← Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
When Protecting Your Agile Team Becomes the Barrier to Their Growth | Bhavin Shukla
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- [00:02]
A
Hello everyone. Quick heads up before we start today's episode. The Global Agile Summit is happening on May 4th. Yes, May 4th. And even with a big blowout Star wars party, you have to join. It will be online and it's like always free to attend. We have four tracks this year that I'm really excited about and I think you will too. Stick around to the end of the episode to know what they are. If you want to check it out already now you can check it out at bit ly globalagile 26. That's the numerals 2 and 6 at the end. So one more time, that's bit ly globalagile 2, 6, all one word, all lowercase. And 2 and 6 are the numerals 2 and 6. So stick around till the end of the episode and I'll tell you what's in store. But for now, on to today's episode. Hello everybody. Welcome to one more week of the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. And this week, joining us from beautiful Sydney in Australia is Bhavin Shukla. Hey Bhavin, welcome to the show.
- [01:15]
B
Hi Vasco. Thank you. Thank you for hosting me.
- [01:19]
A
Absolutely. It's a pleasure to have you. So let me tell you a little bit about Bhavin. He is driven by, just like many of us, unlocking potential and helping people thrive in ambiguity through clarity, honesty and discipline. He believes growth comes from truthful conversations, thoughtful experimentation and learning from failure, which is very much apropos because that's what we're going to talk about today as well. Guided by ownership, confidence, kindness and purpose, he focuses on what matters most to build meaningful progress for himself and others. That was a beautiful way to describe yourself, Pavin, Tell us a little bit more about yourself and how did you end up becoming a Scrum Master?
- [02:07]
B
So I started my career around working with multiple B2B B2C products and that's feels like years ago now and those are the times when it was the beginning of the Agile Manifesto, 2001, 2002 period. So there wasn't much movement around Agile, the buzzwords and the lingo in the market. So a lot of products I used to work back then was used, they used traditional project management approaches basically. So I distinctly remember my experiences where when I was coding I had this project managers, multiple projects. They used to be standing on my shoulders watching me code. Not particularly exciting, but I think the feeling I had back then was it wasn't empowering. That was one key reflection when I, when I still think about my past experience, it wasn't really empowering now did I, did I survive in that environment? Sure, that's why that's how I'm here. But then apart from being empowered, I never really felt trusted. So that's some context for you, Oscar, in terms of where I come from. Later when I got this opportunity to lead a totally cross functional SCRUM team, US and India, that organization was completely scrum, which was a completely new language for me.
- [03:41]
A
Now can you tell us a little bit? You said completely new language. Can you give a couple of felt examples of that new language as you describe it?
- [03:51]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Look, coming from this traditional project management methodology, you know that was the first time, when I joined this new organization, that was the first time I heard of the word Agile. That was say 2009, 2010 period. And I'm like, okay, so I'm doing my core job which is coding and also this thing called Agile. So it was pretty, I was pretty nice back then on this, the SCRUM happening. There's people talking about standups and sprint plannings and things like that. So I did feel nervous about what's in store because this ambiguity and this unknown makes you feel a bit unsettled as a human. Same emotion, same feeling. Well, the only thing I probably knew back then was I wouldn't lead the way I was being led or monitored or not. Truly felt empowered. That was one message which was very clear in my head. So when I took up this role as an architect, that was my formal designation. I worked with this lovely architect back in us. He was fantastic. He said to me, look, keep this Agile scrum, languages and the complexities around jargons aside, what we have to work towards is creating transparency, building some real good customer value in the healthcare products we used to do because it was a healthcare organization. And he said a very empowering thing. He said, always tell your team and always remind yourself, be working towards saving lives. Now if that doesn't move you and the team, probably we are in the wrong profession.
- [05:46]
A
Not just move, but kind of focus, right? Because then then it's not about writing
- [05:50]
B
code exactly, it's about saving lives. And from back then, you know, whenever I worked with this team trying to navigate all the complexities of not just the organization but products and you know, my own work plus scrum, that's where I started getting introduced to. Okay, so this is how I should be probably thinking because he said very explicitly that no, I cannot give you a or say that you're a SCRUM master. Officially titled, but that's the role that I would like you to play be my offshore Scrum Master, where I do the onshore thing. Build, coordinate, will help team move the, move the machine together. So that was my first, I would say, experience getting master shoes.
- [06:37]
A
Absolutely. And you said something like, it's a completely new language. And that's so beautifully said because it really is. When we go from project management to agile product development, it is a completely new language, different paradigms, different approaches. But when we trying to adopt, those things don't always go well. And today's Monday, Fail Monday, as we call it here on the podcast. It's always beautiful to start the week with a failure, but we do that because we want to learn. Right? Like we want to reflect and we want to learn and we want to be hopeful towards the future. And that's what lessons learned give us hope towards the future. So let's share one of those stories. Pavin, tell us, you know, what kind of project there was. What did you try to do, what was the perceived problem and then what happened and what you learned from it.
