Sharpening the Saw at the Agile Coaches Symposium

Billie Schuttpelz and I at the Agile Coaches Symposium

One of the seven habits of highly successful people is called “Sharpening the Saw.”  It is taking time off for self-care and personal development.  I took time off from the blog and spent some time at the Uptake offices for the Agile Coaches Symposium in Chicago.  It was a great time and a valuable learning experience.

Working as a scrum master and agile coach is often a lonely duty.  You are spreading the word and sharing information with a skeptical audience.  Business and cultural forces often impede the agile maturity of the organization.  As a coach, you are spending your time serving as an example to others.  It is why it was nice to spend time with others in this profession and exchange information.

A few themes cropped up during the conference.  First, over 80% of the people at the conference said that had suffered from Impostor Syndrome.  It surprised me because when I have moments of doubt and disappointment, I chalked it up to something else. It is clear that those moments of darkness are Imposter Syndrome rearing its ugly head.  We did not have any easy answers to these issues, but it was still helpful to discuss them out in the open with others.

Next, there is a trend in the business world for Project Managers and other waterfall types of people to falsely brand themselves as agile coaches.  These falsely branded coaches create plenty of situations where people without experience or the personal qualities of coach try to bring agile to organizations.  The aftermath is typically a poorly applied implementation, and the agile movement undermined.  Collectively, we felt that some level of exposure and experience with agile was necessary to help coach others.  The consensus of the group was that a good coach, “Wares the shoes and can talk about the walk.”  So be on the lookout for agile coaches who cannot find comfortable shoes to wander around the office.

There were plenty of other discussions.  I even had a chance to talk about how my notion of story points have changed during my career.  The best part is spending time with other agile professionals and learning from them. If that is not sharpening the saw, I do not know what is.

Until next time.

Rage is when I am most vulnerable

Don Quixote got nothing on me.

Being a scrum master is a hard job.  It includes plenty of early meetings and late nights.  It is a life filled with stress.  Sometimes, there is a payoff when the customer is happy, and the software is in production.  Software development is a messy job.  Inevitably that dirt rubs off on people especially the scrum master.  Cleaning off this grunge has an emotional toll and this week I would like to talk about it.

As a scrum master and agile coach, I am a big believer in the idea of servant leadership.  The Marine Corps saying, “Ductus Exemplo,” is starting to become slang among business executives.  It is a fantastic concept, and I strongly support it.  The hardest part of being a servant leader is the everyday realities of being in charge of complicated software projects and managing people who are equally messy.  The mask of command and professionalism falls away, and you become vulnerable which for a leader is dangerous.

This danger of vulnerability means your raw nerves are exposed, and your emotions are controlling you rather than you controlling your emotions.  Losing emotional control means you will say things you should not and do things impulsively without thinking them through.  It is a dangerous place to be and one which can undermine your leadership credibility.

I have to confess that the above situation happens to me more than it should.  I become a fountain of rage at times.  In particular, when confronted with an individual who refuses to be accountable for their conduct I become a character from a Robert Louis Stevenson novel.  I get angrier when I spend time coaching someone, and they ignore my direction.  It makes a person feel like Don Quixote jousting with windmills.  The reward for your trouble is getting knocked off your horse and the laughter of by-standards.  Getting up and dusting yourself off to do it again looks stupid and futile when you have to do it with weekly regularity.

So here I am at my most vulnerable, filled with rage, feeling like a failure and believing the effort is futile.  These feelings can be fleeting, or they linger.  It is the worst when you are alone in bed trying to sleep, and the vulnerability is thicker than the darkness in the bedroom.

Like any leaders, I have to deal with these emotions and the emotions of my team.  It is not easy.  The rewards are fleeting. I promised myself that when I became a business leader, I would try to be firm, fair, and inspire others.  I fall short from time to time, but I still aspire to that ideal.  I have no choice; it is a promise I kept to myself and to the people I serve.  People depend on me.

Until Next time.

The Darkness of a Scrum Master

Each Scrum Master has their own version of the Darkness

The biggest challenges of a scrum master are personal challenges.  These are the emotions that well up inside while you are doing your job.  It is confronting personal failure and shortcomings of others. This week I want to talk about the emotional challenges of be scrum master.

David Foster Wallace was a famous author who publicly battled depression and alcoholism.   Wallace referred to his depression melodramatically as “The Darkness.”  It was an all-encompassing cloud or sludge which polluted his life.  I live with darkness myself each day.  Work is never on time.  Budgets are too tight. The hours are too long.  The coffee is either too hot or too cold.  Instead of being in control of my work and destiny; I am carried along by meetings and expectations I did not set.

This is when the darkness creeps into my life. It is the moment I do not feel like a professional but rather a cog in a large machine spinning endlessly spewing out profit and broken lives.  I am sure it would drive some to drink.

I asked some of my friends and colleagues in the Agile+ Community about how they deal with the stresses of the job. Some common themes came up in the conversation.  Talking to other scrum masters helps.  Taking time off and long lunches seem to help.  The consumption of alcohol came up often.  The most important theme was talking through the issues.  Scrum masters need to celebrate successes and learn from failures.  We need to find a healthy venue to complain about developers who are not living up to expectations.  Finally, we need a free and open exchange of experiences because it will help lessen the stress of the job.

