Stop! Stop hiring Scrum Masters!

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

Attention! The content of this post may be considered hilarious or provocative. Maybe it is not.

An increasing number of fellow scrum masters (or agile coaches), product owners, scrum developers, reports confusing job descriptions, misleading role and responsibilities documents and huge regrets from managers or leaders who hired or are trying to hire scrum masters.
If you are thinking of hiring a scrum master please, stop and take a moment to reflect before doing so.

I know, all your competitors, partners, clients, claim to be agile and you heard they are using one of the most successful frameworks: Scrum.
You think you made your search, and you are told that Scrum after making the history of car manufacturing first and software development later, can now make the difference in your organization.
You have been told that acquiring an agile mindset and adopting the scrum framework, you can produce double of the value in half time.
You read that any modern and successful IT organization introduced Agility at some point, hiring a bunch of Scrum Masters, Product Owners Agile Coaches, Agile Transformation Lead or even Chief Transformation Officers.

What they didn’t tell you is that all of this success doesn’t come for free.
You will need to let go of all your old habits, unreasonable practices, rights to command and control all your staff, change even the way you work, the way you contract and collaborate with providers, partners and clients.
I know you think you are OK with that, you assume you can do it, you believe that you and your people can change. But you can’t. Most people resist the change. Whether you are a hiring manager, executive or owner, you don’t know what you are doing. Especially if you created your own tailored job description and role specification for the scrum master.

If you think the agile coach has to sell you the value and benefits of adopting the agile mindset, please stop!
If you think the scrum master has to sell you the value and benefit of adopting the scrum framework, please stop!