Servant Leadership: The Agile Way

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

  Agile   Estimating   Leadership  

In more traditional projects, PMI has a notion that you can “control” a project. I have never found that to be true. Of course, I never quite used a waterfall approach—I have used feature-driven approaches more often than I used a serial approach.

Instead of “control,” I like to think about guiding or steering a project. Agile project managers exercise servant leadership, which includes guiding and steering. Here are three ways an agile project manager can exercise servant leadership to guide projects to a great conclusion.

Agile Project Managers Serve the Team
In agile, the project manager serves the team. The project manager might arrange for the resources a team needs (such as lab time, a team meeting room or even desks and chairs). During one of my projects, the technical leader had a back problem. His previous manager had scrounged a desk and chair from storage. That was good because he had a place to work. It was bad because the desk and chair didn’t fit him.

I had two important jobs: find this guy a desk and chair that fit him, and aid him in helping the rest of the project team understand what he was thinking. I was afraid—as he was—that he might have to take significant time to manage his health. It took me two weeks to convince the Furniture Police that he needed a different desk and chair. For those two weeks,…

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