As a scrum master, all eyes are on you.  The emotional toll of the job should not be ignored and everyone should take steps to beat back the “Darkness” which comes with the job.

Until next time.

The Postulates of Impostor Syndrome for the Scrum Master

We are not impostors under a mask!

When I think about it, I do not consider myself a successful person.  I have an average home.  I drive an average car.  My one extravagance is my collection of compact disks and the toy soldiers which bring me joy.  I am not one of the rich and famous.  I am just an ordinary person who when I die will have my name forgotten just like many other people who came before me.  This kind of realization makes me sad.  I am one of the many unwashed masses of people.  These are the facts as I understand them and they are woefully misguided.  I suffer from what authors Pauline R. Clance and Suzannne A. Imes call “impostor syndrome.”  After a week away from work and some reflection, I wanted to write about it.

The best definition of impostor syndrome I can find online comes from Forbes magazine.  In short, a person with impostor syndrome feels like they are going to be exposed as not being smart, talented, driven, and competent enough to be doing what they are doing.  It is that little nagging voice in the back of their head which says, “Who are you kidding.” It undermines your self-confidence and your ability to do the work you are doing.  It is what David Foster Wallace would call a Darkness which is following you around.

In the business world of continuous improvement, six sigma, and agile impostor syndrome is about as common as post-it notes.  The reason why is that for many people in that world we are open to and provide criticisms and critiques of each other’s work.  We can always be faster, smarter, and better communicators.  Sometimes, this generates soul crushing moments of frustration and futility.  Nothing is worse than being told you could have communicated something better when you send out 10 e-mails daily, speak to people personally twice in a day, and have a white board filled with information for upper management to read.  It is almost like they want me to sit on their chests like a hungry cat wanting to be fed on a lazy Sunday morning.

I think something deeper causes us to feel like we are impostors.  Human beings are pretty complicated things.  Over the last four hundred years we have done a pretty good job understanding how bodies work, but we are still struggling with understanding how our minds work.  We are not computers who all run code the same way.  We are complicated puddles of emotions, memories, and experiences who if we try hard enough can be rational thinking beings when the need arises.  This is why it is hard for me as a scrum master to be upbeat and positive all the time; sometimes the Darkness wins.  After some thought, on the matter I broke this down into four things which foster these feelings of being an impostor.

Consider these to be Wisniowski’s four postulates of Impostor Syndrome.

The Outside Image

As early as middle school, a professional is taught to dress and act a particular way.  While other young people get tattoos, piercings and are looking to have hair colors that do not occur in nature; the larval professional is told that they must act, dress and behave in a certain way to be credible for others.  This learning process creates what is known as a mask of command which other see but hides your true self.  This personal branding and quest to build leadership presence is not a natural process for most people so it creates a kind of cognitive dissonance where professionals are afraid that someone will penetrate their mask.  The situation is still not as bad as during the mad men era of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s but it is still there.  Just ask yourself when was the last time you saw a banker without a neck tie at the local branch.

The Inner Turmoil

Every human being is the sum of their experiences and not all of these experiences are good.  Each of us have suffered from failure, heart break, frustration, and disappointment.  This undermines your self-esteem.  The trouble is that in the business world you cannot be emotional because being emotional is a sign of weakness.  Thus, these feelings are buried and over time if they are not addressed they can manifest themselves in harmful ways.  In the quest to be strong, we undermine our own health and mental well-being.

The first two postulates of impostor syndrome cover what can be controlled by the individual.  The last too are outside of an individual’s control.

Our Public Reputation

Every professional is concerned about his or her personal brand and how others see them.  Around the office we all know people who are the ones who drink too much, who over share their lives, and who smell like feet.  To be a successful professional, we want to be perceived as the one who is hard working, knowledgeable, and able to take difficult projects and succeed.  The trouble with this is, try as we might to cultivate a positive reputation, it is out of our control.  Other people control our reputation because it is a product of our actions and the perceptions of others who see our actions.  One person’s hard worker is another person’s suck up to management.  The person who is fashionable to one co-worker is another person’s dressed inappropriate for the office.  Because of this lack of control, we try even harder to influence those opinions because a negative reputation could affect our career.

Our Personal Misconceptions

Finally, human beings are evolved creatures with emotions and an unconscious mind.  Cognitive science has shown that our unconscious mind can deceive us.  It has been shown that people suffering from Anorexia look at themselves in the mirror and have very different perceptions than people who do not suffer from the disease.  People with impostor syndrome reflect on their appearance and achievements through the same kind of distorted lens.  We did not graduate from school because we worked hard.  We did not earn the career success we have.  We see it as luck or the intervention of others.  Thus, even though the facts of our lives may say otherwise; our unconscious minds and emotions trick us into thinking that we are somehow faking it through our careers.

So those are my postulates about impostor syndrome.  I have been thinking about this lately because being a scrum master is to live with self-doubt.  You could always be better, more efficient, and able to handle more.  The reality is that sometimes you need to accept yourself warts and all and do the best you can.  I look forward to hearing what you have to say about this and how it applies to your work as an agile practitioner or scrum master.

Until next time.