The CORe skills
Of the five Scrum values, three values always stand out for me: Courage, Openness and Respect.
They are the supporting pillars that make a team a team in the first place. The “CORe Skills”, as I like to call them. When team members don’t learn, apply, and cultivate these skills, not only does efficiency and effectiveness suffer, but the spirit, cohesion, and intrinsic motivation to go the extra mile to a common goal also fall by the wayside.
I have experienced very often how a lack of courage has prevented a necessary and important conversation. I’ve seen how politeness and shame have prevented the addressing of deficits in teammates. I’ve heard and seen condescending comments and gestures between team members that make open and trusting collaboration impossible.
An example from a team to which I had newly joined: Various work packages were already being worked on in a sprint, which were then to be continued in the next sprint planning, since they were not completed, and finally a developer involved openly admitted that he is actually not really clear what the desired result should be. In fact, he only dared to ask substantive questions through my request. So the dam broke and others asked in a similar way. Previously, they had been unsure who they would ask and within what framework they would get their answers. So far, they have received requirements in writing and tried to get smart from them alone, which was their task exactly. The previous project manager had only made sure that all work was distributed. Unfortunately, without jointly discussed content and without clear agreements between developers and testers involved. The team members were unfamiliar with asking questions about the content and, above all, lacked the courage to address this obvious grievance to superiors.
In the end, everyone in the team had at best a rough idea of the overall goal to be achieved. Scrum had been introduced in the form of a 2-hour frontal lesson. The team members took it as a new method of doing project management, was and more or less simply continued to work as usual. Now with other tools and different names for the meetings, that’s all. The basic values and the meaning and purpose of agile methods were not conveyed to them. The culture and the way of working remained as it had been before.
Just teaching the three CORe skills would have helped essentially here, regardless of whether Scrum, waterfall, V-model or Kanban would have been used. In case of doubt, an open and trusting cooperation must first be learned together. This is the prerequisite for further steps. Please just start there first: Think along and communicate with each other. Open, respectful and courageous.