---
title: "Five Questions to ask yourself when getting advice about team leadership"
url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/five-questions-to-ask-yourself-when-getting-advice-about-tea.md"
canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/five-questions-to-ask-yourself-when-getting-advice-about-tea.html"
published: "2011-09-13T13:17:28.613000+00:00"
updated: "2011-09-13T13:23:36.437000+00:00"
tags: ["Critical Thinking", "Meta", "Ri", "Self Improvement"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "Questions for testing any team leadership advice against the three team maturity stages, plus bonus questions about the author's hidden assumptions."
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/"
---

# Five Questions to ask yourself when getting advice about team leadership

Go through [each guest post in in this blog](https://www.5whys.com/articles/category/Guest+Post), and ask yourself the following questions about it:

- In what [maturity stage](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-3-maturity-stages-of-a-software-team-and-how-scrum-fails.html) does this suggestion make sense?
- What would happen if I exercise this suggestion during each of the other team maturity stages that don't seem to fit?
- Can you think of a time when you tried or seen someone else try such a behavior during the wrong team maturity stage?
- Some posts suggest ideas that may make sense in more than a single maturity stage. What do you think makes them different than other posts? What makes a team leader's behavior apply to more than a single team stage? what makes a team leader behavior apply only to a single stage?
- Can you think of team leader behaviors that make sense in \*all\* three stages?

**Bonus Questions:**

- What hidden assumptions about you and your team did the author make when suggesting this? Why would they make those assumptions?
- How can you avoid the wrong assumptions when deciding on a course of action?

## Read next

- [Manifesto for Continuous Improvement](https://www.5whys.com/articles/manifesto-for-continuous-improvement.html): A photo shared by Andrew of 21apps, plus a one-line take on continuous improvement: when asked whether you are happy with things, the answer is always no.
- [The three stages of learning team leadership](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-three-stages-of-learning-team-leadership.html): How Shu-Ha-Ri applies to learning team leadership and TDD: start with practices, then learn the principles, and earn the values over time.
- [Developing Critical Team Thinking](https://www.5whys.com/articles/developing-critical-team-thinking.html): How the effectiveness, novelty and self-direction of critical thinking map onto growing a self-organizing team that keeps experimenting.


---

## 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/