While servant leadership is a timeless concept, the phrase “servant leadership” was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in The Servant as Leader, an essay that he first published in 1970. In that essay, Greenleaf said:
“The servant-leader is a servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is a leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them, there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.
“The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?“.
A servant-leader focuses primarily on the growth and well-being of people and the communities to which they belong. While traditional leadership generally involves the accumulation and exercise of power by one at the “top of the pyramid,” servant leadership is different. The servant-leader shares power and puts the needs of others first, and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible.
Being a servant-leader is the very essence of agile coaching.
Serving the Business
Serving the business is about helping that business to focus on outcomes over output, product over project, with a constant eye on the creation of an indefinitely sustainable business.
You help businesses towards sustainable profit by creating outcomes that delight and provide value to their customers by focusing on customer needs and leveraging Agile/Lean practices to accelerate learning and value delivery. They have the knowledge and skills that serve the business in several ways, including their ability to facilitate, teach, advise and support:
- Understanding Customers – Customer Research and Product Discovery.
- Purpose & Strategy – developing practical product strategies, product planning, forecasting, and product economics.
- Product Backlog Effectiveness: – creating a Product Backlog that focuses on what is needed to improve the product through valuable outcomes. Ensuring that there is organizational alignment from concept to execution which clearly defines the value and order of the work to be done.
- Supporting Business Stakeholders – supports the learning and growth of the Product Owner and other business stakeholders.
Competency Level Definitions:
1 Beginner
1 Beginner
Understanding Customers
- Describe at least one technique to prioritize conflicting customer (or user) needs.
- Describe at least three aspects of product discovery and identify how each contributes to successful product outcomes.
- List at least three approaches to connect the team directly to customers and users.
Purpose & Strategy
- Outline an approach for creating a product vision.
- List at least three approaches to communicating progress with stakeholders.
- Describe the relationship between outcome and output.
Product Backlog Effectiveness
- Explain at least two approaches to identify small, valuable slices of work to maximize outcomes.
- Describe at least one approach to making sure work has clear outcomes.
- Describe at least 4 properties of a well-structured Product Backlog.
Supporting Business Stakeholders
- Describe at least two stakeholder behaviors that support the team’s success and at least two behaviors that do not support the team’s success.
2 Advanced Beginner
2 Advanced Beginner
Understanding Customers
- Practice at least one technique to support teams learning by connecting them directly to customers and users.
- Examine the impact of product work on customers, stakeholders, and/or the organization.
- Compare at least two approaches to validating assumptions to inspect and adapt.
Purpose & Strategy
- Discuss a real-world example of how product strategy is operationalized and evolves in an Agile organization.
- Practice at least one technique to visualize and communicate product strategy, product ideas, features, and/or assumptions.
- Facilitate the creation (or refinement) of the product vision between stakeholders, the Product Owner, and the team.
Product Backlog Effectiveness
- Apply at least one technique to assist the Product Owner in creating a smooth flow of work, ensuring that enough Product Backlog items of the right type are “ready” for the upcoming period of work.
- Facilitate at least two techniques for moving from a product vision to a Product Backlog. Show how these can be organized, ordered, and filtered within a Product Backlog to link to product goals or strategies.
- Apply at least two techniques to model value and at least two techniques to measure value.
Supporting Business Stakeholders
- Explain agile to business stakeholders.
- Build a coaching relationship with at least one business stakeholder and help them become more effective.
- Teach business stakeholders different practices for making decisions aligned with product strategy.
3 Practitioner
3 Practitioner
Understanding Customers
- Mentor business stakeholders in integrating product discovery into development.
- Facilitate at least three techniques for customer research or product discovery.
- Facilitate the selection of an appropriate experiment to test a hypothesis and evaluate the results.
Purpose & Strategy
- Facilitate the development of a business model and competitive analysis for a product idea.
- Apply at least two methods to calculate a product’s expected outcome or economic results.
- Explain an iterative and incremental investment model for product development.
Product Backlog Effectiveness
- Assess and recommend improvements for how teams and/or organizations emphasize outcomes over output and how this is reflected in a Product Backlog.
