 A good Scrum Master grasps the responsibilities of the role. A great Scrum Master grasps the skills and mindset of the role. I don't think I've ever come across a job role that has been so popular yet simultaneously derided, so simple yet so misunderstood, so common sense and yet so revolutionary as the Scrum Master role. The role's introduction was intended to be somewhat controversial. The Scrum Master role offers neither authority nor an attractive title, and as a result, those who want a powerful position as opposed to a leadership role tend not to apply. The Scrum Master is part facilitator, part coach and part coordinator. They're also part parent, part orchestra conductor and part sheepdog, and they're much, much more. The Scrum Master should do whatever is needed to help the team become high performing and for the organisation to deliver excellent products quickly. Because of this definition, it's incredibly hard to nail down exactly what the role entails. What a Scrum Master needs to do once sprint could be incredibly different from what they need to do in the next sprint. From the earliest days of Scrum though, the Scrum Master has always been described as a servant leader for the team. A Scrum Master should serve the product owner, the development team and the organisation in various ways, most notably in facilitation, impediment removal and coaching. This definition of a servant leader helps add some certainty and solidity to the ambiguous statement of do whatever is needed. But what is a servant leader? Well the term servant leadership originated from an essay by Robert K Greenleaf back in 1970, entitled The Servant as Leader. In this essay, Greenleaf calls essentially for a reversal of traditional leadership where power is historically accumulated and exercised by one person at the top of a hierarchical pyramid. Instead, Greenleaf calls for a leader whose focus is to ensure that other people's highest priority needs are being served. His guiding principle states that the highest priority of a servant leader is to encourage, support and enable subordinates to unfold their full potential and abilities. Servant leaders serve first and then come to lead. Their best test, as Greenleaf describes it, is do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous and more likely themselves to become servants? Now, Greenleaf was more focused on a change in wider society than specifically in project teams but bundling servant leadership into the scrum framework has led to a very interesting shift in many work practices and organisational structures. Now what do I mean by great? In his book, Good to Great, Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't Jim Collins describes level five leaders. Level five leaders, he says, look out the window to apportion credit to factors outside themselves when things go well. At the same time, they look in the mirror to apportion responsibility, never blaming bad luck when things go poorly. These leaders are highly ambitious but not for themselves. Instead, they want their organisations to excel. They build successes, for example, rather than try to set people up to fail to make themselves look good. In my experience, great scrum masters share the characteristics of level five leaders. Being a great servant leader calls for a certain set of characteristics. Respected, they have a reputation for integrity, both within the team and in the wider organisation. Enabling, they're passionate about helping others be effective. Tactful, they are diplomacy personified. Resourceful, they're creative in removing impediments to productivity. Alternative, they're prepared to promote a counterculture. Inspiring, they generate enthusiasm and energy in others. Nurturing, they enjoy helping both individuals and teams develop and grow. Empathic, they're sensitive to those around them. Disruptive, they break the old status quo and help create a new way of working. You can think of these characteristics in the context of the acronym Retrained. And we'll look at each of these characteristics in turn throughout the modules of this course. For too many organisations, scrum has sadly been a big disappointment. A failed experiment that hasn't delivered anywhere near the positive impact that management was hoping for. Yet I have also witnessed the great rewards and transformative power that come when a company truly embraces scrum concepts and agile principles. So what's the difference then between success and failure for organisations that are attempting to adopt a servant leader approach like scrum? Well, for me, it all boils down to how effective their scrum masters are in the role. I fundamentally believe in both the power and also the humanising nature of self-organising empowered teams. And I'm equally sure that the key to achieving these benefits is the scrum master. Put simply, if organisations can create and support great scrum masters, then those scrum masters will foster great teams and create environments that enable these teams to create great products. This course aims to give scrum masters the tools to go from good to great, bringing their team and organisation to higher levels in the process. I feel great sympathy for many of the people who find themselves in the scrum master role, because it's very difficult and it's often misunderstood. And as well as that, there's often very little specific guidance on how to perform the role well. They're also often swimming against the tide of traditional management techniques from the 20th century, which are not fit for today's age of rapid change and complexity. I look back to my early days as a newly minted scrum master. I was absolutely loving the opportunity to help my team grow and my organisation become more effective, even though there was precious little specific advice on how to do my job well. Many years later, and after working with many agile teams as scrum master, internal coach, external coach and consultant, I've been lucky to observe and work with many great scrum masters and scrum teams, and I've learnt a lot from them. I've identified key practices and patterns that great scrum masters tend to exhibit. And I present them throughout this course as phrases that describe the fine line between good scrum masters and great ones. Notice the difference is between good and great, not bad and good, because both sets of characteristics that I describe are positive. This is similar to the way that the agile manifesto sets out its values. For example, individuals and interactions over processes and tools. At no point is the agile manifesto attempting to suggest that processes and tools are bad. All that is trying to suggest is that individuals and interactions are considered more valuable. At its core, scrum aims to harness the power of self-organising, autonomous, engaged teams who take responsibility for delivery and collaborate directly with their customers. These fantastic delivery teams don't just appear by magic, but they're created, nurtured and supported by servant leader scrum masters. This course aims to help you find out how to raise the bar of scrum in your organisation as well as your own personal bar of scrum mastery.