy, high-performing teams.

Final Notable Quote:

• Chris Sims [11:11]:
  "The team health is more important than appeasing even someone who's a very strong contributor."

This poignant reminder encapsulates the episode’s core message: prioritizing the overall well-being and cohesion of the team is paramount to sustainable success in Agile environments.

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Key Takeaways

1. Proactive Coaching: Regular one-on-one interactions can help identify and address interpersonal issues before they escalate.
2. Structured Retrospectives: Implementing check-ins and role-based sharing can surface hidden tensions and promote honest dialogue.
3. Cultural Alignment: Establishing and reinforcing a team culture based on respect and mutual understanding is essential.
4. Team Over Individuals: Focusing on collective team health yields better outcomes than concentrating solely on individual performance.
5. Continuous Learning: Engaging with Agile communities and events, such as the Global Agile Summit, can provide valuable insights and foster professional growth.

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Further Resources

• Global Agile Summit: An event featuring Agile thought leaders and practical sessions aimed at transforming Agile practices. globalagilesummit.com
• Books Mentioned:
  • The Elements of Scrum by Chris Sims et al.
  • Sacred Hoops and Eleven Rings by Phil Jackson
• Concepts:
  • Super Chicken Paradox: A model illustrating the potential downsides of assembling teams solely with high-performing individuals.

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This episode serves as an essential listen for Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, and team leaders seeking to enhance their team's effectiveness by addressing the human factors that underpin successful Agile practices.

Transcript

[Host]

Have you ever wondered what it really takes to make Agile work well? At the Global Agile Summit, we're bringing you real life first person stories of Agile succeeding out there in the real world that will inspire you to take action. Whether you're a leader, a product innovator, a developer, you'll hear practical insights from those who've done it. They'll be telling their own stories from the stage. I'll tell you more about this at the end of this episode. So stay back and listen to the full detailed description of what we have in store for you at the Global Agile Summit. But if you can't wait, you can go right now to globalagilesummit.com and check out our full schedule for now onto the episode. But I'll see you at the end of this episode with more details on the Global Agile Summit. Talk to you soon.

[Chris Sims]

Hello, everybody.

[Host]

Welcome to our Team Tuesday. This week we have with us Chris Sims. Hey, Chris, welcome back.

[Chris Sims]

It's good to be back.

[Host]

So, Chris, Team Tuesday is the, of course, focus of today's episode. But before we dive into that, to share with us, what was the book that most inspired you in your career as a Scrum master?

[Chris Sims]

All right, I might have to share two here because my first one's a little bit of a cheat. So the book that most inspired me, certainly most impacted me is the Elements of Scrum, because I was one of the co authors and we actually used Scrum to write the book and it worked out actually really, really well. And we used a lot of the tools. We had a story, not a storyboard, a story map that we used to map it out and evolve it over time. And I've often heard it said, if you want to learn something really well, teach it. I would add to that, write a book about it. Oh my goodness. My understanding got so much deeper by having to write about it. My second book, real quick, completely outside of the world of Scrum and Agile, a book called Sacred Hoops. There's a related book, eleven Rings. They're both by Phil Jackson, who is a basketball coach who is really well known for getting players who are individually very strong, but perhaps not good team players to play well together as a team. That was his magic. And so it was a whole book about like, how do you get people to play well as a team? And I learned a lot from it.

[Host]

Yeah, that's really great as a book for today's episode, of course, because it's all about how do we get teams to work well together or rather how sometimes they don't work well together and what we can do about it. So let's dive into that story, Chris. So tell us the story of a team, give us a little bit about the context, and then walk us through how those small little behaviors kind of started small, but grew and became a problem for the team.

