--- title: "Self-Leading Phase: articles" url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/category/Self-Leading%2BPhase.md" canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/category/Self-Leading+Phase" tags: [] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Posts on leading a self-organizing team, covering mature teams, Scrum versus Kanban, influence strategies and why a go-to architect gets in the way." 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/" --- # Self-Leading Phase: articles Posts on leading a self-organizing team, covering mature teams, Scrum versus Kanban, influence strategies and why a go-to architect gets in the way. HTML: https://www.5whys.com/articles/category/Self-Leading+Phase · 11 linked entries (each is plain Markdown) · Site index: [llms.txt](https://www.5whys.com/llms.txt) - [You're not self organizing if you have a go-to architect](https://www.5whys.com/articles/youre-not-self-organizing-if-you-have-a-go-to-architect.md) (2012-05-01): A quick test for self-organization: if a team must ask an outside architect to finish its work, it is not self-organizing, and the architect should teach. - [Video: How to manage a person who is always late to a standup meeting](https://www.5whys.com/articles/video-how-to-manage-a-person-who-is-always-late-to-a-standup.md) (2011-07-30): A YouTube video answering how to handle a team member who is always late to the daily standup, with a different approach for each team maturity stage. - [Video: Ten Mistakes Software Team Leaders Make](https://www.5whys.com/articles/video-ten-mistakes-software-team-leaders-make.md) (2011-07-20): Video and slides of a SkillsMatter talk on ten mistakes software team leaders make, from ignoring team maturity to fear of delegation and placating. - [What to do if some people in the team just don't want to take a task?](https://www.5whys.com/articles/what-to-do-if-some-people-in-the-team-just-dont-want-to-take.md) (2011-06-06): How a Scrum team leader should respond when team members won't pick tasks in sprint planning, with different tactics for each team maturity stage. - [Scrum vs. Kanban attitudes](https://www.5whys.com/articles/scrum-vs-kanban-attitudes.md) (2010-06-13): A link to a post on how Kanban and Scrum differ in attitude and in how they provoke change, with a note that combining the two can work well. - [Leadership and the mature team](https://www.5whys.com/articles/leadership-and-the-mature-team.md) (2010-05-18): Mike Burrows responds to the three maturity stages, arguing self-organization goes beyond self-management and mature teams still need leadership. - [The 3 maturity stages of a software team and how scrum fails to identify them](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-3-maturity-stages-of-a-software-team-and-how-scrum-fails.md) (2010-05-17): The chaotic, mid-life and mature stages of a software team, the leadership each one needs, from dictator to coach, and why Scrum Masters miss them. - [How to plan and influence change at your company](https://www.5whys.com/articles/how-to-plan-and-influence-change-at-your-company.md) (2009-12-10): How the six sources of influence from the book Influencer explain why change efforts like adopting TDD fail, and how to find the vital behaviors to change. - [Why XP’s influence is more effective than Scrum](https://www.5whys.com/articles/why-xps-influence-is-more-effective-than-scrum.md) (2009-12-09): Why XP practices like TDD, pair programming and continuous integration change team behavior better than Scrum alone, seen through six forces of influence. - [How to influence others](https://www.5whys.com/articles/how-to-influence-others.md) (2009-11-30): Two books for team leaders who want to drive change: How to Win Friends and Influence People for one-on-one influence, and Influencer for the macro level. - [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.md) (2009-11-16): 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/