--- title: "What Leaders Do That Keep Scrum Teams Working Like Individuals" url: https://daily.dev/posts/what-leaders-do-that-keep-scrum-teams-working-like-individuals-f9qe3decd source_url: https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/agile/what-leaders-do-that-keep-scrum-teams-working-like-individuals type: article source: "The Mountain Goat Software" published: 2026-08-16T20:50:03.881Z updated: 2026-08-16T20:50:22.608Z tags: ["leadership", "agile", "scrum"] reading_time: 12 upvotes: 0 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # What Leaders Do That Keep Scrum Teams Working Like Individuals **[The Mountain Goat Software](https://daily.dev/sources/mountaingoatsoftware)** · 12 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Leaders often blame teams for acting like individuals rather than collaborating, but the real cause is usually organizational structure: part-time staffing across multiple teams, individual utilization metrics, functional reporting lines that outweigh team goals, constant mid-sprint interruptions, assignment-focused questions, frequent team reshuffling, and reward systems that celebrate individual heroics over sustainable teamwork. Each dynamic is paired with concrete leadership changes, such as making shared staffing constraints visible, focusing on finishing work rather than individual busyness, aligning functional managers' incentives with team outcomes, making interruption tradeoffs explicit, asking team-level progress questions, treating team reshuffling as a real cost, and rewarding collaborative behaviors instead of last-minute heroics. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Why Your Scrum Team Still Works Like Individuals](https://daily.dev/posts/why-your-scrum-team-still-works-like-individuals-5fht2enou) · The Mountain Goat Software · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Why Scrum Isn’t Working Even Though You’re Doing Scrum](https://daily.dev/posts/why-scrum-isn-t-working-even-though-you-re-doing-scrum-ye47p4nmo) · The Mountain Goat Software · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Creating Impactful Software Teams That Continuously Improve](https://daily.dev/posts/creating-impactful-software-teams-that-continuously-improve-j1vmdgdxn) · InfoQ · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Nurturing a Self-Organizing Team through the Daily Scrum](https://daily.dev/posts/nurturing-a-self-organizing-team-through-the-daily-scrum-tmbjlmw74) · The Mountain Goat Software · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#leadership](https://daily.dev/tags/leadership), [#agile](https://daily.dev/tags/agile), [#scrum](https://daily.dev/tags/scrum) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/what-leaders-do-that-keep-scrum-teams-working-like-individuals-f9qe3decd)