I have often considered putting together a talk called “Why Your Scrum Master should be Liberal Arts educated”. (Not surprisingly, I attended a liberal arts school… Where I dual-majored in Peace & Conflict Studies and Information Technology. People used to jokingly ask me, “What are you going to do? Mediate conflicts between computer nerds?” Sure enough, here I am, doing exactly that!)
The point @Leanleff made about having a servant leader mindset is absolutely critical. Suppose you had to pick between two imperfect people for a Scrum Master:
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Person A has incredibly strong technical skills but has low emotional intelligence and has a dictator mindset.
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Person B is a true servant leader, strong collaborator, easy to engage, and quickly builds trust with anyone s/he meets but has no technical skills.
I would take Person B every time. This person is going to be living the Agile values and principles, and their presence on the team is more likely to drive high performance. If technical issues are blocking the team, Person B is also more likely to ask questions about how the issue can be resolved (a facilitation-based approach) whereas it is possible Person A may be tempted to “do it himself/herself” because s/he already has the technical skills to solve the problem. That may remove the immediate impediment, but it may not help the team become more self-organizing. Also, it is much easier to fill Person B’s gap in technical knowledge through training than it is to change Person A’s mindset and behaviors.