When Telling a Manager "You Don't Have a Role" Backfires — A Lesson in Agile Coaching Humility | Peter Merel
About this episode
Peter Merel shares a lesson in humility from his experiences in agile coaching, highlighting the consequences of telling a manager they don't have a role.
Peter Merel: When Telling a Manager "You Don't Have a Role" Backfires — A Lesson in Agile Coaching Humility Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes . "A failure is not a failure. A failure is just the first step." - Peter Merel Peter Merel became a Scrum Master by stealth — long before the title existed. Credited in Kent Beck's first XP book and present at the first agile conference, Peter was practicing lightweight processes at Hewlett Packard in the late 1990s. When he took a role at GMAC, the residential finance arm of General Motors, he brought XP practices with him and found early success. After six months of strong results, the project manager, Mike Alakom, sat Peter down and asked the most dangerous management question: "What do I do?" Peter gave what he now calls the stupidest answer possible — "You don't really have a role in this process." The next day, Mike called an all-hands meeting and calmly maneuvered Peter into crediting the entire way of working as Mike's idea. Peter stayed on for another six months, but at arm's length. In…
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