The Art of Positive Confrontation
“Looks like this isn’t working. This sort of thing happens. I need to try something else.“ -That’s the feeling a positive facilitator has to fix one problem.
Last week, I have started a project with my scrum team. I am the facilitator of the same team, the most generic term is “SCRUM Master”. This was the project where the team has adopted a new tool to develop their APIs. The whole team got training from vendors. When it comes to developing the real-time application API, the team was struggling to develop the projects.
Here comes the important part, the scrum master (the facilitator) has to support the team and get the work done on time without any team conflict. This is the hardest situation I was facing. I had to balance my team and get them free from any distractions and blockers.
The team has started facing problems and reacting to situations. Here are a few situations where the team is getting panic-
- The team was blaming the manager for why they have started a project without any SME.
- The team was taking time to fix issues.
- The team has to take care of the security aspects of the APIs.
- Some of the team members have a problem with other members’ capabilities.
What does a facilitator think when it comes to confrontation?
We all are human. We try our best to avoid dread confrontation. Still, there is a fear which comes to our mind every time. A negative feeling that tries to pull us back from the situations. Even the same things happen to me as well.
- We do not want to be confronted by fear and avoid to face the situation.
- We do not want to involve in the worse situation just because not the make ourselves sad.
- It’s difficult to face a challenging environment, so we back out.
- We do not want to be demotivated if we fail.
- We rather are in hope that the problems will sort out automatically, which is wrong.