- [07:31]
B
Absolutely. So this was, after a few years, I started my Scrum Master journey and then I got into, I entered Australia, amazing sunshine country. I started working with a couple of teams who were tasked to build a bi regulatory platform which essentially was the main job of that product was to actually report sales and marketing numbers so we could see the leads coming from the source and the decisions could be made around how do we navigate the direction with the product, product setting or how can we sell other offerings. That was the primary purpose of the whole project back then. There were two teams, like I said. And when I joined this team, I noticed that the morale of the team was overall quite low. The body language that I observed on the floor, everyone's like, deep down in the, on their screens, you know, no one's looking at each other. Everyone's going for coffees alone. And I'm like, just confused, like, which is my team like, because I don't see a bunch of people talking, having this healthy debate and, and that was the environment I was used to. So I'm like, where do I go? Who do I talk to? But I got on with the first few weeks navigated, you know, getting into, into the team Scrum ceremonies, observing what's happening, getting the business context, trying to understand them, cream members, the dynamics there. And funny enough that I observed this fact that the morale and the energy was low. And that sort of turned out to be one of the biases I carried forward. Now that, okay, this is A problem. Could be, could be not. Because I did not have data that said, yes, this is a problem. It was probably a manifestation in my head, you know, could be. Well, Lucky didn't work out. It wasn't the case. So after observing, understanding all the dynamics, my natural instinct led to, how can I protect this team to be at their best? Natural Scrum Master instinct, right? Like, I need to improve people, I need to help them work, just better. But what I noticed then is the more I protected this team, the more I saw the movements of stakeholders and people around the floor coming and talking to the team. And there were these siloed conversations. Can I have a chat with you in the meeting room? And then, oh, hey, Scrum master, can we have a chat? I'm like, sure, we are having a lot of chat, which is good. We are collaborating, but something doesn't feel right to me. Like, we're having a lot of siloed conversations. I was working with this amazing coach who's a friend of mine now. He told me something that I would probably never forget. He said, you know, Bhavin, you're protecting the team. It's a good thing. But then you'd step back and ask this question to yourself, what's the balance that you have when it comes to protecting the team, to creating this visibility and transparency in what, what the outcomes are or we're trying to achieve? And that still resonates me because I tried connecting the dots and I was probably focusing more on how to, how do I protect this team, how do I get the best of them? But all my ceremonies, conversations were very shielded just because something told me that this team needs to first gel together as a team, come together first before we open up to stakeholders. But that wasn't the. So from an action perspective, we as a team decided we'll open up our reviews to stakeholders as a starting point, setting very clear expectations with the stakeholders. Hey, guys, this is what we do in this particular review. This is what we want from you. How would your feedback help us? So on and so forth. So we set the ground for them. What it helped us is it started changing our backlog and priorities and things like that now. So we saw movements, we saw people having more conversations around, hey, what if, hey, what happens if this is the feedback? Hey, but this is not what we heard. Yes, there was this healthy tension building up, but if I step back and think of what I saw, and a few years ago I saw this team humming, what that made me realize is, and this is after reflecting again with the same coach, he said, reflection time, Scrum Master. What do you see? What's changed? The lesson for me was, you know, we talk of creating safe spaces and empowering teams and so on and so forth. Yes. But the perception I had was safe space means insulation from creating the transparency. It was not about protecting the teams, it was actually about giving them the voice, giving them the platform and by isolating them was actually impacting that trust.
- [13:05]
A
Yeah, that's a beautiful story to exemplify an anti pattern that is very easy to fall into as a Scrum Master, which is when protection starts to be not just protection, but also avoidance of the reality of the relationships, stakeholder expectations and all of that. Because the teams can only grow when they face the reality of the expectations. And there's no way to avoid some of those being difficult. Right. Because that's just the reality of life in general. And that's why when we talk about psychological safety, it's very easy to understand safety as lack of difficult emotions. But it's not. It's the freedom to have difficult emotions without causing destructive or self destructive patterns. So I think that was a great story to give that nuance to the meaning of psychological safety. So thank you for sharing that. Pavin. Hi there friends. Thanks for sticking around till the end of the episode. So let me tell you what's coming on May 4th. We're running the Global Agile Summit. It will be online and I want you there. This year we have four tracks and each one is built around real conversations with practitioners. No slides, no keynote theater, just honest interviews with people doing the work, just like you. The first track is AI in Organizations where practitioners show what actually works. No hype, just AI that makes your Monday better. Happy Monday everybody. And then we have the people track. Honest conversations about putting humans at the center of how we work and keeping them there. And third is Agile in Construction. And yes, I really mean brick and mortar construction. Lean and agile, Actual job sites, field leaders removing waste, Teams transforming how buildings get built. Stay tuned for what I think will be a super track on Agile in construction. And the fourth track is Agile in Gaming. How Game Studios Ship Without Burning Out Agile Inside the Creative Pressure Cooker. Over the years we've had more than 12,000 participants since 2017, the time of the first summit organized with the podcast. And this year we're making it easier than ever to join. You can register for free and get access to the summit sessions live during the event week. That's May 4th to May 6th. Or you can grab the practitioner pass and get immediate access to last year's keynotes from Jurgen Apollo Gojkoadi and Mirete Kangas right now, even before the summit starts. So grab your practitioner pass and start learning today. Head on over to Bitly GlobalAgile 26. That's 2, 6. The numerals 2 and 6 sign up and I'll see you on May 4th. And one more time, here we go. Bit. Ly. GlobalAgile 26. All lowercase, all one word. And 26, that's the numeral 2 and the numeral 6. I'll see you on the conference floor.