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Is the combination of the Product Owner and Scrum Master (or Kanban Lead) a better combination for leadership on a team? I am leaning toward POs being part of the leadership as well as the Scrum Master. I believe a great PO with great leadership skill can immensely lead the dev team in rough times.
I don't agree that only Scrum Master should be the Servant Leader on the team. I think the combination of Scrum Master and Product Owner works much better.
You are the victim of legacy command-and-control thinking. The roles you describe have responsibilities, but they are not "leaders" of the team in the traditional sense either alone or in combination.
According to the official Scrum Guide:
The Scrum Team consists of a Product Owner, the Development Team, and a Scrum Master. Scrum Teams are self-organizing and cross-functional. Self-organizing teams choose how best to accomplish their work, rather than being directed by others outside the team.
A self-organizing team isn't directed by traditional leaders from outside or inside the team. Instead, each role on the team plays a vital part in delivering value to the customer. You can read the entire section of the Scrum Guide for a description of each role, but in short:
If you like sports metaphors, it's like zone defense: each member of the team has a region of responsibility, and must collaborate, trust, and rely on the rest of the team to be effective. No one is "in charge" of the team, although effective teams will certainly have team members who display leadership qualities.
Structure your teams to be cross-functional, make sure they are empowered, and ensure that everyone understands their role within the team. Encourage collaboration and a sense of shared purpose, rather than fostering a culture of leaders and followers. That is the embodiment of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto.
In Scrum, every individual on the Scrum Team, including the PO, SM, and Development Team members have some leadership/management responsibility.
The beauty of Scrum is that leadership is distributed throughout all parts of the team, ensuring that every single person, ideally, has ownership of what is being built and can lead in the area in which they are most proficient. The PO, a business representative and Voice of the Customer, is allowed to lead the business decisions. The SM is a process-oriented individual and is allowed to lead the team in process and coach them through Scrum. The Dev Team is allowed to do what they do best and lead in the technology and completion department.
I hope this answers your question!
Maybe we should first understand What is Servant-Leadership?
In his works, Greenleaf discusses the need for a better approach to leadership, one that puts serving others—including employees, customers, and community—as the number one priority. Servantleadership emphasizes increased service to others, a holistic approach to work, promoting a sense of community, and the sharing of power in decision making.
Who is a servant-leader? Greenleaf said that the servant-leader is one who is a servant first. In The Servant as Leader he wrote, “It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant—first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test is: 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?”
from: Servant leadership
I disagree with most of these answers. Teams need leadership no matter what style of leadership it is. It could be servant-leadership or something else, but there needs to be leadership. And good teams have strong leadership. If there is no one at the front of the table motivating, encouraging, and in general driving the team then the team will eventually stagnate. It is human nature to look to a leader in any group effort.
So with that in mind, I would say that, YES, the PO and the SM can partner to lead a team, if they are both strong and have leadership qualities. I was in this position in my last job. Both myself and the "Business Owner" (as we called PO's there) had a very strong grasp of the business needs and the team's strengths and so we co-led that team.
Also, a PO can have a very strong grasp of business needs and have a clear vision for his/her product and not have any leadership qualities whatsoever. The same is true with SM's. An SM can be the best process coach in the world and not be able to lead. Agile dogmatists can spout team-composition theory all they want, but the reality is that the leader of the team will emerge organically, and it will be the person who is best fit to lead that team, regardless of their scrum role and responsibilities.
The team has no fixed leader. The team is a group with no single leader. Self organized. Self motivated. Self sufficient. Self lead.
If the team needs a leader, it's not yet a team in a SCRUM sense.
That said, good leadership skills, good social skills and being an upbeat and positive person can be an asset in any SCRUM role.