- Support the Product Owner in selecting an appropriate value-creation strategy, using product data to make an informed decision on what to build next.
- Apply techniques to structure and order single-team and multi-team product backlogs to create transparency and understanding.
Supporting Business Stakeholders
- Facilitate Lean experiments.
- Build a coaching relationship with multiple Product Owners and business stakeholders to help them become more effective.
4 Guide
4 Guide
Understanding Customers
- Advise the business on market segmentation.
- Guide the business to identify market opportunities.
- Assess at least two approaches for validating assumptions and guide the client in using them appropriately.
Purpose & Strategy
- Facilitate product kickoffs in almost any situation, engaging multiple customers, stakeholders, leadership, and team members.
- Advise an organization on developing a business vision and strategy.
- Guide the business to decide which initiatives to invest in to create a shared understanding of value creation across the organization.
Product Backlog Effectiveness
- Advise the organization on prioritising demand across the business.
- Facilitate an initiative from concept through to value recognition.
- Change the focus on initial success to be outcome-focused (economic, social, and environmental value).
Supporting Business Stakeholders
- Respect any previous coaching done with business stakeholders and use this to continually improve how to serve others.
- Guide a product community in their growth.
- Teach business stakeholders Agile and Lean concepts so they can bring the right products to the market at the right time.
5 Catalyst
5 Catalyst
- Seen as a Leader in the community on topics such as
- Understanding Customers
- Purpose & Strategy
- Managing the Backlog
- Coaching Business Stakeholders
- Contribute new thinking to the community relating to product and business matters.
- Inspire others on the need for organizations to exist beyond traditional economic value and to consider the wider ethical, environmental and social implications of product development and strategy.
1 Beginner
2 Advanced Beginner
3 Practitioner
4 Guide
5 Catalyst
Understanding Customers
- Describe at least one technique to prioritize between conflicting customer (or user) needs.
- Describe at least three aspects of product discovery and identify how each contributes to successful product outcomes.
- List at least three approaches to connect the team directly to customers and users.
- Outline an approach for the creation of a product vision.
- List an approach to communicating progress with stakeholders.
- Describe the relationship between outcome and output.
- Explain at least two approaches to identify small, valuable slices of work to maximize outcomes.
- Describe at least one approach to making sure work is refined enough for the team.
- Describe at least 4 properties of a well-structured Product Backlog.
- Describe at least two stakeholder behaviors that support the team’s success and at least two behaviors that do not support the team’s success.
Understanding Customers
- Practice at least one technique to support teams learning by connecting them directly to customers and users.
- Examine the impact of product work on customers, stakeholders, and/or the organization.
- Compare at least two approaches to validating assumptions in order to inspect and adapt.
- Discuss a real-world example of how product strategy is operationalized and evolves over time in an Agile organization.
- Practice at least one technique to visualize and communicate product strategy, product ideas, features, and/or assumptions.
- Facilitate the creation (or refinement) of the product vision between stakeholders, the Product Owner, and the team.
- Apply at least one technique to assist the Product Owner in creating a smooth flow of work, ensuring that enough Product Backlog items of the right type are “ready” for the upcoming period of work.
- Facilitate at least two techniques for moving from a product vision to a Product Backlog. Show how these can be organized, ordered, and filtered within a Product Backlog to link to product goals or strategies.
- Apply at least two techniques to model value and at least two techniques to measure value.
- Explain agile to business stakeholders.
- Build a coaching relationship with at least one business stakeholder and help them become more effective.
- Teach business stakeholders different practices for making decisions aligned to product strategy.
Understanding Customers
- Mentor business stakeholders in the integration of product discovery into development.
- Facilitate at least three techniques for customer research or product discovery.
- Facilitate the selection of an appropriate experiment to test a hypothesis and evaluate the results.
- Facilitate the development of a business model and competitive analysis for a product idea.
- Apply at least two methods to calculate the expected outcome or economic results of a product.
- Explain an iterative and incremental investment model for product development.
- Assess and recommend improvements for how teams and/or organizations emphasize outcomes over output, and how this is reflected in a Product Backlog.
