Mauricio Robles Agile Coaching, Book Reviews, Scrum Mastery

Daring Leadership: From Clarity to Connection

In the ever changing world of Agile, on of the most powerful tool an Agile Coach or Scrum Master possesses isn’t a framework—it’s vulnerability. Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead provides a powerful mandate for how we can operationalize vulnerability to build the trust necessary for true organizational agility.

My key takeaway from Brown’s work is that daring leadership begins with clarity and ends in curiosity.

Be Kind: The Power of Clarity

Brown bring us down a very simple but profound truth: “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” In an Agile environment, this means eliminating the ambiguity that breeds resentment and speculation. When we are clear about expectations, feedback, and roles, we act with kindness, even when the message is difficult. This clarity creates a safe foundation from which we can then be genuinely curious about others’ perspectives and challenges. Without this initial clear communication, any attempt at curiosity will feel performative or even manipulative.

Building Empathy Through Emotional Exploration

True connection and trust are the currency of high-performing Agile teams. This trust isn’t built on happy hours; it’s forged in shared emotional exploration, time and tough conversations. Brown’s work emphasizes that to build empathy, we must explore the emotions that live within our experiences. As coaches, this means moving past a simple “What happened?” to “How did that experience make you feel?”

By slowing down to acknowledge the fear, frustration, or even joy tied to a project, we build a deeper human connection. This exploration shifts the team from merely processing tasks to genuinely understanding and supporting the people performing them.

📜 The Danger of the “Story I’m Making Up”

The core danger in the absence of clarity is the human tendency to fill the void. Without clarity, people will create their own stories, their own truths. Brown calls these internal narratives the Shitty First Drafts (SFD)—the often negative, self-protecting stories we invent to make sense of uncertainty. These SFDs quickly become an organization’s unofficial, detrimental truth, leading to misaligned efforts and eroded trust.

A daring leader recognizes the patterns and behaviors that lead to the SFD phenomenon and intentionally creates a space to expose and process these stories.

Applied Daring Leadership: The SFD Retrospective

To combat the chaos of unmanaged SFDs, I came up with the SFD Retrospective as a powerful tool for coaches and Scrum Masters following a rocky period or project:

  1. Present the Situation: Clearly and neutrally define the event or project period being reviewed.
  2. Draft Your SFD: Ask each team member to individually draft their personal SFD—the story, assumptions, and emotions they privately held.
  3. Fill the Gaps: Invite team members to look for elements in others’ stories that help fill in the blind spots or gaps in their own.
  4. Collective Story: Use dot-voting to select key elements and phrases from the shared drafts to construct a more accurate, collective story of what actually happened.
  5. Capture New Awareness: Facilitate a dedicated section to record the team’s shared “Aha!” moments and new understanding.
  6. Move Forward: Collective actions are then gathered based on this shared truth, not the previous conflicting narratives.

The bottom line

This process is a deeply human way to integrate the principles of Dare to Lead. By encouraging clarity, engaging with emotion, and giving shape to the SFDs, we transform uncertainty into powerful collective action.

Mauricio Robles Scrum Mastery

Recharging Your Team’s Batteries

Ever feel like your team is running on fumes? We’ve all been there. As Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters, we know that a motivated team is a productive team. But keeping that motivation engine humming can be a challenge.

Here is a fun activity that I’ve used with countless teams to help them understand and boost their motivation.

The “Energizers and Drainers” Activity

This activity is like a quick pit stop for your team’s motivation. It helps everyone identify what tasks and activities fuel their energy and which ones leave them feeling drained. The real magic happens when the team starts exploring how to leverage those energizers to tackle the drainers and even identify opportunities to eliminate those energy-sucking tasks altogether.

Here’s how it works:

Time: 45 minutes

Materials: A whiteboard (physical or virtual) and sticky notes.

