A consumer home-robot company introduced Scrum for its firmware group, but functional managers who predate Scrum still conduct performance reviews and still occasionally tell individual Developers which task to pick up next. The Scrum Master wants to work with these managers rather than against them. What is the best approach?

The Scrum Guide names exactly three accountabilities inside a Scrum Team — Product Owner, Scrum Master, Developers — and self-management means the Developers decide who does what, how, and when, without someone outside the team assigning tasks. A Scrum Master who wants that to stick has to work with the organization's existing management structure, not dissolve it: functional managers can remain valuable stakeholders, mentors, or career-development contacts while stepping back from day-to-day task assignment. Inventing a fourth accountability misreads the Guide, which fixes the Scrum Team's composition at three; adding a role to accommodate an existing manager just recreates the assignment problem inside the team. Declaring management unnecessary is an overreach the Scrum Master has no standing to make and burns a relationship that could otherwise support the team. Escalating to eliminate the managers' positions treats a coaching problem as a personnel problem and is well outside what a Scrum Master does. A caveat: this takes patience — managers often need to see self-management work before they trust it. Concrete check: watch whether task-level direction to Developers is coming from inside the team or from a manager, and use that as the signal for where coaching is still needed.