How can a Scrum Master manage or mitigate conflict? 

There are lots of different ways a Scrum Master can help to resolve conflict. Some of the ones that immediately come to mind are: 

• Promoting the Agile and Scrum values through meetings and events; 

• Encouraging transparency in Scrum retrospectives; 

• Promoting honesty and transparency with the sprint backlog tasks; and 

• Promoting collective ownership.  

A useful way of identifying the Scrum Master’s role is by looking at the different stages of Tuckman’s team formation model. 

• During the forming stage you outline the mission, look for agreement on team roles, and establish rules and guidelines for decision-making; 

• Then, in the storming stage, you facilitate discussion and ensure common understanding of the things that have been agreed. 

• In the norming stage you encourage norming processes, support and coach the individuals in the team and celebrate success; then 

• During the performing stage you encourage high performance, facilitate communication and continue to celebrate success. 

You can see here that there are quite a few things you can do as a Scrum Master to create effective teams who have transparent communication and work towards a common goal. The activities at each stage will help to avoid conflict or, where it does arise, provide the basis to resolve it. 

A coaching approach 

A Scrum Master should have strong relationships with the individuals in the team and this can effectively be supported by adopting a coaching style with them. This means: 

• Listening to them to understand their perspective on things; 

• Being calm when you engage with them – building mutual respect and always being constructive; 

• Separating the person from the problem; 

• Listening for the root cause of an issue and then taking appropriate action; and 

• Inviting ideas from them to reach the solution. 

Here’s a 4-step approach for coaching a team through a conflict resolution process. 

Mediating a dispute is not as easy as getting everybody to agree on an outcome. In a team conflict, the sides often have a firm position and may be quite emotional. You need to mediate to get everybody to a solution building mindset. 

• First you need to work out if it’s a dispute – a short-term issue which is relatively easy to resolve – or a conflict, which is usually more intense and destructive. Questions like these will help you check if an intervention is viable: 

• Do they use a language of fundamental values or moral beliefs? 

• Do they express a personal judgment against each other as part of the conflict? 

• Is there a power struggle or a mismatch of goals at the root of the conflict? 

• Then, take a coaching stance – make sure that you fully participate in the conversation but remain detached from any specific outcome. This will help you gain awareness of the whole situation whilst supporting the individuals to move things forward. 

Techniques you can use to get your head into a coaching stance include developing a physical and mental routine to create a coaching position; acknowledging your existing bias towards any position, outcome or individual at the start; and checking your attitude to make sure you focus on driving the process and serving all the people involved. 

• Encourage the use of ‘I’ statements to express points of view and help the individuals take ownership of their position.  

• Once the parties have moved away from a win-lose mentality you can start building a solution. Here you need to define the conflict so everybody sees it as a common problem by re-framing the issue so it reflects everybody’s needs, goals and perceptions.  

• Then, through solution-focused conversations, define what the situation, environment or process looks like once the issue has been removed. This will help the parties move from confrontation to collaboration. 

Once you’ve worked with everybody to define the characteristics or constraints of the solution, you can start building it using whatever technique works best – like brainstorming or ideation. The goal is for the team to validate potential solutions against the required characteristics, rather than looking at them as competing solutions that they need to defend. 

Managing conflict in agile teams 

A foundation of agile practices is being pre-emptive. This doesn’t mean you should avoid conflict but you should try and make it unnecessary. Agile is about generating a collaborative and responsive atmosphere for teams to operate in. 

Conflict can be predicted by planning and foresight, and can be achieved in agile teams by: 

• Sharing the vision and mission so that objectives and outcomes are clearly understood; 

• Creating a team manifesto that describes the intentions, motives, and methods the team works through; 

• Making sure feedback and retrospectives are a natural part of the daily process; and 

• Working in an environment of trust. 

Emotional intelligence 

Before we finish, a brief word on using emotional intelligence to help managing conflict.