--- title: "A Possible Job Description: Team Leader" url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/a-possible-job-description-team-leader.md" canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/a-possible-job-description-team-leader.html" published: "2009-10-16T23:52:56+00:00" updated: "2009-10-16T23:56:55.687000+00:00" tags: ["Guest Post", "people patterns"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Kevin Stevens drafts an honest job description for a software team leader: mentor juniors, choose tools wisely, ship with integrity and care for the code." usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # A Possible Job Description: Team Leader > Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Kevin Stevens. Kevin Stevens is a Senior Software Engineer at Ecology & Environment in Buffalo, NY. He claims to be the only person who has a B.A. in acting, a B.S. in Computer Science, and who has worked for Siegfried and Roy. He has a PMP, but thinks it was a giant waste of time. I’ve been thinking a lot about what qualities make a good team leader. We’ve been trying to hire a senior developer for the last few months without a lot of luck. Our job description is, like most, strong on technical skills. But when we do the post-mortem on an interview, that isn’t what we talk about. What we talk about are things like, “Would he be able to lead a design meeting?”, “Is he going to be able to mentor the juniors?”. All of which makes me think that the job description needs a rewrite. So, even though HR would never approve of a listing written like this, here’s what I’ve been thinking. > > You’ve proven you can wield application code like a lightsaber, but you know there’s more to software engineering than that. You write unit tests, integrate continuously, program in pairs and rock it Agile-style three ways from Sunday. You have shown what you can do and now want to show that you can lead. Here’s what you need to do: > Remember what it was like to be a junior programmer > Teach others to avoid the mistakes you made so they don’t stay junior for long > Know about the next generation of technology coming down the pike > Have enough sense to adopt new things because they’re the right tools for the job and not because they’re new > Ship applications that reflect the hard work and integrity of your team > Care for your team’s code like it is the piece of craftsman ship it truly is > If you can do this and more, lots more, it’s time for you to step up and lead. ## Read next - [Creating Team Trust](https://www.5whys.com/articles/creating-team-trust.html): Johanna Rothman explains how a team lead builds team trust, starting with yourself: deliver what you promise, stay consistent, and negotiate. - [Check-in: sharing emotions in an effective way](https://www.5whys.com/articles/check-in-sharing-emotions-in-an-effective-way.html): Yves Hanoulle explains the Check-In protocol from The Core Protocols, using mad, glad, sad and afraid to share emotions at work and at home. - [How to deal with bad decisions made by the team](https://www.5whys.com/articles/how-to-deal-with-bad-decisions-made-by-the-team.html): How a team lead can steer a self-directing team away from bad technical decisions by asking hard questions, based on Mike Cohn's Succeeding with Agile. --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/