Directors ask the snowplow-GPS coach to "ask better questions so people volunteer for weekends." What should the Scrum Master / Team Coach refuse, and what is the legitimate use of powerful questions?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
A question that corners someone into Saturday is a crowbar, not coaching. Snowplow-GPS teams need questions that grow ownership of flow and quality, not guilt about weekends. If leadership wants overtime, that is a staffing and policy problem, not a facilitation trick.
Full Explanation
Refuse to use powerful questions as a pressure tool for weekend volunteering. Directors asking the snowplow-GPS coach to “ask better questions so people volunteer for weekends” want coercion dressed as coaching during winter operations. The Scrum Master/Team Coach should use questions for learning and ownership—not to guilt staff into unpaid overtime clearing GPS issues that keep plows effective for residents.
Agreeing and scripting questions that guilt people into unpaid overtime fails by concept: it weaponizes coaching against sustainable pace. Replacing coaching with a mandatory weekend rotation published as a PI Objective fails by concept by laundering overtime as strategy without addressing capacity or WIP. Using questions only to collect names for a utilization report to finance fails by concept because interrogation for billing is not team coaching.
Exam caveat: Servant leadership protects people and sustainable delivery; powerful questions are unethical when designed to extract unpaid labor. Legitimate capacity conversations are explicit, fair, and bargained—not Socratic traps on snowplow-GPS teams responsible for public safety logistics.
Operational check: decline the directive to guilt-question weekends, surface real capacity and WIP causes of the GPS backlog, propose in-hours recovery options or honest staffing requests, and keep coaching questions aimed at learning and shared ownership.