Introduction (5 minutes):

Start by acknowledging that everyone has tasks they love and tasks they, well, don’t love so much. Explain that this activity will help them visualize these tasks and find ways to optimize their energy.

Instructions:

  1. Divide the whiteboard into four quadrants:
    • Energizers at home
    • Energizers at work
    • Drainers at work
    • Drainers at home
  2. Brainstorming (5 minutes):
    • Ask the team to write down their energizers and drainers on sticky notes, one idea per note.
  3. Sharing (12 minutes):
    • Have team members volunteer to share their ideas, one quadrant at a time.
    • (Pro tip: I usually leave “Drainers at Work” for last, as this tends to spark the most discussion.)

Debrief (15 minutes):

Now for the juicy part! Guide the team through these questions:

  • What are the common themes? Are there any patterns in the types of energizers and drainers people identify?
  • Which energizers can help us complete the drainers? Can we strategically schedule energizing tasks before or after draining ones?
  • Which drainers can we remove? Are there any tasks that are truly unnecessary or can be delegated/automated?
  • Are there pairing opportunities between team members to help each other with drainers? Can someone who finds a task energizing help someone who finds it draining?

Action Planning (8 minutes):

  • Capture any action items that emerge from the discussion.
  • Assign owners and next steps to ensure follow-through.

Why This Works

This activity is more than just identifying tasks. It’s about:

  • Open Communication: Creating a safe space for the team to share their feelings about their work.
  • Collaboration: Encouraging the team to support each other in tackling challenging tasks.
  • Continuous Improvement: Identifying opportunities to optimize the team’s workflow and boost overall motivation.

Challenge Yourself!

Try this activity with your team and see the difference it can make. Remember, a motivated team is a high-performing team!

What are some of your favorite ways to boost team motivation? Share your tips in the comments below!

Mauricio Robles Scrum Mastery

Energy Management

Have you ever felt that your teams are low on energy? You might have even noticed that interactions among team members have become increasingly aggressive. There are several indicators that often suggest the team’s energy is lower than usual:

  • Difficulty completing tasks that are typically easy for the team
  • Lack of initiative when proposing ideas
  • Limited participation in meetings (especially retrospectives)
  • Increased aggression in conversations
  • Elevated level of toxicity within the team

When any of these symptoms start to show, it might be time to gather the entire team to inspect how we are managing our energy. Thus, we seek the best moment for this exercise, which can be during a retrospective or simply creating a dedicated meeting where we can have focused time with the team.

It’s important to take a few minutes at the beginning with the team to explain that every day we do things that recharge our energy and things that drain our energy. Take a moment for each team member to individually think about how full their energy tank is at that moment. According to Tom Rath, author of “Are You Fully Charged?”, only 11% of people feel they had a lot of physical energy throughout their day.

When I’ve worked on this with my teams, I ask them to individually identify the following:

  • Tasks that recharge their energy at home
  • Tasks that recharge their energy at work
  • Tasks that drain their energy at home
  • Tasks that drain their energy at work

We put one idea on each post-it note and share them on a prepared board with the four quadrants. Up to this point, we’ve only identified data; the value of the activity comes in the next part where we start the conversation.

In this part, I focus on asking the team:

  • Which ideas are repeated?
  • Which energy-recharging tasks can help balance out the energy-draining ones?
  • Which energy-draining tasks do we need to maintain?
  • Which energy-draining tasks can we discard?
  • What actions can we take as a team to eliminate tasks that drain our energy?

Along with the four quadrants, I maintain a section on the board to identify those actions that we’ll discover as a team, which will help us boost energy levels in our day-to-day and with our teammates.

What can we achieve?

With this exercise, we might achieve:

  • Increased empathy among team members
  • Identification of waste we can eliminate in our workflow
  • Recognition of energy-draining obstacles and how to eliminate them
  • Getting to know each other and having fun as a team

If you give it a try, I’d love to hear how it goes, what you discover that you didn’t know before, and if it proves valuable for the team.

See you…