---
title: "Team Leader Manifesto"
url: "https://www.5whys.com/topics/team-leader-manifesto.md"
canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/topics/team-leader-manifesto"
updated: "2026-10-27"
tags: []
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "All drafts of Roy Osherove's Team Leader Manifesto, from the first take in 2011 to the We believe text and the NDC Oslo talk on growing teams."
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

[Topic](https://www.5whys.com/#topics-h)

The Team Leader Manifesto was written in the open on this blog, one take at a time, between December 2011 and June 2012.

The last take starts with We believe: great teams are grown, not hired.

Each take below shows how the wording changed, and the NDC Oslo talk explains the ideas behind it.

1. [Team Leader Manifesto - Take #4](https://www.5whys.com/articles/team-leader-manifesto-take-4.html) June 7, 2012

    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.

2. [Team Leader Manifesto - Take #3](https://www.5whys.com/articles/team-leader-manifesto-take-3.html) June 6, 2012

    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.

3. [Software Team Leader Manifesto - Take #2](https://www.5whys.com/articles/software-team-leader-manifesto-take-2.html) February 23, 2012

    The second draft of the team leader manifesto: adapt leadership style to the team, embrace risk, fear and experimentation, and lead people.

4. [A Manifesto For Software Team Leaders - Take 1](https://www.5whys.com/articles/a-manifesto-for-software-team-leaders-take-1.html) December 8, 2011

    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.

5. [Video: The Team Leader Manifesto, Growing Effective Teams](https://www.5whys.com/articles/video-the-team-leader-manifesto-growing-effective-teams.html) June 15, 2012

    The page for Roy Osherove's NDC Oslo 2012 talk on the Software Team Leader Manifesto; the embedded video is gone but a Vimeo link remains.

6. [Manifesto for Continuous Improvement](https://www.5whys.com/articles/manifesto-for-continuous-improvement.html) September 24, 2009

    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.

Every post in the category [manifesto](https://www.5whys.com/articles/category/manifesto) (2) · Other topics: [Survival Mode](https://www.5whys.com/topics/survival-mode), [Learning Mode](https://www.5whys.com/topics/learning-mode), [Scrum Master](https://www.5whys.com/topics/scrum-master) · [All articles](https://www.5whys.com/articles)


---

## 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/