--- title: "Elastic Leadership" url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/elastic-leadership.md" canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/elastic-leadership.html" published: "2011-04-04T08:09:28+00:00" updated: "2011-11-13T20:09:03.012000+00:00" tags: ["Meta"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Roy Osherove defines Elastic Leadership, adapting your leadership style to the team's phase, from chaos to learning to self-leading, and why it is scary." 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/" --- # Elastic Leadership - Elastic leadership is about **team context**. It is about understanding that you need to lead the team differently, based on [which phase you discover the team is in](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-3-maturity-stages-of-a-software-team-and-how-scrum-fails.html). The phases  can change from day to day or week to week. You keep adapting to the new phase, or you _will_  keep them from growing. - Elastic Leadership is about **team transformation**.  You continually [drive and transform the team](https://www.5whys.com/articles/my-team-keeps-breaking-their-promises-what-can-i-do.html) to get better than they are, up to the next phase. From chaos to learning. From learning to self-leading. - Elastic leadership is **personal transformation.** You may find it easy to be a command and control leader, but you'll need to learn how to _teach_ and _delegate_ when the team starts out it's _learning_  phase. In the self leading phase, you'll need to to let go of actually telling people what to do, and only change their surrounding constraints - are you ready for that? can you go a whole day without telling anyone in the team what to do? - Elastic leadership is **personally scary.** you are afraid of losing your friends, you are afraid to fail, and you are afraid of getting out of your own comfort zone to accomplish the various types of leadership for each team phase.  - Elastic leadership is **highly effective** because it looks the current situation straight in the eye, and does something to improve it. Because you assume things change constantly, you are prepared to also _change_ things constantly, and change based upon any needs the team has as they arrive. you do _not close your eyes_ in the face of hardship. instead you embrace it as a learning opportunity. ## Read next - [Elastic Leadership Team Survival Vs. Team Chaos Vs. Cynefin](https://www.5whys.com/articles/elastic-leadership-team-survival-vs-team-chaos-vs-cynefin.html): Why the first phase of Elastic Leadership was renamed from chaos to survival to avoid clashing with Cynefin, and how the three team phases are defined. - [Team Leader Manifesto - Take #3](https://www.5whys.com/articles/team-leader-manifesto-take-3.html): The third draft of the team leader manifesto, which defines a leader's success as the team's growth in self-organization and adds slack time to learn. - [Software Team Leader Manifesto - Take #2](https://www.5whys.com/articles/software-team-leader-manifesto-take-2.html): The second draft of the team leader manifesto: adapt leadership style to the team, embrace risk, fear and experimentation, and lead people. --- ## 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/