Ever since I was a kid, I "decided" for myself that when I will grow up I will be a "manager". As you can see from my style of writing, it is not hard to recognize that English is not my native language. In my head, this magnificent word sounded extremely cool, it also seemed an important title one must have to be respected and powerful. So, I wanted to have it, of course. My heritage and background influenced this kind of mindset, not that proud of it, but hey one can only learn and wake up.

Little did I know that I will grow to hate the word and go a different way, a way much harder, but so much more rewarding. Little did I know, that to be a manager, I needed to work closely with other people and like it. Set on this course, armed with impatience and curiosity, I started learning and discovering. The first wake up moment for me was, when I realised that I don't want to be a manager, but something more valuable than that, a leader. This changed my perspective and gave me the first discoveries, 2 golden rules: people come first and people are awesome.

Over the years I’ve heard that leadership comes together with loneliness. It is said that, as a leader, people around you won't understand your "burden", so you are alone with all this. I know this was so true and present for me in the past. I felt misunderstood and unsupported many times, sometimes I still do. These feelings settle in when I make it hard for myself, when I fail to apply very basic and common sense principles.

To be a leader it takes a lot of guts and other people, people who will follow you and support you in your journey. You need people to take that vision of yours, make it theirs, and transform it into reality. That means, it is practically impossible to ever be alone.

My journey crossed paths with one of the most challenging roles I had until now. The role of a Scrum Master, also known as a Servant Leader. With this role my life changed quite drastically, as I needed to start learning a lot. I started reading more and more, discovering and trying new and crazy ideas. I've learned and tried a lot of methodologies out there, which brought also a lot of misery, as most of them are idealized and for commercial purposes only. It took me around 20 years to open my eyes, but as the saying goes, it’s never too late, and in my case, it wasn’t. I am still not there yet, and my quest is continuing as I write these sentences, I know I will never get there.

Through the eyes of a Servant Leader I want to share some of the challenges I faced and what I did and still do, to overcome them. It is well known that as a Scrum Master you have no power over the people you serve. In reality, you don’t even have any power over the processes you need to implement, even though the school of agility is kinda’ teaching you that. Given all that, how on earth can you make people follow you?

It is a hard job to live up to the requirements of a Servant Leader. Personally, I go one step forward and try to apply stewardship. People will follow when they feel heard, when they are seen and acknowledged. When you put people first everything will follow. When you show people how awesome they are they will be motivated to do great things. Over the last years I learned to let myself guided by to a set of values which I hold dear to my heart.

Since it is a trend nowadays, when you write an article to enumerate a list, here is my list of five: listen, believe, bridge, authenticity & care.

I will approach each of these values in dedicated blog articles, with the hope that this might help someone out there, as it did help me.

Everyone can call themselves a leader, but not everyone can lead.