Gfrktyl

About 3 months ago, our teams restructured and I was offered the opportunity to be Scrum Master for the new team. The role pretty much meant 1) being in charge of scheduling the necessary ceremonies, 2) being default facilitator for the meetings, and 3) making sure the team upholds the promises they said they would do. There is no authority in the additional role. Wanting to improve my leadership skills, I took the role.
For some context, I have been in previous teams that have had a Scrum Master, so I saw what tasks they did, but I myself have not been one yet.

Since the 3 months of being Scrum Master, I have found the role to be a lot more stressful than I thought. I struggle a lot with the facilitating meeting aspect of it, and with making sure the team does what they say they do. I was given a Scrum Master book from my previous team lead, which gave practical tips and example scenarios, which I found very helpful, but it also shows the Scrum Masters being able to ask relevant and revealing questions on the spot, and impromptu speaking is not something I am good at. This also explains a bit why facilitation is difficult for me - you can't plan ahead what people will say, and you don't have time to decide what the useful questions for the team are.

On the other hand, I want to be able to facilitate groups, and develop my skills, and grow as a person. I realize this position is going outside of my comfort zone, but I am not sure if it is too much out of my comfort zone and leading to burnout.

I had a year-end review with my manager last week, and he noticed that I was stressed out and frustrated with the Scrum Master role. Other team members have picked up on this as well. He... suggested that if the extra role was too stressful for me, then maybe it would be better if someone else had the role, someone who has an easier time with doing the things I struggle with.

This brings me to the main question: Should I continue an extra role, if it is highly stressful for me, but it is an area I want to improve in?

Should I continue to get better, or stop because it isn't a good fit?

You keep talking about "additional" and "extra". Being a Scrum Master is a job. It's not something you tack on top of your actual job. I mean you don't do the companies books in your lunch break or clean the floors after hours either. That's jobs, not additional duties to another job. No wonder you are stressed out.

Now, lets assume you actually had the time to properly do the Scrum Masters job and you would still be stressed out. Going out of one's comfort zone is great, but only to find out if you actually like what's out there. You never know if you don't try. You said you don't. It's not for you. And that's fine. There's no point in pushing. Go back to being a developer. If you want, try other things out of your comfort zone, maybe another language or another project or maybe even being PO or PM. But if you don't like being SM because it does not play into your strengths, don't do it. You don't seem to get more money, there is no "career path" from SM that you could not reach from developer either, so there is no gain.

I don't think you "grow as a person" by doing stuff that stresses you out for no gain and against better judgement. You grow bitter. But not better.

Life is too short to do stuff that stresses you out. Especially if it's not necessary. If you have the chance to be a happy developer, then what are you waiting for?

I will not advise you what to do as career advice is not part of the site guidelines, but give you my opinion about the origin of stress : you try to endorse full responsibility at day one, while you have room to take the role in a lot more lean way and learn things as you practice them.

I struggle a lot with the facilitating meeting aspect of it

Great facilitators I've met let people speak at large and only stop them when they go offtopic. There is already a lot of value in letting everyone express his or her opinion, and not necessarily in giving yours or being relevant to the topic. Simply preparing a meeting purpose with a few words intro, letting everyone talk, is most if not all the job.

and with making sure the team does what they say they do.

In litterature I've read it's not really the SM job, but if it is your role anyway, the hardest part is trust. Trust people do what they say they do works most of the time. Some of the time only you are reported or will witness irregularities you have to investigate, but you don't have to be in everyone's back checking they are actually working. People usually try their best without you to tell them to do so.

As a professional agile coach (and someone who has been in the agile space since 2003) I can see where your issues lie:

The role pretty much means being in charge of scheduling the necessary ceremonies,

Nope, the team/PO own the ceremonies so are responsible for scheduling them

being default facilitator for the meetings,

Nope, you can facilitate to help, but they should be able to function without you.

and making sure the team upholds the promises they said they would do

Nope, the team makes a forecast of what they will do (commitment was deprecated in 2011 as it's fixed scope in fixed time)

You are in a very common Scrum antipattern - Scrum Mom ( see here - https://age-of-product.com/scrum-mom/)

As a Scrum Master your role is:

• Help the team clear blockers


• Coach the team on the agreed process.

You have no responsibilities over whether the team deliver, you are there to help work flow, it's a people job, not involving project management or administration.

Your stress is because you are being asked to do things that are deliberately NOT in the Scrum Master remit.

There are plenty of ways to grow leadership skills, but getting stressed over the ceremonial parts of a SM role will prevent you from focusing on this, and seeing you struggling will not instil confidence in your abilities as a leader. To the contrary, if you maintain an situation that others express doubt in, it can be seen as a lack of judgement.

That said, there's plenty of takeaway from the situation; As SM, you've likely tracked tasks for all members of a team, so you know by now how work tends to get done. E.g. when someone is being overambitious in estimation, which tasks normally takes an extra review to get right, how soon business can expect a feature to be delivered, when it's time to clean up tech debt to maintain progress. That's hugely valuable.

The good news is you don't have to be a SM to make use of this knowledge. In planning, the approach most often agreed upon is the one that most closely aligns with 'how things normally get done', and having focused on overall team performance, you'll be in a better position than most to assess this.

Before deciding to keep the role or not, I'd air my concerns to the rest of the team. Maybe a compromise can be found with less ceremony and shared facilitation duty. Maybe the parts that you stress about are insignificant to others, and you'll know to focus less on them. Maybe others will come to understand the burden of being a SM and thus appreciate your efforts more.

It does not seem that you have been set up for success. While you have had a chance to observe Scrum in action on a previous team, that does not seem to have given you the proper grounding in Agile. Agile is more of a state of mind rather than a series of practices, and as a SM you need to understand more fully the Why of what you are doing, so that you can better guide the team in these activities. See if you can spend time with a Coach at your company, or some other Scrum Masters from other teams to see what works well for them, and set yourself some new goals to experiment with during the next iteration. Helping your team to take more ownership, and self organize to meet team commitments can be challenging, but this is a necessary step to relieve the stress you are dealing with.