---
title: "Video: Elastic Leadership in software - InfoQ interview"
url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/video-elastic-leadership-in-software-infoq-interview.md"
canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/video-elastic-leadership-in-software-infoq-interview.html"
published: "2011-04-15T17:02:01.137000+00:00"
updated: "2011-04-15T17:02:01.137000+00:00"
tags: ["First Steps during chaos", "Meta", "Video"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "A link to an InfoQ video interview from QCon London 2011 on Elastic Leadership, where the leader moves from dictator to coach as the team matures."
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/"
---

# Video: Elastic Leadership in software - InfoQ interview

during the recent [QCON London](http://qconlondon.com/) 2011 Conference, [Michael Hunger of Infoq](http://twitter.com/mesirii) interviewed me about what I later started describing as “[Elastic Leadership](https://www.5whys.com/articles/elastic-leadership.html)” – The team leader changes her leadership style (dictator all the way through to coach) based on the [current team stage](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-3-maturity-stages-of-a-software-team-and-how-scrum-fails.html).

[You can see the full video interview here](http://www.infoq.com/interviews/osherove-software-team-leadership).

I look a bit tired, but I hope my message was clear.

## Read next

- [Video: Mistake #1 - Not Understanding Team Maturity](https://www.5whys.com/articles/video-mistake-1-not-understanding-team-maturity.html): A short video on the first of ten team leader mistakes, failing to recognize the team's maturity stage, plus a note on an Oslo team leader class.
- [Video – Code Leaders and Beautiful Teams](https://www.5whys.com/articles/video-ndash-code-leaders-and-beautiful-teams.html): A post about a QCon London 2010 talk on code leaders and beautiful teams, focused on the chaotic first stage, with a link to the InfoQ recording.
- [Video: Ten Mistakes Software Team Leaders Make](https://www.5whys.com/articles/video-ten-mistakes-software-team-leaders-make.html): Video and slides of a SkillsMatter talk on ten mistakes software team leaders make, from ignoring team maturity to fear of delegation and placating.


---

## 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/