Host (5:34)

Yeah, go ahead.

Stuart Tipples (5:36)

Without psychological safety in our teams, teams, essentially, they'll rot from the inside out. Right. They're doomed. This book, as a Scrum Master, gives you an adrenaline shot into your mindset thinking. It gives you language that's really helpful, and it should bolster your courage to lead with your team and sort of not lead at them. Okay, so you can't recommend it enough.

Host (6:08)

So talking about teams, of course, because that's the next topic we cover. Tell us the story of a team and how they over time kind of delved into maybe negative patterns. What were those patterns and how did that affect the team? So tell us the story of that team that self destructed, Stuart.

Stuart Tipples (6:28)

Yeah, so I've told this story quite a few times and I tell it to sort of new teams I'm working with to the point that I've given them the name and I lovingly refer. Referred to them as the Get Along Gang, which if you're of a certain age in the uk, was a children's Saturday morning cartoon. But yeah, this was a team that I didn't start with. I was sort of brought in as a coach to support the Scrum Master and support the team get out of a bit of a funk. They were in. They were behind on work, supporting A. It was a B2B customer portal that was linked to a much larger program of work and it was a key piece. And again, on the face of it, with this team, things seemed okay, right? The Scrum Master was running the events, everything was happening. They had slipped their retrospectives, as we've talked about before, that sort of, that happens. They sort of had that terrible view that they were just a drain. It was output focus rather than sort of focus on how they could help the team. Despite this and despite the sort of pressures they were under to deliver, they all seemed quite happy. Everybody seemed to get along. Everybody. Retros were just not silent. But there was no real sort of. There was nothing actionable coming out of it. It was kind of, you know, it's all fine, it's all good, you know, yeah, we're happy. Yeah, we know we've got lots of work to do. We've just kind of got to get on with it. That attitude wasn't helped by the fact that I had a little bit of hero culture in that team where we had a sort of one, one of the devs who was, you know, a rock star, but they kind of felt like they were taking the lion's share of the work. It was a lot on their shoulders and they'd kind of fallen into that trap of as long as my work's done, it's okay, I've done my bit. Which is really sort of bad for any team dynamic, right? It's bad to be over reliant on any one single team member, but it's also bad that you're sort of just breaking away to like, what my bit's done. It's, you Lot. You suck. The other reason we didn't sort of achieve the goal, so I, you know, my support initially was to just, let's, let's. Let's sort of reinforce the structure. Let's try and sort of break away from that hero culture. And I started to sort of encourage a Scrum Master to share the work out a bit more evenly amongst the devs. I even suggested we just try some simple sort of approaches, like a bit of sort of pair programming so the other devs could work with the more experienced device. That did not go down well at all. It was huge, huge pushback. Ultimately, I think what really sort of shattered this team was, and my big sort of learning from it was silence is not agreement, right? So as a Scrum Master, we need to sort of recognize that and recognize that early on and push, you know, use real sort of rudimentary, you know, the five whys. If I'd applied that a lot earlier in that particular situation, I no doubt would have uncovered this. So.

Host (9:56)

So when you say silent affected this team, silence, pardon me, affected this team, you mean like the. The team was not like taking ownership. They were not stepping up and owning the challenges that they were facing even though they were late. They were just kind of accepting it as just a given.

Stuart Tipples (10:14)

I think. I think it was. I think it was sort of almost. It was. It's. What's the expression? It's. It's almost. It was almost toxic positivity. I think if I look back with this team, right, it was this sort of the unwillingness to sort of address the issues. It was the unwillingness. And I say unwillingness, that's probably not fair. They didn't feel safe or comfortable to disagree. So the psychological safety was missing. And I think that was. That was really painful for me as a coach to realize. Again, quite later on, as I said, if I maybe sort of hit them with the five whys and address the sort of. The silence and that sort of very sort of muted.

Host (10:59)

So what you're describing there is like, instead of engaging in conflict to resolve a problem, they would just sit back and wait for the problem to go away on its own, right?

Stuart Tipples (11:09)

Yeah. And you know, what ultimately happened with this team, Vasco, is that like, in any situation, right, it exploded because it was on a. It was just. It was left unattended, it wasn't addressed, and it sort of exploded into quite unpleasant, quite personal sort of disagreement. So by that point, it's very difficult to sort of apply beneficial sort of conflict management because it's too Late, right.

Host (11:37)

It's too late.

Stuart Tipples (11:38)

And emotions have sort of taken over. So I guess boiling it down. Yeah. Toxic positivity is real. Don't just accept that sort of. If people tell you it's all good and it's fine and you have a feeling in your gut as a Scrum Master, trust your intuition, push a little deeper, push with the team, push individually with one on ones. Right. And understand, scratch below the surface. There's probably something that is giving you that feeling and the longer you leave it, the bigger the fallout is. Yeah.

Host (12:15)

And actually that's a very good point. Right. Like one of the patterns that we should always have in our minds is that when there isn't the conflict, it's because people are not taking the conflict that is latent there. I mean, and conflict doesn't need to be disagreement. It could be just, you know, positive tension, positive energy in the conversations. Maybe we could call it passion. Right. Like, and where, when there isn't, we very often oscillate between silence and explosion. This is a very normal human pattern, right. Like we hold off until it's too late and then we have to get everything out of our chest. And of course, sometimes we lose. We lose kind of the guideposts of what is productive and respectful conflict. And we go too far. And if we do that, then it's too late. So it's a very important pattern to.

Stuart Tipples (13:07)

Have in mind for anyone that's sort of experiencing this right now. I think my learning and how I ultimately sort of very slowly sort of repaired and rebuilt the trust in this team, I would say, is you can foster the psychological safety by normalizing healthy disagreement. Right. Encourage it. Again, as a Scrum Master, you have to sort of bring that out, tease it out. You can have fun with it, right. You can be a bit sort of cheeky with it. You can. We're very good as human beings at sort of reading each other, even in remote, sort of in the world where we live now, where we have sort of teams that are remotely, you know, as long as even without cameras on, we can hear it in the voice or we can hear it by the fact that people aren't engaging. Right. There's something driving that. Trust your intuition, scratch below the surface. But yeah, normalize that. Healthy disagreement. Encourage it. A key one is, and I was guilty of this very early on in my career as a Scrum Master in that I would sort of perhaps over labor the idea of civility and that we must all sort of be very civil, professional, and keep our emotions in check. But civility is kind of empty without honesty. So make sure that you really are getting honest views and you sort of work with your team. And every team's language will be different, right? Every team's idea of civility will be different. You'll have one team, whereas a group of people, they perhaps have enough trust to sort of be quite blunt. And in other teams, they need a bit more of a delicate approach.

Host (14:54)

Absolutely. Always keep civility. But of course, if there's no conflict, be aware of that.

Stuart Tipples (15:00)

That's a sign 100%.

Host (15:02)

Thank you very much for sharing that story, Stuart.

Vasko (15:07)

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