Difficult people in a scrum
There was a post recently on the scrum development group about how to handle a difficult person in a scrum who was causing the team to fail on delivery. While that particular post is about someone who overestimates it led me to think about difficult people in general.
Under traditional methods of managing software development, difficult people are a source of angst for both the team members and the manager, and the manager is typically required to spend a lot of time trying to keep the difficult one in line and manage the negative impact on morale, team spirit and productivity that this type of person usually causes. It has a real defocusing aspect on the team and is a source of delay and poor results in projects.
If the manager is unable to bring about behavioural change a team will often lose respect for the manager and undesirable staff loss may occur (ie the good ones get frustrated and leave) or an irrevocable and undesirable culture shift can occur wherein the good staff learn to live with their frustration and just start "phoning it in".
Under scrum, a difficult person is usually a lot easier to deal with. Not because the person is any different but because the pressure on the individual to work well in the team is not brought just from above but from the side as well (ie by the team members). Now this happens in normal project management as well, but because scrum gives the team the right to self organise and the authority to do what they need to to get the job done, they typically figure out a way to deal with the difficult person and they know that they can make the changes they need to in order to make the team work. Traditional teams have the ability to pressure their peers but lack the authority to do anything about it.
In scrum a team will usually opt for isolation and/or marginalisation of the individual. The team doesn't enjoy working with the person, so they give them the crappy tasks or the trivial ones that need no assistance from the rest of the team.
It's the teams right to do this and the scrum master should interfere as it disempowers the team. However, as a scrum master this is not something that should be left to continue for long and if it continues some intervention may be required. The difficult person could be moved to another team or shown the door, or they could be coached in improving their behaviour, or the team might just have personality conflicts and should be broken up.
Remember, as the scrum master, the management of difficult individuals to ensure a positive result is not your responsibility, it is the teams. Taking your hands off the wheel is a hard thing to do when transitioning from traditional project management to scrum, but it is something that will free you up to do the more important aspects of your job (ie mentoring and building up your team, instead of directing and limiting them). Leave it to your teams to sort it out and see what happens.
Under traditional methods of managing software development, difficult people are a source of angst for both the team members and the manager, and the manager is typically required to spend a lot of time trying to keep the difficult one in line and manage the negative impact on morale, team spirit and productivity that this type of person usually causes. It has a real defocusing aspect on the team and is a source of delay and poor results in projects.
If the manager is unable to bring about behavioural change a team will often lose respect for the manager and undesirable staff loss may occur (ie the good ones get frustrated and leave) or an irrevocable and undesirable culture shift can occur wherein the good staff learn to live with their frustration and just start "phoning it in".
Under scrum, a difficult person is usually a lot easier to deal with. Not because the person is any different but because the pressure on the individual to work well in the team is not brought just from above but from the side as well (ie by the team members). Now this happens in normal project management as well, but because scrum gives the team the right to self organise and the authority to do what they need to to get the job done, they typically figure out a way to deal with the difficult person and they know that they can make the changes they need to in order to make the team work. Traditional teams have the ability to pressure their peers but lack the authority to do anything about it.
In scrum a team will usually opt for isolation and/or marginalisation of the individual. The team doesn't enjoy working with the person, so they give them the crappy tasks or the trivial ones that need no assistance from the rest of the team.
It's the teams right to do this and the scrum master should interfere as it disempowers the team. However, as a scrum master this is not something that should be left to continue for long and if it continues some intervention may be required. The difficult person could be moved to another team or shown the door, or they could be coached in improving their behaviour, or the team might just have personality conflicts and should be broken up.
Remember, as the scrum master, the management of difficult individuals to ensure a positive result is not your responsibility, it is the teams. Taking your hands off the wheel is a hard thing to do when transitioning from traditional project management to scrum, but it is something that will free you up to do the more important aspects of your job (ie mentoring and building up your team, instead of directing and limiting them). Leave it to your teams to sort it out and see what happens.