If you are leading an agile project, nothing is more important than understanding your role as a servant leader. A servant leader serves the team selflessly by doing whatever is needed to help them be more successful. It’s a leadership approach meant to empower the team so they can make their own decisions in order to deliver real business value to the organization. A servant leader serves first through meeting facilitation, removing impediments, coaching, and providing support to the development team, the product owner, and the organization. Servant leadership primarily focusses on the following:
- Shielding the team from external interruptions
- Removing impediments to the teams progress
- Communicating the project vision
- Providing essential resources the team needs to stay productive
Having a servant leader mindset helps you build trust for your team and stakeholders. Don’t approach your team using a command and control style. Instead, let the team go and self-organize, you are there to guide them. Give them freedom, suspend judgement for a few sprints, then reinforce agile.
Characteristics of a Servant Leader:
- Promoting self-awareness – being aware of yourself helps to understand ethics, power, and values.
- Listening – being effective in meeting facilitation and removing impediments for your team requires excellent listening skills.
- Serving those on the team – as a servant leader, your job is to bring the team food and water, this means thinking of others before yourself, giving credit where it’s deserved, and taking blame.
- Helping people grow – you have to help people grow in their agile journey, helping them understand the agile mindset to be more successful.
- Coaching vs. Controlling – instead of traditional command and control leadership, you have to instead coach the team to be successful.
- Promoting safety, trust and respect – your team needs to feel safe from reprimand, they have to trust and respect themselves and each other. Successful teams are not in it for themselves. Instead, you have to create an environment where everyone is comfortable to grow as a team.
- Promoting the energy and intelligence – be a positive influence to your team, always lift people up, foster an environment where people are motivated to go the extra mile.
Why is Servant Leadership so important to Agile?
Servant leadership is very important in an agile environment because it emphasizes creating empowered teams. Servant leaders encourage teams to self-organize and innovate, which generally leads to maximizing business results. This is because people who feel empowered tend to be more motivated to do their work, which can lead to better results.
How to be a great Servant Leader
Servant leaders think of the teams’ needs before their own. It’s a behavior you need to adopt and display to your team. Here are some other behaviors you need to display in order to be a great servant leader:
- Listening – Make a commitment to listen to what your team is saying and why they are saying it.
- Empathy – You need to have a sense of empathy to understand other people’s perspectives, intentions, and feelings.
- Awareness – As a servant leaders, you must have self-awareness. This means looking at yourself, being aware of you emotions and behavior, and consider how that may affect those around you.
- Persuasion – Use persuasion, rather than authority to encourage people to take action. You also need to persuade people to build a group consensus so that everyone supports a decision.
- Foresight – This means being able to predict future events based on past experiences. Remember, failure is ok as long as you learn from and and use it improve your team.
- Commitment to growing people – As a servant leader, you must commit yourself to the professional development of your team members.