True Servant Leaders Live the Agile Principles
We teach agile leaders, managers, and ScrumMasters to be servant leaders without really telling them why. It’s because the values and principles stated in the Agile Manifesto align very well with the description of servant leadership given by Robert Greenleaf, the modern movement’s founder.
Taken together, these ideals and standards can help managers understand their new role in organizations that have transformed to agile, and be guiding lights for both agile managers and team members.
In the following paragraphs, bold is used to indicate references to Greenleaf’s attributes of servant leaders, and italics is used to indicate agile principles or values. This way, you can see how parallel these concepts are.
The single most important word in the agile principles is trust: Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. This is the tenet that forms the link from agile principles to servant leadership. As Greenleaf wrote in his essay The Institution as Servant, “A new condition of these times is the need for a high level of trust.”
Another key aspect of servant leadership is deep listening. A great agile leader listens for understanding before replying or reacting. By modeling this skill, the leader teaches their teams how to communicate well, particularly face to face. This also enablesperiodic reflection, leading to a culture of kaizen, or continuous improvement. It also makes it easier for business people and developers to work together on a daily basis.
Greenleaf encourages servant leaders to find the optimum by prioritizing those few things that are truly important and ignoring the less important. This is the key to creating a sustainable pace.
A servant leader accepts and empathizes, never rejects. By accepting the ideas of others and not rejecting them out of hand, the agile servant leader builds projects based on motivated individuals. It shows each of the individual members of the teams that they are trusted to get the job done.
Furthermore, Greenleaf identifies foresight as one of the key responsibilities of a servant leader. Using foresight to establish a direction, define goals, and create some broad guiderails is exactly the kind of leadership agile teams need. It is the basis of a bounded authority that brings out the best in teams by enabling them to self-organize.
Servant leaders create opportunities for autonomy. These opportunities lead to the formation of self-organizing teams who are most likely to create the best architectures, requirements, and designs.
Finally, a leader who wants the improved business outcomes that result from being agile must create an environment that makes it possible for the members of their organization to follow those principles: to value delivery to customers, embrace change, work on a daily basis with the business, engage in meaningful face-to-face conversations, strive for technical excellence, self-organize, and reflect on opportunities for improvement . By creating a culture and mechanisms that enable these behaviors, those leaders are serving the highest-priority needs of their people and helping them develop—the true test of servant leadership.
David Grabel will be presenting his session Now That We’re Agile, What’s a Manager to Do? at Agile Development Conference East 2015, from November 8–13 in Orlando, Florida.
