Agile project management emphasizes servant leadership as a way to empower teams. Servant leadership is the practice of leading through service to the team, by focusing on understanding and addressing the needs and development of team members in order to enable the highest possible team performance.
A servant leader facilitates the team’s discovery and definition of agile, approaching project work in this order: Purpose, People, and Process. 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, and promoting the energy and intelligence of others.
Successful agile teams 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.
Servant leaders manage relationships to build communication and coordination within the team and across the organization. These relationships help the leaders navigate the organization to support the team. This kind of support helps to remove impediments and facilitates the team to streamline its processes. Because servant leaders understand agile and practice a specific approach to agile, they can assist in fulfilling the team’s needs.
When project managers act as servant leaders, the emphasis shifts from “managing coordination” to “facilitating collaboration.” Facilitators help everyone do their best thinking and work. Facilitators encourage the team’s participation, understanding, and shared responsibility for the team’s output. Facilitators help the team create acceptable solutions.
The first value of the Agile Manifesto is individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Servant leaders take on the responsibility to take a hard look at processes that are impeding a team’s or organization’s agility and work to streamline them. Servant leaders should also look at other processes that are lengthy, causing bottlenecks and impeding a team’s or organization’s agility. Examples of processes or departments that may need to be addressed include finance, change control boards, or audits.
In addition to servant leadership, team members emphasize their interpersonal and emotional intelligence skills—not just technical skills. Everyone on the team works to exhibit more initiative, integrity, emotional intelligence, honesty, collaboration, humility, and willingness to communicate in various ways so that the entire team can work together well.
Servant leaders work to fulfill 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 the project, and work with IT to get the tools the team needs.