Scrum Servant Leadership: What Went Wrong

How Servant Leadership Could Be

The profound impact of effective servant leadership was demonstrated by Toyota while en route to being, as of 2024, the #1 selling car manufacturer in the world. Toyota has generously shared the inner workings of its manufacturing plants with other people in joint ventures. One of those people was Rick Madrid whose first account of servant leadership was described in Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity:

When the screw gun squealed inside the Japanese plant, though, something unexpected happened. The worker who made the mistake reached above his head and pulled a hanging cable that turned on a spinning yellow light. He then reversed the direction of his screw gun and pulled the bolt out of the doorframe, grabbed another tool, and used it to smooth the hole’s threads. At this point, a manager walked over, stood behind the worker, and began asking questions. The worker ignored his boss except to bark out a few orders, and then grabbed another tool to rethread the hole. The conveyor belt was still moving, but the worker hadn’t finished his repair. When the door got to the end of the worker’s station, the entire assembly line stopped. Madrid had no idea what was going on.

Another man, clearly a senior manager, came over. Instead of yelling, he laid out a new bolt and equipment on a tray, like a nurse in an operating room. The worker kept issuing orders to his superiors. In Fremont, that would have gotten him…