[Chris Sims]

Yeah. So this was the team that I was on years ago, and it was a team of people with, in fact, very strong personalities. So we probably could have used Phil Jackson as our team coach. Things may have gone better because quite frankly, I don't think I handled it all that well. So people with very strong personalities, very strong opinions about how the work should be done, strong opinions about whether or not the other people on the team were doing the work the right way. And several of them had, for lack of a better term, kind of very harsh ways of expressing those opinions. And there was a lot of back channel communication. So there were subgroups of the team talking trash about someone who wasn't there. Right. And these kinds of behaviors started small. Right. Someone would. And a couple of, you know, several of the team members were kind of quirky, me included. And so people would like, oh, that person did this weird quirky thing. What's up with that? Right. Kind of a thing. So it started out small, but over time, a lot of resentment grew on the team. And, you know, several people were making kind of accusations again behind other people's backs about other people not working hard enough. Right. And by the time I kind of really realized how toxic things had gotten, it was. It was pretty dark. And eventually, you know, some of the folks were behaving so badly and so blatantly that, you know, they ended up on performance programs and ended up gone. And that to this day, that breaks my heart. Right. Because I kind of feel like as the coach for that team, had I been able to catch this earlier and get the team to have some frank, hard conversations earlier, maybe we could have caught it. Right.

[Host]

Let's dive into that, Chris. So I'm sure that you've seen this type of behaviors elsewhere as well, later on as a coach, perhaps even before that, who knows? But when you think about that story and that type of behavior that you described, what are some of the things that you think you would do differently if you had to go through that story again?

[Chris Sims]

So definitely I would have done more one on one coaching. I think at the time we were all under a lot of pressure and it was all about, oh, we got to get things done by the deadlines and all that. So there's just not time for this more, you know, personal stuff. And looking back, it's like, no, no, that stuff is actually really vital. And so I think I would have done more one on one coaching to help people see, like, hey, that thing you just did, maybe that's not so great, right? Let's. What's going on there? What's underneath that? Like really trying to figure out what's going on and help people find better, more productive ways to express whatever their discontent is and find more productive approaches to dealing with it. Similarly, I think I would have started having those harder conversations as a team in retrospectives much earlier because I think one of the negative cycles there was. We all had become aware that things were getting a little dark, but in our retrospectives we were focusing on surface level stuff, right? I mean, we were finding improvements and such, but we weren't dealing with the cultural aspect. And it was the cultural stuff that, you know, ultimately was the demise of that group. And so I think I would have initiated conversations about what kind of team culture do we want? And you know, maybe brought those back to the scrum. Value of respect, right? Are, are we treating each other with respect? Maybe giving people an opportunity to share like what, what feels like respect to you? Because I think it's different for each person and I think ultimately most people on that team ended up feeling not respected by the end.

[Host]

And of course that leads to usually resentment, as you said, also this latent conflict. Latent is even worse other than outspoken conflict, because outspoken conflict needs to be handled right. Like it's, it's not in hiding anymore. But when it's latent, like behind the backs or side comments or whatever, then, or talking trash, of course that, that, that just reinforces the, the division, the rift between the team members. But when you think about this type of conflict, this latent conflict that is kind of under the surface, that shows up in, you know, retrospectives having only surface items being discussed. What were some of the things you've learned over the years that you apply these days to help surface that latent conflict in a productive way?

[Chris Sims]

Well, so, you know, perhaps opening retrospectives with check ins, maybe even anonymous, to identify like the mood, but also the attitude that people are bringing to the retrospective. There's one that I've used where people get to select a role that they feel that they're in in this retrospective and it can it, you know, some of the roles are like hostage or observer or you know, active participant. You know, there's a handful of others that I've seen. And that can, especially if it's anonymous, so people feel maybe a little bit more comfortable and then we like, look at the overall that can start to surface. Like, how are people doing here? Right. I think that's, that's a tool that's useful from core protocols. There's the, the check in idea where people basically get to show up and say, you know, how are you feeling? Like we actually care about that and are you ready to be in and do the work or is there something going on for you where you need to be out right now and take care of something else? And having that be, you know, a fully acceptable option. That's an interesting tool that I've, I've worked with some teams who use that tool quite successfully. So I think some of that, honestly, one of the other things I would have done earlier is be far less tolerant of like blatantly destructive or disrespectful behaviors. I think there was sometimes a, like, oh, but we're all under a lot of pressure and we're in a rush and you know, so yeah, this person kind of blew up. But you know, gosh, we're all, we're all working hard here and it's like, no, no. Right. Like there are some behaviors that just shouldn't be tolerated. And if that means removing someone, even someone who's a rock star. I think the team health is more important than appeasing even someone who's a very strong contributor.

