02 — Developing People and Teams

This section targets: Self-Managing Teams, Facilitation, Leadership Styles, Coaching, Mentoring, Teaching.

Key Focus Areas from Professional Scrum Competencies:

• Self-Managing Teams
• Facilitation
• Leadership Styles
• Coaching
• Mentoring and Teaching

Self-managing teams

The 2020 Scrum Guide uses "self-managing" (not self-organizing). Self-managing means the team decides:

• Who does the work
• How the work is done
• What to work on within the Sprint (selecting from Product Backlog)

What self-management looks like:

• Teams pull work rather than having it assigned
• Teams resolve internal conflicts
• Teams continuously improve their process
• Teams adapt their plan daily toward the Sprint Goal

What leaders must do to enable self-management:

• Provide clear outcomes (goals), constraints, and context
• Remove organizational impediments teams cannot remove themselves
• Avoid "task assignment as control"; trust the team to organize
• Create psychological safety for experimentation
• Align incentives with team outcomes, not individual performance

What self-management is NOT:

• It's not "no management" or abandonment
• Leaders still provide direction, constraints, and accountability
• Teams still need coaching and support
• There are still expectations and outcomes to achieve

Facilitation fundamentals

Facilitation is about helping a group think and decide effectively.

Core skills:

• Define the decision and desired outcome
• Invite diverse perspectives
• Keep focus and timeboxes
• Make agreements explicit (definition of done for decisions)

Anti-pattern:

• “Facilitator = decider.” The facilitator enables; the group decides (unless a clear decision owner is defined).

Leadership styles (practical)

Leadership is situational. Agile leaders shift between stances based on context.

Servant Leadership (Primary stance for Agile Leaders)

Robert K. Greenleaf (1970): "A good leader must choose to be a servant first."

Core characteristics:

• Listening actively and understanding
• Building community and relationships
• Sharing leadership responsibilities
• Collaborating and sharing control/decision-making
• Humility to admit they don't have all the answers
• Developing people through teaching, mentoring, coaching

What servant leaders DO:

• Remove impediments teams cannot remove themselves
• Coach and develop team members
• Protect the team from external interference
• Enable access to experts and resources
• Create environments conducive for experimentation
• Shield the team so they can focus on delivery

What servant leaders DON'T do:

• Assign tasks or micromanage
• Make decisions the team should make
• Use authority to override team judgment
• Take credit for team successes

Coaching Stance

• Ask powerful questions, don't give answers
• Help people discover their own solutions
• Build capability over time
• Focus on growth and learning

Mentoring Stance

• Share experience and guidance
• Provide advice based on past learnings
• Help navigate organizational complexity
• Offer perspective from experience

Teaching Stance

• Transfer knowledge and skills
• Explain concepts and frameworks
• Train on practices and techniques
• Build foundational understanding

Directive Stance

• Appropriate in emergencies, safety/legal/compliance constraints, or severe risk
• Use temporarily, then return to enabling autonomy
• Still explain the "why" when possible

PAL I mindset:

• High trust, high accountability, enable autonomy with clear outcomes.
• Default to servant leadership but be situationally aware.

Psychological safety and accountability

Safety isn’t “no standards”; it’s:

• safe to speak
• clear expectations
• fast learning loops

Look for:

• blameless root cause analysis
• learning from incidents without scapegoating

Coaching toolkit (simple prompts)

• “What outcome are we trying to achieve?”
• “What options do we have?”
• “What evidence would change your mind?”
• “What’s the smallest safe experiment we can run?”
• “What’s blocking you that you can’t remove yourselves?”

People Development: Teaching, Mentoring, Coaching

A key servant leader responsibility is developing people. Three approaches:

Key insight: Move from teaching → mentoring → coaching as people develop capability.

Exam traps

• Confusing empowerment with abdication. Leaders still set direction, constraints, and accountability; they don't disappear.
• Thinking facilitation is "running meetings". It's enabling better decisions and collaboration.
• Assuming one leadership style is always best. Choose situational leadership that increases capability and self-management.
• Servant leadership ≠ weakness. It requires courage and conviction to serve rather than control.
• Coaching isn't giving advice. Coaching helps people find their own solutions through questions.