My first job as Scrum Master (and my first difficult situation)

Nice question, and congratz on working in what you love bro :)

As we know, communication is essencial for the sucess of the SCRUM framework. Surely, communication problems can be solved in retrospective, but why wait for it? The principle of adaptation has to happen all the time with the ongoing devolepment of the team. 

You can talk to this developer one-to-one, but not in a top down way, but in a team collegue way. Or you can let the team work itself naturally,  in my opinion it will eventually happen if you give the right authority to people. 

That's my opinion, I hope it will help you!!! 

Good luck bro!

From SM to SM!

I'd suggest working with whoever raised the complaint directly, and find out more about what's going on. At the moment, there doesn't appear to be any evidence that the substance is:

- factually correct

- fair

- an impediment to collaboration

It might be all of those things, in which case it needs to be taken to the team. However until you have more information, for all you know at this stage, you could have a team member who is being unjustly accused and who needs defending.

Thank you Thiago and Ian! This helps a lot - it’s always great to get some input from other Scrum Masters! I‘ll go the next step here ... I am pretty sure that this is a perfect situation to learn and improve!

Hello Marc,

I appreciate your concern for your team member. However, it is a behavioral/communication issue exhibited by him outside the project and I assume here that complaint is not from client. As Scrum Master you are not responsible for this. Every employee is bound by company HR policies and he has to abide by them. As a mentor you can have discussion with him over coffee and get more details. If HR gets into this, it may impact your team.

Thank you Ian, I have not thought about this aspect :/

In fact, there's a kind of unwritten rule to praise in front of an audience and to reprimand one-to-one.

IMHO, your reaction should depend on how serious complaint was. If it was about breaking any fundamental interpersonal rules you should act immediately. If it wasn't that serious working on with both sides of the conflict might be beneficial. 

First don't panic.

Second, identify root of the issue. Is happening regularly, under what circumstances?

Who has sent you an email, person who has been abused or this issue emerged to a high level management? (If not, try to minimize people involved, and do not disseminate information about the incident, until you know all the details)

Try to gather as much information as possible about the incident, from all involved parties. 

Base on this information you can decide what to do next

Next steps probably are :

(Conduct analyze, possible solutions, risk/impact and aftermath of each solution).

If you are in doubt, try to involve someone for an advice. 

I agree with these comments in regards to verifying the incorrect behavior (if any) and then determining the root cause.  Root Cause Analysis (5 why's) will be appropriate to use on the person who complained.  If the complaint is legit, have a conversation with the developer today.  If the developer did nothing wrong, and the complainer is overly sensitive, a separate conversation needs to occur with them today.

If you live in the States, you are probably aware that many are becoming unreasonably sensitive to simple, yet trivial conversations.  I offended someone the other day by simply stating that it sounded like he had a rough night (his voice was hoarse).  

As a Scrum Master, our duty is to coach and mentor.  We help mold the culture by addressing these behaviors immediately.