- Support the Product Owner in the selection of an appropriate value creation strategy, using product data to make an informed decision on what to build next.
- Apply techniques to structure and order single team and multi-team product backlog to create transparency and understanding.
- Facilitate Lean experiments.
- Build a coaching relationship with multiple Product Owners and business stakeholders in order to help them become more effective.
Understanding Customers
- Advise the business on market segmentation.
- Guide the business to identify market opportunities.
- Assess at least two different approaches for validating assumptions and guide the client in the appropriate use of them.
- Facilitate product kickoffs in almost any situation engaging multiple customers, stakeholders, leadership, and team members.
- Advise an organization on developing a business vision and strategy.
- Guide the business to decide which initiatives to invest in, to create a shared understanding of value creation across the organization.
- Advise the organization on how to prioritize demand across the business.
- Facilitate an initiative from concept through to value recognition.
- Change the focus on initial success to be outcome-focused (economic, social, and environmental value).
- Respect any previous coaching done with business stakeholders and use this to continually improve how to serve others.
- Guide a product community in their growth.
- Teach business stakeholders Agile and Lean concepts so they can bring the right products to the market at the right time.
- Seen as a Leader in the community on topics such as
- Understanding Customers
- Purpose & Strategy
- Managing the Backlog
- Coaching Business Stakeholders
- Speaks at conferences and other community events on product and business-related topics.
- Contributes new thinking to the community relating to product and business matters.
- Inspiring others on the need for organizations to exist beyond traditional economic value.
Serving the Team
A team is more than a collection of individuals, it is a human system with its own characteristics, needs and growth potential. Moments of conflict or collaboration difficulty should be seen as human systems dynamics, rather than solely personal to the individuals involved.
You help teams become the best self-managed entities they can be by leveraging the interlinked competencies of the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel.
A team has the knowledge and skills to complete all aspects of creating usable value in short and frequent empirical feedback loops. If they do not have these skills, as an Agile leader, you need to foster the environment for the team to learn or acquire the knowledge and skills.
This section covers a more focused view of specifically serving the team through a journey to high performance. This is done with knowledge, skills, and experiences that serve the team, including things such as:
- Team effectiveness – Is the capacity of a team to accomplish its shared outcome-based goals and objectives.
- Team dynamics – The behavioral relationships of conscious and unconscious forces that influence the direction of a team. This includes how the team communicates, their capacity for self-management, accountability, transparency, conflict navigation, emotions and how they embrace diversity.
- Team Formation and Sustainability – Studies show (Hackman, 2011) that 90% of the variation in team effectiveness is due to team design (60%) and team launch (30%), so the start (or restart) is really important. This should include elements such as helping the team establish their purpose, create a culture, align on vision, set up their work environment and establish team agreements and/or ground rules.
Competency Level Definitions:
1 Beginner
1 Beginner
Team Effectiveness
- List at least three attributes of effective teams
- Describe three challenges facing a self-managing team.
- Describe the importance of creating a continuous learning culture in a team.
Team Dynamics
- Identify the advantages of diversity within the team
- Understand the importance of conflict in a team.
Launching Teams
- Understand how starting an agile team differs from kicking off a traditional project.
- Identify characteristics of a successful team launch.
2 Advanced Beginner
2 Advanced Beginner
Team Effectiveness
- Discuss three ways the organization (culture, leadership, policies, structures etc.) can impact team effectiveness.
- Describe at least three characteristics of a high-performing team and how those characteristics relate to an agile mindset.
- Discuss at least three typical impediments for a team and describe at least one way to address them.
Team Dynamics
- Describe when a constructive interaction moves to destructive conflict.
- Apply at least two techniques to foster greater self-management within teams.
- Explain at least one multi-stage model for team formation and development. Illustrates what is important for a new team.
Launch a Team
- Facilitate the creation of team purpose, roles, agreements and alignment during the start-up of a team.
3 Practitioner
3 Practitioner
Team Effectiveness
- Describe how you can help a team overcome at least three challenges to be more effective.
- Analyze at least two ways you have evolved a team’s culture.
