---
title: "Software Team Leader Manifesto - Take #2"
url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/software-team-leader-manifesto-take-2.md"
canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/software-team-leader-manifesto-take-2.html"
published: "2012-02-23T13:32:59+00:00"
updated: "2012-02-23T13:32:59+00:00"
tags: ["Meta"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "The second draft of the team leader manifesto: adapt leadership style to the team, embrace risk, fear and experimentation, and lead people."
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/"
---

# Software Team Leader Manifesto - Take \#2

after the first one, here's what I have so far. Your comments are appreciated.

**We believe the role of a team leader is to also grow the people in their team, and themselves, and that this will create the most value for everyone involved.**

**To that end:**

- We believe in adjusting the leadership style to the current needs of the team, over a single style of leadership
- We believe in challenging ourselves and our teams to always get better, so:
    - We embrace taking risks for our team over staying safe
    - We embrace fear and discomfort as learning new skills
    - We embrace experimentation as a daily practice
        - With people
        - With tools
        - With processes
        - With the environment
- We believe team leaders lead people, not machines, so:
    - We embrace spending more time with our team than in meetings
    - We embrace learning people skills and techniques

## Read next

- [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.
- [A Manifesto For Software Team Leaders - Take 1](https://www.5whys.com/articles/a-manifesto-for-software-team-leaders-take-1.html): The first draft of a manifesto for software team leaders, a list of leadership values open for reader comments, written ahead of the Stoos summit.
- [Team Leader Manifesto - Take #4](https://www.5whys.com/articles/team-leader-manifesto-take-4.html): Roy Osherove's Team Leader Manifesto in full: great teams are grown, not hired, by continuously growing people's skills to the point of self-organization.

## Topic

- [Team Leader Manifesto](https://www.5whys.com/topics/team-leader-manifesto)


---

## 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/