---
title: "Middle Management or puppet management?"
url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/middle-management-or-puppet-management.md"
canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/middle-management-or-puppet-management.html"
published: "2012-05-06T11:19:00+00:00"
updated: "2012-05-06T11:48:31.213000+00:00"
tags: ["First Steps during chaos"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "Most team leaders I've seen in lead roles usually feel quite helpless. Someone put them in their position, and no one taught them how to do their jobs. So they are mostly developers who are just trying to keep the status-quo. They either…"
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/"
---

# Middle Management or puppet management?

Most team leaders I've seen in lead roles usually feel quite helpless. Someone put them in their position, and no one taught them how to do their jobs. So they are mostly developers who are just trying to keep the status-quo.

They either don't want to, or not sure how to lead the team, and what's their role in the team. 

They don't feel like leaders, and they mostly act as puppets for upper management for setting (sometimes) impossible goals and chasing them.

If you're that team leader, you should realize that your job is to lead people to do the right things, and to do the right things the way you believe is right(for everyone involved). That's your job. That's why they pay you more.

Management, done right, is a very tough job. That's why you get paid more.

But maybe no one ever told you this. I'm telling you this now. Your job is to make your own decisions, and find your own voice. and to lead.

Your job is to build value, and knowledge in the company. Your job is to grow your team to become the best bloody team they could be.

[This is your manifesto.](https://www.5whys.com/articles/software-team-leader-manifesto-take-2.html)

Scared? Great. Means you're about to start learning new skills, and get out of your comfort zone.


---

## 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/