- Appraise at least two models or techniques for developing and improving team effectiveness.
Team Dynamics
- Surface conflict positively to improve the team’s competency in dealing with conflict.
- Apply at least three techniques for addressing team dysfunctions in different teams.
- Describe how teams are unique and will require different approaches to how they work and will need to be coached differently.
Launching a Team
- Assess and then address missing skills or capabilities within a team that will take it towards high performance.
- Integrate learnings from other teams and take a whole system approach to the launch of a new Agile team, starting with ‘good enough for now’.
- Facilitate the launch of a new Agile team and explain the learnings from experience.
4 Guide
4 Guide
Team Effectiveness
- Integrate different team models and demonstrate how you have used these to increase the team’s outcomes.
- Contrast different techniques used to increase team effectiveness across multiple teams with who you have worked and evaluate the effects on team results.
- Teach teams how to self-adapt without the need for a coach.
Team Dynamics
- Contrast the relationships across teams with whom you have worked, and integrate learning into your coaching interventions.
Launching a Team
- Apply a coaching approach to the formation and development of teams and the challenges commonly encountered while introducing Agile.
- Guide an organization in changing the environment to provide the best possible start to a team.
- Support an organization in articulating a clear vision and goals that can support teams.
5 Catalyst
5 Catalyst
- Recognized as a Leader in the community on topics such as
- Team Effectiveness
- Team Dynamics
- Launching Teams
- Respected author and authority in Servant Leadership.
- Write about your analysis of research into team effectiveness.
1 Beginner
2 Advanced Beginner
3 Practitioner
4 Guide
5 Catalyst
Team Effectiveness
- List at least three attributes of effective teams
- Describe at least three different challenges facing a self-managing team.
- Describe the importance of creating a continuous learning culture in a team.
- Identify the advantages of diversity within the team (i.e. different perspectives, experiences, and viewpoints).
- Understand the importance of conflict in a team.
- Understand how starting an agile team is different from kicking off a traditional project.
- Identify characteristics of a successful team launch.
Team Effectiveness
- Discuss three different ways the organization (culture, leadership, policies, structures etc.) can impact team effectiveness.
- Describe at least three characteristics of a high-performing team and how those characteristics relate to an agile mindset.
- Discuss at least three typical impediments for a team and describe at least one way to address them.
- Describe when a constructive interaction moves to destructive conflict.
- Apply at least two techniques to foster greater self-management within teams.
- Explain at least one multi-stage model for team formation and development. Illustrates what is important for a new team.
- Facilitate creation of team purpose, roles, agreements and alignment during the start-up of a team.
Team Effectiveness
- Describe how you can help a team overcome at least three challenges to be more effective.
- Analyze at least two ways in which you have evolved the culture of a team.
- Appraise at least two models or techniques for team development and improving team effectiveness.
- Surface conflict in a positive manner to improve the team’s competency in dealing with conflict.
- Apply at least three techniques for addressing team dysfunctions in different teams.
- Describe how teams are unique and will require different approaches to how they work and will need to be coached differently.
- Assess and then address missing skills or capabilities within a team that will take it towards high performance and business agility.
- Integrate learnings from other teams and take a whole system approach to the launch of a new Agile team, starting with – good enough for now.
- Facilitate the launch of a new Agile team and explain the learnings from the experience.
Team Effectiveness
- Integrate different team models and demonstrate how you have used these to increase the team’s outcomes.
- Contrast different techniques used to increase team effectiveness across multiple teams with who you have worked and evaluate the effects on team results.
- Teach teams how to self-adapt, without the need for a coach.
- Contrast the different relationships across teams with who you have worked, and integrate learning into your coaching interventions.
- Apply a coaching approach to the formation and development of teams and the challenges commonly encountered while introducing Agile.
- Guide an organization in changing the environment in order to provide the best possible start to a team.
- Support an organization in articulating a clear vision and goals that can support teams.
- Seen as a Leader in the community on topics such as
- Team Effectiveness
- Team Dynamics
- Launching Teams
- Speaks at conferences and other community events on team related topics.
- Contributes new thinking to the community relating to teams.