---
title: "Ask Royo #1 - Team Leadership and Influence Edition"
url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/ask-royo-1-team-leadership-and-influence-edition.md"
canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/ask-royo-1-team-leadership-and-influence-edition.html"
published: "2014-11-03T02:00:46.003000+00:00"
updated: "2014-11-03T02:04:21.527000+00:00"
tags: ["Video", "people patterns"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "The first Ask Royo video on YouTube, answering questions on test first vs test last, survival mode, team size, unit tests and remote code reviews."
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/"
---

# Ask Royo \#1 - Team Leadership and Influence Edition

A new experiment I'm making. Twieet me questions about anything relating to leadership or software dev, and I'll try to answer as best I can if I have any knowledge in the area.

In this episode I answer the following questions:

- How do you show the benefits of test first vs. test last?
- When jobseeking, how do I look for places that are in chaos or survival mode?
- How big should your team be before you need a team lead?
- Examples of Team "Homework"
- How to encourage devs to write unit tests
- The role of designers and architects in agile. is tdd irrelevant?
- Code reviews with remote teams

[![](https://www.5whys.com/img/video/youtube-EV5gdyRYV8M.jpg)Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV5gdyRYV8M)

Ask Royo Ep.1

## Read next

- [Video: Influence Strategies](https://www.5whys.com/articles/video-influence-strategies.html): A pointer to Richard Banks' video on influence strategies based on Linda Rising's work, and why team leads must influence others. It is no longer hosted.
- [The hidden leadership lessons we can learn from music conductors](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-hidden-leadership-lessons-we-can-learn-from-music-conduc.html): Lessons for software team leaders from Itay Talgam's TED talk on great conductors: self-direction, letting people grow and control without control.
- [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/