• Scrum Master

The Drive of Scrum – how Scrum extraordinarily motivates people

Since his introduction to Agile working in 2008, he cannot imagine working any other way. With his broad background and experience, he enthusiastically helps individuals, teams and organizations become more agile. While dodging trees, he also applies Agility on a mountain bike in the woods.

“Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.”

In many of our Scrum training courses, we show this beautifully illustrated talk by Daniel Pink on motivation. Pink, author of Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates people, argues that there are three intrinsic factors that motivate people: autonomy, professionalism and meaning (purpose).

The differences in the scrum roles at Scrum, Scrum Master, Development team and Product Owner greatly encourage these drivers. Read here how I apply Drive in Agile practice with perhaps inspiring examples for you.

The Scrum Master and autonomy

The Scrum Master is a servant leader for the Scrum team. One of his biggest responsibilities is coaching the Development Team in self-organization. This means making sure that the Development Team gets more and more autonomy in terms of how they work. By removing impediments and getting the organization to the point where the Scrum team is increasingly in control, the Scrum Master can increase the motivation of the team members.

One of the most common impediments for a Development Team is being shielded from information about the “health” of the product they have created. For example, whether there are bugs in it, and what bugs, or whether parts of the product are not being used. For example, I worked with a team that created a website that sold insurance.

In order to purchase insurance, a lot of information is often requested. So a lot can also go wrong here. As Scrum Master, I made sure that the team itself could see errors and data from the website, which was not the case before. Instead of going to another department, they could now take immediate action themselves if something went wrong. This autonomy gave a big boost to the team’s motivation.

Another example is a team where, as Scrum Master, I made sure we did our annual review ourselves. Instead of our manager gathering information from colleagues, we did it ourselves. I organized a 360-degree feedback session where we as a team assessed each other’s performance and gave everyone individual feedback. We shared the outcome with our manager, who gave his approval. We felt really empowered!

The Development Team and craftsmanship

The Development Team in Scrum consists of professionals who are perfectly capable of organizing their work themselves and managing themselves to a great extent. They not only continuously improve their ways of working, but also continuously hone their skills. Well-functioning Development Teams invest in their craft and become masters of their profession. In other words, true professionals. They attend training courses and conferences, participate in hackathons and use their slack time to try out new technologies and innovations. By (voluntarily) developing their craftsmanship, they become more motivated.

One of the teams I helped always ended their sprint on Thursday. It was not possible for them to schedule the next sprint earlier than Monday. So they had a day “left over.” They used this time to create a self-conceived application, based on a new technology, that allowed them to monitor messaging between other applications. This allowed, for example, errors to be found much faster and drastically reduced the development time of new applications. A big win, in other words.

The Product Owner and purpose

The Product Owner strives to maximize the value created by the Development Team. She ensures that the product supports and realizes the business vision. When this vision is purpose-driven this purpose trickles down to the Product Backlog and thus the product itself. The Scrum team then knows why they are creating the product and how it contributes to the company’s purpose.

Moreover, research at Google shows that successful teams want to see meaning in their work. Teams that find what they work on personally important are simply more successful. Especially if they see that the work they deliver makes an impact with customers. Therefore, a good Product Owner is not only a value-maximizer, but also a purpose-maximizer!

A good example was one of the Product Owners I worked with recently. The Scrum team had introduced a great new feature that customers could order. At the end of each sprint, she shared sales figures with the Development Team. But she also shared qualitative data, feedback from customers, with the team. Everyone on the team saw the impact of their work and this really works very motivating!

Why not just motivate people with more money?

Money does not work well as a motivator, according to Pink, when it comes to cognitive work. It is important, however, to pay people enough money. Enough to keep people from doing it. Paying too little is a demotivator, and paying more in the form of innovation or performance bonuses, for example, does not motivate people to perform better.

So try to allow agile teams to grow in their autonomy, craftsmanship and meaningful work, instead of spending money on bonuses that don’t work. For example, organize hackathons or experiment with things like Google’s 20% time.

In my experience, no team that has embraced an agile way of working wants to go back to a more traditional way of working together. People report that it’s a lot more fun, that they can be creative again and are seen as the smart professionals they are. Of course, sometimes I meet someone who really likes to just be told what to work on. But even he wants to become a professional at something and work on something that makes an impact.

Self-motivated to grow agile teams? Take a training course at the Scrum Academy and appoint yourself a Scrum Master, Product Owner or Agile Coach.

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