Very recently, I was engaged in LinkedIn conversation! That LinkedIn post began listing a few commercial tools as the critical assets of a great Scrum Master! When I mentioned Scrum is mainly about promoting leadership, there was a comeback that leadership can coexist in the tools! Since social media is a place for free speech, I didn't extend the conversation much to create an unhealthy discussion! However, I decided to write my thoughts briefly in my monthly blog.
Having helped many companies with their agile transformation and stood up many successful teams, I firmly believe that no commercial tool makes anyone a great Scrum Master, Project Manager, or leader. Neither has any tool promoted the self-organization emphasizing the critical Scrum Values - Courage, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Collaboration. Please don't get me wrong - a good tool can certainly help the team bring risk driven prioritization and enable visibility to the work in progress! A good tool can surface impediments earlier, promote single source of truth, and advance the total cost of ownership!
However, over the years, I’ve seen organizations invest heavily in many siloed tools and use reporting dashboards weaponizing the metrics. Some examples include:
- Use one team's velocity as a benchmark for another team's performance
- Use individual stories completed within the team creating a hierarchy instead of self-organization
- Create more work with integrating documents in one tool (wiki) with stories in another tool (board), etc.
What is going on here? People are missing the fundamental concepts of a framework. No framework (PMBOK, Agile, Scrum, Lean, Kanban, etc.) ever mentioned using one commercial tool! People's affinity, comfort zone, and towards certain tools make them believing agility would emerge once the tool was “properly configured.” What actually emerged was something else: beautifully documented dysfunction. In Leadership Unleashed, I challenge this exact fallacy—the belief that structure can replace thinking and that process can substitute for leadership.
In one engagement, a team proudly showcased an advanced Jira setup with custom workflows, automated rules, and detailed dashboards. Yet delivery was slowing, morale was low, and finger-pointing was high. When asked what problem the tool was meant to solve, the room went quiet. The use of the tool had become the goal - not using the tool to create a product, service, or result that the customer used! The leadership conversation had disappeared.
Scrum is about helping people dream, learn, and deliver more for customers
A great Scrum Master’s job is not to manage boards but to expand what the team believes is possible. Many scrum certification courses and microlearning modules emphasize servant leadership without truly even understanding the elements of servant leadership! Having invested substantial time and researched these areas of leadership, I firmly believe this is where transformational leadership becomes essential. The Scrum Master must help teams dream bigger, learn faster, and deliver more meaningfully. Scrum Master does not do this by pushing people harder, but by leading differently.
I once coached a Scrum Master who believed her role was to “keep the team moving faster.” Velocity charts dominated every discussion. When we stepped back, it became clear that the team had stopped experimenting, stopped challenging assumptions, and stopped learning. Speed had replaced curiosity. This is exactly why Leadership Unleashed emphasizes thinking leadership over mechanical execution—because without learning, acceleration is just burnout in disguise.
The 4 I’s in Practice: Leadership Beyond the Scrum Guide
The 4 I’s of Transformational Leadership show up daily in effective Scrum Mastery. Individualized consideration is visible when a Scrum Master recognizes that a senior engineer disengaging in retrospectives is not a performance problem but a signal of unaddressed frustration. Inspirational motivation appears when sprint goals are framed around customer impact instead of ticket completion.
In one program, I observed retrospectives that had become ritualistic and shallow. By introducing intellectual stimulation, the Scrum Master began asking uncomfortable questions: Why do we accept this dependency as fixed? Why does “on time” matter more than “usable”? Over time, the team shifted from defending metrics to examining assumptions. That shift—not any tool—changed outcomes.
Tool Fetishism: When Comfort Zones Kill Agility
Tool fetishism thrives when familiarity replaces judgment. I’ve seen teams defend suboptimal workflows simply because “that’s how Jira works.” In reality, that’s how they configured it—often years ago, under different constraints.
In one case, a team resisted adopting a newer collaboration tool that better supported discovery work, insisting Jira was sufficient. Discovery conversations were being forced into ticket comments, and learning slowed dramatically. The Scrum Master initially complied—until she realized comfort was masquerading as maturity. Challenging the status quo felt risky, but leadership demanded it. This mirrors a core theme in Leadership Unleashed: comfort zones are organizational blind spots.
Velocity Misuse: The Metric That Lost Its Meaning
Velocity misuse is one of the most damaging agile anti-patterns I encounter. Originally designed as a planning heuristic, velocity often becomes a proxy for productivity, discipline, or even individual performance. When that happens, teams respond rationally—to the wrong incentive.
I once worked with a team whose velocity steadily increased while customer defects also rose. Stories were being split unnaturally, estimates inflated, and technical debt deferred—all to “meet expectations.” Jira showed success. Reality did not. This is a textbook example of what I describe in Leadership Unleashed as metric-induced blindness—when numbers replace judgment.
Pseudo-Agility: When Doing Agile Replaces Being Agile
Pseudo-agility is not a failure of intent; it is a failure of leadership. Standups occur, PI plans are conducted, and retrospectives are documented—yet nothing fundamentally changes. Teams comply without committing, participate without owning, and deliver without learning.
In a global program spanning time zones, daily standups had become status broadcasts. No impediments surfaced, not because they didn’t exist, but because it wasn’t safe—or useful—to raise them. Once leadership shifted the focus from reporting to sense-making, the same ceremonies began producing real insights. The rituals didn’t change. The leadership did.
Tools as Radiators, Not Weapons
A transformational Scrum Master treats tools as conversation starters, not judgment tools. Metrics are invitations to inquiry, not verdicts. Dashboards raise questions rather than close discussions.
I’ve seen Scrum Masters model idealized influence by openly challenging leaders who attempted to use velocity as a comparative metric across teams. That kind of moral courage builds trust faster than any retrospective technique. As I argue in Leadership Unleashed, ethical leadership shows up most clearly in how power and data are used.
Leadership First. Tools Second. Always.
Agility cannot be installed, configured, or automated into existence. Tools can support agility, but they cannot rescue it. When leadership leads and tools follow, teams learn, adapt, and improve sustainably. When tools lead and leadership follows, agility becomes theater.
For a deeper exploration of agile anti-patterns—including velocity misuse, tool fetishism, and pseudo-agility—I previously covered these themes in a webinar available here:
https://youtu.be/i7nR3gn34Go
Agility is not installed. It is led.
