Topic

Servant Leader Traits Introduction

Response

The successful adoption of an agile leadership style calls for a structural approach to changing the nature of how leaders and managers engage with individuals and teams.

The following topics describe the core traits of an agile servant leader. Over the course of the organisational agility transformational program activities should be carried out that assist leadership transition from an existing command and control approach to a servant leadership. These activities should includes raise awareness, providing examples, coaching and the adoption of a regular assessment that measures the pace of their adoption.

Leading by example
Celebrating fast failure as part of a continuous test-and-learn culture where failure is celebrated and not feared
Focus on strategic discussions and defining the What and leaving the How to the Team to decide
Being thoughtful on how to approach and when to ask agile teams for new requests
Providing clear and unambiguous goals and outcomes
Be constantly listening (an active listener) to the agile teams views and position before sharing your own
Providing concise feedback at the appropriate iterations and through the correct ceremonies
Constantly stretch the agile team to drive continuous improvement
Provide guidance whilst empowering the team to meet its goals
Always take a value based approach to defining objectives and key results
Be approachable. Adopt a welcoming body language and good-natured tone of voice
Learning when to offering help and when to hold back
Feed into the de-prioritisation of tasks to make dedicated time for critical tasks
Be constantly ready to take ownership of escalations that the agile team has brought to you
Enable the agile team to maximise the amount of work not being done so they can focus on the more important.
Constantly work on taking decisions based o driven rather than emotion and ensure the agile team presents its position, view, and performance in the same way
Enable the agile team to ring-fence (protect) a certain percentage (for example 10%) of each iteration for continuous learning activities that are NOT directly connected to the short term objectives or key results.

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Additional information, including working examples and templates are available in the Monetical knowledge base.