---
title: "Team Leader Manifesto - Take #3"
url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/team-leader-manifesto-take-3.md"
canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/team-leader-manifesto-take-3.html"
published: "2012-06-06T01:24:16.313000+00:00"
updated: "2012-06-06T01:28:33.947000+00:00"
tags: ["First Steps during chaos", "Meta", "manifesto"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "As team leaders our goal, and the way we measure our work, is the overall growth in skills of self organization and self maintenance of each person of our team, and the team as a whole. To that end: We accept that the team’s needs from us…"
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/"
---

# Team Leader Manifesto - Take \#3

#### As team leaders our goal, and the way we measure our work, is the overall growth in skills of self organization and self maintenance of each person of our team, and the team as a whole. To that end:

We accept that the **team’s needs from us change continuously** based on their skills for handling the current reality of work, so:

- We embrace a **continuously changing leadership style**, over a one-style-fits-all leadership approach

We believe in **challenging ourselves and our teams** to always get better, so: 

- _We **create slack time** for the team to learn and be challenged_ 
- We embrace **taking risks** for our team over staying safe 
- _We embrace **fear and discomfort** as learning new skills over keeping people within their comfort zones_
- We embrace **experimentation as a constant practice** over maintaining the status quo 
    - **With people** 
    - _With **tools**_ 
    - **With processes**
    - With the **environment**

We believe our core practice is **leading people**, not wielding machines, so:

- We embrace **spending more time** with our team than in meetings 
- We embrace treating software problems as **people problems** 
- We learn **people skills** and communication techniques


---

## 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/