Servant leadership means gaining knowledge and teaching others.

There are plenty of things to discuss when you get into agile development. Certifications, long nights, and working with developers.  There are times when you feel like a nursery school teacher trying to get your people working together.  Other times, there are moments of quiet contentment where you realize you are doing the right thing and that you are making a difference.  Agile is many things.  It is not dull.  This week on the blog, I wanted to share a little wisdom I learned many years ago as I wandered my college campus.

This week was commencement week at Illinois State University. Graduate students and undergraduates walked for ceremonies.  What made the experience more heartfelt for me was that some people walking were the children of friends and family.  For all those newly minted Redbird alumni, I want to say welcome to an exceptional club.

The motto of the university is “And gladly would he learn and teach,” although it has changed since I went to campus.  I thought this bit of wisdom came from the Bible, but instead, it comes from Chaucer and describes the medieval clerk.  A clerk.  The person who makes sure the bills are paid.  The person who makes sure the paperwork is in order and who has toiled anonymously under tyrants, kings, generals, and thought leaders for all of history—no one in elementary school dreams of being a clerk.  The life of a doctor, firefighter, or astronaut seems much more satisfying.

Here is a secret: the modern world would fly apart without clerks.  The trains run on time because someone has a job to ensure they do.  They have a staff of people who make that happen. The trains run on time in bad weather and during contract negotiations.  The trains work when budgets are cut, and the politicians have unrealistic expectations.  Over the last 400 years, clerks, using engineering skills and bureaucratic knowledge, have created our modern world.  That is a mighty burden on a class of people that most of us look at with shame and contempt.

The clerk and the teacher have 400 years of Western civilization to maintain.  If we go back to the ancient Egyptians, that burden is over four thousand years of history.  All of it was managed by clerks who were educated with the best knowledge of the past and willing to try and improve on existing practices.  I am going with this because it is up to us, those of us many people negatively refer to as clerks to try and make a difference in our offices and communities.

The agile movement was founded not by business leaders but by project managers.  These clerks were the people who noticed that what they were doing was not working and decided that some radical change was in order.  This is why we have the Agile Manifesto.  This is a reformation happening not from the C-suites or boardrooms of power.  Instead, it is taking place in the cubicles, and the leaders of this reformation are clerks!

Suppose you wonder how this ties back into my nostalgia for my Alma mater.  The slogan is: “And gladly would he learn and teach.”  A good servant leader is a lifelong learner.  Each day they take the knowledge they have gained and share it with others.  So whether it is explaining the heteronormative theory to the HR lady or SOLID programming principles to a junior developer, it is up to a servant leader to be learning all the time and share our knowledge with others.  As Scrum professionals and agilests, it is up to us to lead reformation by gladly learning and gladly teaching others.  I think that lesson alone has stayed with me since I was an undergraduate.

Until next time.