Servant Leadership
Servant leader is servant first – not that literally serving tea/coffee or snacks. Objective of this is to enhance and increase teamwork and personal involvement. A servant Leader is one who- Build trust
- Empowers team
- Encourage them to achieve the next level
- Empathetic
- Ethical and caring
- Humble and socially aware
He is the one who ensure team is gelling well and interacting with each other. He who understand the teams need and ensure team understand the business objective and thereby working towards the common goal. Having said that it doesn’t mean a scrum master asks team not to create noise in case of any conflict.
Rather he is the one leads the team through healthy conflicts and debates in case of difference of opinion. During one of our scrum delivery, when we were taking the code into production, we surfaced a critical issue at the last minute. The scrum team I was working with was on top of it and they ensure the issue was fixed before code went LIVE.
There was no push from scrum master to stay back till late and resolve the issue, it was team’s decision. This is an apt example of self-organizing team and this is where a scrum master should feel pride about. To have this level of coordination and empowerment within the team is what a true servant leader is.
Servant’s leadership is
- To serve your people/your team with heart
- Listen to them
- To invest time in team, to educate them, to inspire them
- Telling them their mistakes politely and help them improving so as to ensure its not repeated