Good news ladies, female leadership style is a perfect fit for Agile!

 

One component of agile approach is a servant leadership style which is based on the following characteristics (source Scrum.org):

·         Serving others, not yourself

·         Not leading by title

·         Leadership that endures

·         Helping people develop and perform as highly as possible

·         Selfless management of team members

·         Promoting genuine team ownership

·         Harnessing the collective power of a team

Servant leadership is the key for building empowered, self-managed teams and develop their high performance. There are differences between more directing, managing style that is attributed to the traditional waterfall methods, though agile mindset as such is indeed not necessarily related to the project management method you apply. However, it may still mean that when you transition from one environment to another, or happen to be part of the agile transformation, you need to revisit and adjust your leadership style and methods.

So where is the good news? There are several recent posts on the projectmanagement.com raising awareness of professional gender gap between female and male project managers. Female project managers are in minority (estimate says 20-30%) and project management discipline feels to be male dominated. At the same time companies are running gender diversity programs and women are seeking for advice how to progress in their careers and reach equal pay.

Can the agile project management be the opportunity to enhance presence of female project managers and make the gap smaller?

Female leadership is characterized as follows and its similarity with the servant leadership is striking:

Emotional prevalence, empathy, focus on teamwork, strong communicators, leading by example, great listeners, motivated by challenges, persistent, people oriented, nurturing, strong tendency to cooperate, having capacity to think and operate in different directions (multitasking), more prone to change and innovations, flexible.

Does it mean that any female project manager would be great Scrum Master or Agile Coach? Indeed not. But when thinking how to bring more women to the project management discipline, the current agile popularity can be an open window of opportunity. Especially when role of a Scrum Masters is to facilitate the team and not to prescribe solutions, so the interpersonal skills, natural focus on teamwork, caring for the others, ability to multitask and make decisions while considering several aspects and flexibility, may offset a strong technical background.

Ladies, go for it!