Servant Leadership in the Agile Context

By Linky van der Merwe

The practice of Servant Leadership is not new, but it is embraced and adopted again with fervor, especially in the context of more organizations following an agile way of working.

What is Servant Leadership Again?

To refresh memory, I want to reiterate the Servant Leadership definition as per Wikipedia:

“Servant leadership is both a leadership philosophy and a set of leadership practices. Rather than exercising power at the top (traditional), the servant leader shares power, puts the needs of others first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible”.

Servant leadership was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in “The Servant as Leader” that was published in 1970. His definition states:

“Servant leadership is a philosophy and set of practices that enriches the lives of individuals, builds better organizations and ultimately creates a more just and caring world.”

The most important elements of servant leadership are:

Commitment to developing people
Empathy through trying to see a situation from the other person’s point of view; putting yourself in their shoes
Listening with the intent to understand, not respond
Authenticity through being yourself
Awareness of what is happening in the lives of your team members (including any conflicts and tensions between team members)

Servant Leadership is also known from a religious tradition where in the Bible Jesus is known as the ultimate example of a Servant Leader. In a business context, it can represent a decentralized structure that focuses on employee empowerment and encourages innovation.

Servant leadership is covered quite extensively in the Agile Practice Guide (PMI 2016). It’s because, once having practiced it, servant leaders can usually see how well servant leadership integrates into the agile mindset and values. When leaders develop their servant leadership or facilitative skills, they are more likely to become agile. As a result, servant leaders can help their teams collaborate to deliver value faster. Successful agile teams also embrace the growth mindset, where people believe they can learn new skills. When the team and the servant leaders believe they can all learn, everyone becomes more capable.

With this clarity of what servant leadership is, what are the responsibilities of Leaders in Agile organisations and what characteristics of servant leadership will enable project leaders to become more agile?

Servant Leader Responsibilities

Here are examples of the responsibilities a servant leader may have:

Educate stakeholders around why and how to be agile. Explain the benefits of business value based on prioritization, greater accountability and productivity of empowered teams, and improved quality from more frequent reviews, etc.
Support the team through mentoring, encouragement, and support. Advocate for team members training and career development. Through support, encouragement, and professional development, team members gain confidence, take on larger roles, and contribute at higher levels within their organizations. A key role of the servant leader is to nurture and grow team members through and beyond their current roles, even if that means losing them from the team.
Help the team with technical project management activities like quantitative risk analysis. Sometimes team members may not have knowledge or experience in roles or functions. Servant leaders who may have more exposure or training in techniques can support the team by providing training or undertaking these activities.
Celebrate team successes and support bridge building activities with external groups. Create upward spirals of appreciation and good will for increased collaboration.

Characteristics of Servant Leadership

According to the Agile Practice Guide (PMI 2016) the following characteristics of servant leadership enable project leaders to become more agile and facilitate the team’s success:

Promoting self-awareness;
Listening;
Serving those on the team;
Helping people grow;
Coaching vs. controlling;
Promoting safety, respect, and trust;
Promoting the energy and intelligence of others.

Servant Leaders on Agile Projects

Project managers acting as servant leaders will move from “managing coordination” to “facilitating collaboration.” Facilitators encourage the team’s participation, understanding, and shared responsibility for the team’s output. Facilitators help the team create acceptable solutions.

Servant leaders promote collaboration and conversation within the team and between teams. For example, a servant leader helps to expose and communicate bottlenecks inside and between teams. Then the teams resolve those bottlenecks.

Additionally, a facilitator encourages collaboration through interactive meetings, informal dialog, and knowledge sharing. Servant leaders do this by becoming impartial bridge-builders and coaches.

Honouring the first value of the Agile Manifesto: ‘individuals and interactions over processes and tools’, a servant leader can help to remove organisational impediments. On a practical level you can look at processes that are lengthy, causing bottlenecks and impeding a team’s or organization’s agility. It could be a process established by change control boards, or audits where you can partner and work with others to challenge them to review their processes to support agile teams and leaders. For example, what good is it for the team to deliver working product every 2 weeks only to have the product fall into a queue or process that could take 4 or more weeks to release due to lengthy release processes.

Servant leaders work to fulfil the needs of the teams, projects, and organization. Servant leaders may work with facilities for a team space, work with management to enable the team to focus on one project at a time, or work with the product owner to develop stories with the team. Some servant leaders work with auditors to refine the processes needed in regulatory environments, and some servant leaders work with the finance department to transition the organization to incremental budgeting.

The servant leader focuses on paving the way for the team to do its best work. The servant leader influences projects and encourages the organization to think differently.Because servant leaders understand agile and practice a specific approach to agile, they can assist in fulfilling the team’s needs.

A Mental Shift

Agile project managers need to shift from being the centre to serving the team and the management. In an agile environment, project managers are servant leaders, changing their emphasis to coaching people who want help, fostering greater collaboration on the team, and aligning stakeholder needs.

As a servant leader, project managers encourage the distribution of responsibility to the team: to those people who have the knowledge to get work done. Therefore, control of the detailed product planning and delivery is delegated to the team.

Ultimately, the project manager’s focus is on building a collaborative decision-making environment and ensuring the team has the ability to respond to changes.