[Host]

Yeah, there's a, a video that I saw many years ago, super. The Super Chicken Paradox, where the presenter describes how when you put together teams of superstars, actually the shared outcome is a lot less impactful than when you put together teams of, let's call them good enough performers that are not superstars. Right. So that's really, really important. The team health is more important. Thank you for sharing that, Chris.

[Chris Sims]

Oh, thank you. This is me doing a web search for Super Chicken right now. I want to see that.

[Host]

There you go. I'll put the link in the show notes for everybody else.

[Chris Sims]

I love it. The Super Chicken model. Okay, I'm going to be reading that.

[Host]

Hey, friend, thank you for staying here is all you need to know about the Global Agile Summit. If you've ever suffered or know people who are suffering from agile fatigue, this event is for you. Agile fatigue is that feeling that settles in when we can't really see a light at the end of the tunnel. We get discouraged. Especially when conversations revolve around the same old frameworks, the same old buzzwords. And theories. We don't feel that energy anymore. Well, the Global Agile Summit is a different kind of event. We're bringing you real life first person stories of Agile succeeding out there in the real world that will inspire you to take action and transform the way you work. The Global Agile Summit will happen in Tallinn, Estonia May 18th. That's the workshop day. Then 19th and 20th, the conference day. And Tallinn, Estonia is one of the most innovative tech hubs in Europe. The Global Agile Summit is hosted together with Latitude 59, which is kind of a citywide celebration of software startups and groundbreaking ideas. And we'll have a shared ticket for you to attend those events as well. So who will be speaking? Well, we've got an incredible lineup of thought leaders in software and agile. For example, Clinton Keith, the person who wrote, literally wrote the book on game development with Scrum and is busy bringing Agile to the world of game development. You must check his session. The very famous and well known Jurgen Apello, author of Management 3.0, will be talking and exploring about AI's impact on leadership. We also have Goiko Adsic, who's taking an unconventional look at product growth with his Lizard Optimization keynote. Other speakers include, for example Sig Sven Dietz, who's challenging everything we know about software development by ditching, literally ditching contracts and estimates. Can you imagine his teams deliver software before their competitors are even done with a contract negotiation? How agile is that? But there's more. We'll cover engineering practices in our development developer track with talks on for example AI assisted test driven development, developing products in minutes with a different approach to how we develop, configure, deploy platforms and much more. We also have a product track where we cover cutting edge ideas around product discovery, delighting customers with product product delight frameworks. We'll have a talk about that. And we also have an Agile business track where we will talk about, for example Open strategy, a very agile approach to managing organizations and delivering software faster to clients faster than you can even write a contract. Literally. I mean, I already told you about Svendit's story is amazing. It definitely is a must see. I'm sure you'll be inspired and get a lot of ideas for your own software projects and software delivery. Now, whether you're a business leader, a product innovator or a developer, you'll definitely find value in our three focused tracks. That's Agile Business for those working with businesses and organizations. Agile products for product managers, product owners and innovators, an agile developer for the builders making agile work in practice. The coders, the testers, the designers, the producers, the Scrum masters, you name it. If you join, you will meet over 200 agile professionals from all over the world. People who, just like you, want to grow, want to share, and want to learn. By challenging the ideas that don't work anymore at the Global Agile Summit, you'll get new connections, fresh ideas, and the energy to take your own Agile to the next level. And who knows, maybe even find your next career opportunity. So don't miss out. Check out the full program and grab your ticket now at the Global Agile Summit. I'm really looking forward to seeing you all in Tallinn, Estonia in May. I'll see you there.