Many well-intentioned managers have a fundamental misunderstanding about velocity. They think it is a measure of how hard the scrum team is working or how much they are producing. Neither of these is correct. Velocity is a tool for predictability.
Because of this misunderstanding, many managers think that the team should work toward increasing their velocity. If management focuses on velocity, this will create dysfunction. Imagine that your manager wants to see the team’s velocity increase. This is very easy to achieve; the team can simply increase their story estimates over time. Velocity will climb as high as anyone wants. This won’t correlate to any change in productivity or business performance, and the manager won’t get what they wanted. Worse, the team has just lost visibility and control of their schedule. What’s a scrum master to do?