Success Is Living the Five Scrum Values—And Asking the Team If You Are | Aliu Adewale

Aliu Adewale: Success Is Living the Five Scrum Values—And Asking the Team If You Are

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"Trust is the foundation of empowerment. When you trust your team, they will deliver beyond your expectation." - Aliu Adewale

 

For Aliu, success as a Scrum Master is concrete: the team is living the five Scrum values —commitment, focus, openness, respect, and courage—and the organization is getting real value from their work. Commitment shows up in how the team holds itself to a Sprint goal. Focus shows up in how they protect that goal from noise. Openness reduces conflict because nothing festers in the dark. Respect, Aliu reframes powerfully: respect for someone's background comes before respect for their skill set—because in a team where people come from different countries, religions, and skill sets, that's the foundation everything else sits on. And courage shows up when a team can tell a Product Owner or a stakeholder that no, this can't be done in this Sprint, and we need to talk about it. But the values alone aren't success—the test is whether the team is delivering value frequently to the organization. The way Aliu keeps himself honest is uncomfortable but simple: he sends a survey to his team and asks them to tell him how he's doing on communication, on risk mitigation, on empowering them to reach stakeholders directly. He starts the assessment cycle the moment he joins—asking the organization what success looks like in this role in the next three months—and he refuses to "get carried away" and stop asking.

 

Self-reflection Question: Have you ever sent your team a survey asking them to rate you—and acted on what they said?

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