Coaching and Facilitation
Coaching stance
The Scrum Master coaches the team, the Product Owner and the organization. Coaching means asking rather than telling: listening fully, asking open questions, and holding back your own answer so the group builds capability. Useful questions: What have you tried? What did you expect? What would good look like? What is one thing you could change next Sprint? The goal is durable capability, not compliance with your preferred solution.
Facilitation
Facilitation is designing and guiding the process so the group owns the content. Strong facilitation has a clear purpose, a visible agenda, and techniques that prevent the loudest voice from dominating: silent writing before discussion, round-robins, dot voting or fist-of-five for consent, a parking lot for out-of-scope items, and timeboxed turns. Retrospective formats are tools, not rituals - Start/Stop/Continue, the 4Ls and the sailboat each surface different data. Rotate deliberately.
Traps
- Equating facilitation with deciding: a neutral facilitator does not push content, but is firm about process.
- Jumping in with a solution when the team stalls - that trains the team to stall.
- Running the same retrospective format every time and wondering why the data is flat.
- Confusing coaching with mentoring or advice-giving, or using coaching questions as a technique to steer someone to a predetermined answer.
- Ignoring the silent participant; psychological safety is a facilitation responsibility.
Worked example
A team says, "our Sprint Reviews are useless." Do not redesign the review for them. Ask what they hoped to get from it, what actually happens, who attends, and what one change they could test for two Sprints - then support the experiment.