Cliff Berg
1 min readMay 31, 2020

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No, not as defined by the Scrum Guide, and not as widely practiced by the Scrum community. Because the role makes no sense. It is not servant leadership.

As James Hunter puts it in his book The Servant, “The leader should never settle for mediocrity or second best – people have a need to be pushed to be the best they can be. It may not be what they want, but the leader should always be more concerned with needs than with wants.”

A servant leader is a leader - not a facilitator. A servant leader has both accountability and authority. What diffrentiates a servant leader from an autocratic one is how a servant leader operates.

Also, the SM role downplays the need to understand the work of the team. IME a SM is far more effective if they learn about DevOps, and learn about the team's work - including the technical aspects. That enpowers them: they can then participate in ALL conversations - not just the process ones. And guess what? The team cares a-lot more about the technical issues than the process issues.

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Cliff Berg
Cliff Berg

Written by Cliff Berg

Author and leadership consultant, IT entrepreneur, physicist — LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cliffberg/

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