Enabling Conflict - An Essential ScrumMaster Skill?

Enabling Conflict - An Essential ScrumMaster Skill?

The scrum master as we know has a variety of responsibilities. Those towards the team, those towards the product owner and those towards the organisation as a whole. They are change agents and masters at systems thinking. I have once read a list of 42 tasks that a scrum master needs to do. Definitely not a part time role for a team member.
I have always been fascinated by one of the tasks of the scrum master in particular. That of being a team coach. They have the daunting task of taking the teams through the various levels of team formation by coaching at an individual as well as at a team level. One of the important techniques that work during team coaching is facilitating conflicts for the team. It is especially useful if the team is new and inexperienced.

The five dysfunctions of a team is an essential read for any scrum masters and team coaches. I always had the notion that a good team was one where there were no conflicts and the members were in perpetual harmony. I was really wrong. The perfect team is one in which the members trust each other so much so, that they openly challenge each other and hold each other accountable, which invariably will lead to constructive conflicts. One in which there is no place for ego and inattention to team result.
I have tried this in my teams and I can tell you it really works. One of my best teams had the team motto “Question everything, assume nothing”. I was both surprised and delighted that they came up with that. I also heard one comment once, that in the team everyone behaves like a scrum master, the insinuation being that, everyone asks questions and challenges things. That is how it should be for a team.
The team conflict is something which should be carefully moderated. To understand this one has to understand the concept of conflict continuum. If you map the intensity of conflict from the least to the highest on a line from left to right, on the left extreme we have the artificial harmony in teams which arises from the fear of crossing team members. Every one is OK with everything and each other lest they cross each other in any manner. On the right extreme we have personal attacks which is an extreme case of team conflict. Almost all teams would fall somewhere between the left extreme and the mid point. I once knew a team who was working together for about one and half years. I happened to sit in their meetings and I noticed that, it is usually only one person talking all the time. When I inquired about this, the reason given by one of the team members was that, the senior person always knew what everyone wanted to say. I had the notion of some sort of super human telepathic ability that this team had developed. Such anti-patterns and examples of artificial harmony are many in the real world.
Scrum masters should enable the team to reach the mid point between the extremes which is the ideal point of conflict. The picture which comes to my mind is a tight rope walker (team) who uses a pole (scrum master) for balance. Once the team is comfortable and develop expertise they will eventually be able to walk without the pole.

The conflict modes of a team can be generalized to five categories as can be seen from the graph below. Depending on the teams level of assertiveness and co-operation this can vary. If the assertiveness is more it becomes competitive. Likewise if the co-operation is more it will result in an accommodating mode. The right kind of conflict mode for a team is the highly assertive and highly co-operative kind which brings about a really collaborative conflict within the team.

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