Johanna Rothman - Growing Your Servant Leadership

Premise

Your management wants your team to commit to dates or deliverables. Your team wants adaptability so they can provide the best product at all times. You feel torn between your management and your team, stuck in the middle. You can manage your situation by growing your adaptability and servant leadership.

This is a common problem when organizations transition to agile. The managers still want the assurances that the plan-driven approaches appeared to provide them. How can they depend on the team to deliver value if they don’t know when the team will release the product?

The teams want the freedom to work with the product owner and deliver a great product. How can they create a great product if they have to spend all their time estimating the entire product backlog, or appeasing management with surrogate measures?

Both the managers and teams are correct. Managers need to know what to expect when. Teams need the flexibility of reacting to product owner feedback. Does that mean you need to create Gantt charts or ask people to commit to specific stories?

No. When you change what you measure and report, you can change the conversation and actions. You have alternatives: Helping the team measure what direct measurements instead of surrogates; helping the product owner create deliverable-based roadmaps and small stories, helping the managers differentiate between projects and programs, and see progress in agile ways. In this session, we will problem-solve in small groups. You will have an opportunity to describe your specific problems and help each other develop potential solutions.

We’ll explore what servant leadership means and how you can grow your servant leadership, practicing in an iterative and incremental way.

Learning Outcomes:

Understand the seven traits of servant leaders and how that applies to management The difference between empirical data and surrogate data Understanding needs of both management and your team Ways to discuss what agile means and agile deliverables with management Measurements that make sense to both the team and manager

Summary

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Action / Learning

Nothing here really for me

Presentation

Notes

They are self aware Listen Share power Help others grow Coach people not control Unleash energy

Test for servant leadership:

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?

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