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Do you know what it means to be a Servant Leader in Agile Project Management? Whether you’re a Scrum Master, Project Manager, facilitator or coordinator, understanding Servant Leadership will help you.

Check out the video below, now!

Servant Leadership – Agile practices

From the Agile Practice Guide, by the Project Management Institute and Agile Alliance. Agile approaches emphasise servant leadership as a way to empower their teams. Servant leadership is the practice of leading through service to the team – so in other words you’re the leader, you’re the boss, but your customers are actually your team members.  As a servant leader you’re here to serve them as well and help them get what they need so that they can do the best job that they possibly can.

That means understanding and addressing the needs and development of the team members to enable that highest possible performance.  Servant leaders approach project work in this order – first of all we start with the “why”.  That’s a classic book from Simon Sinek, and many people have written about it.  We don’t start with what we’re doing we actually start why we’re doing it.

Now that we’ve got the “why”, a servant leader will work with the people involved, creating an environment for the people where everyone can succeed.  That means removing those blockers if they need to, improve the process if they need to, and getting the right people on the bus.  It means using the whole team approach.  When it comes to the process we look at the results over the process – that’s an agile principle itself – but if a team delivers value and it often reflects on the product and the process then it can be considered agile.  So you may not call yourself agile in particular, you may be a business team or may not be a technical team but if you’re performing all of the Agile practices and if you’re reflecting often on what you do and if you’re delivering value to the customer then ultimately there’s a good chance that you’re already doing a lot of the agile practices.  And a lot of that is driven by the servant leadership role.

The Characteristics of a Servant Leader

First of all servant leaders promote self-awareness of themselves and of the team members – we want to improve and grow team members, listening to what’s going on within the team and from your customers as well serving those on the team instead of controlling them.  We’re coaching the team versus controlling, helping people grow, promoting safety, respect and trust and that environment will really help people talk about what’s blocking them and what they need to get the work done, what they need to grow and feel better about doing the work as well.

And all those things are keys to helping you get better results from the team as a servant leader.

We’re promoting the energy and intelligence of others so it’s not a case where the team leader takes all of the credit for everything basically the team leader will help grow the team so that they can improve and take the credit for all of the great work that they are doing.  By growing the people you get the results that you need.

There are certain responsibilities of a servant leader as well – servant leaders facilitate, usually in that Scrum Master role or that facilitation role.  Servant leaders remove organizational impediments, in other words “blockers”.  So during the daily standup for example you’ll have that 15-minute catch-up meeting where you talk about what you’ve done yesterday, what you intend to do today and what is blocking the current work.  Do you have everything you need to get the job done?  But the servant leader it’s their job to help remove those impediments and those blockers for the staff – not necessarily during the stand up but definitely once that stand up is complete and putting the right pieces in place, getting the right people involved to help remove those blockers.  In other words servant leaders pave the way for others’ contribution.

Lastly as a coach, a servant leader will educate stakeholders on agile, they’ll mentor the team and encourage career development, help with technical project management activities like quantitative risk analysis, building bridges between external teams or groups, all of the things that that your team needs to get the work done.

If you’re a project manager in an agile then often you will manage using that servant leadership approach.  And that is Servant Leadership.

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