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By Roy Osherove

Great teams are grown, not hired.

A practical framework for software team leaders: recognize which mode your team is in (survival, learning or self-organizing) and lead the way that mode needs.

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Cover of Elastic Leadership: Growing self-organizing teams by Roy Osherove, published by Manning. A 19th-century engraving of a gardener with a spade beside a basket of young plants.

Who it's for

Your team looks to you for guidance.

You’re a manager, technical team leader, architect, or scrum master and your team looks to you for guidance. You have to mediate heated debates. Personality clashes are yours to handle. The team is constantly putting out fires instead of doing the right things, the right way. Everyone seems to want to do things correctly, but nobody seems to be doing so. This is where leaders get stuck. Elastic leadership is a framework and philosophy of leadership that can help you as you manage day-to-day and long term challenges and strive to create the elusive self-organizing team. It is about understanding that your leadership needs to change based on which phase you discover your team is in.

Elastic Leadership provides you with a set of values, techniques, and practices to use in your leadership role. The first part of the book explains the elastic leadership philosophy, a way of navigating the leadership world that provides a moral compass as you make decisions, large and small. This includes the leader manifesto, and the elastic leadership framework phases (survival mode, learning, and self-organization). You’ll also learn a set of techniques and practices the author has acquired along his own journey that will complement and support your moral compass. In the second half of the book, you will find thoughts and notes from other leaders, with accompanying annotations from the author about how they fit into the overall framework and compass outlined in the first part of the book.

The Team Leader Manifesto

We believe great teams are grown, not hired.

The goal of a team leader is to continuously grow the skills of the people in their team to the point of self-organization. Happier teams make happier customers and employers.

To achieve this goal, we must continuously pursue:

  • Challenging ourselves and our teams to become better, instead of keeping everyone in their comfort zone
  • A just-in-time adaptive leadership style, instead of a one-style-fits-all leadership approach
  • Participating in human interaction at least as much as we do with machines

Read the full manifesto (opens in a new tab) →

The model

The Elastic Leadership Model

Your leadership needs to change based on which phase you discover your team is in.

  1. Survival mode

    Leadership style Command & control (The protector)

    You'll notice
    • No time to learn or practice
    • Reacting to fires instead of doing new work
    • Over-committed
    Goal
    Move to learning mode
    What the leader does
    • Set a 30-day re-estimation deadline, and include management
    • Decide which work realistically fits before the line
    • Move everything else after it, and re-estimate to include learning

  2. Learning mode

    Leadership style Coach/Dictator

    You'll notice
    • There is time to learn and slowly practice
    • Slack time is used for learning
    Goal
    Increase skills
    What the leader does
    • Challenge people out of their comfort zones
    • Grow one skill per person at a time
    • Monitor skill growth

  3. Self-organizing mode

    Leadership style Facilitation (The facilitator)

    You'll notice
    • The team solves its own problems
    • The team knows how to handle unknown situations
    Goal
    Stay here
    What the leader does
    • Facilitate self-organization
    • Set goals, not actions
    • Watch for changes that push the team back into another mode
The Elastic Leadership model diagram. Survival mode: no time to learn, reacting to fires, over-committed; goal: move to learning mode; things to do: 30-day re-estimation deadline, include management, decide which work realistically fits before the line, move other work after it, re-estimate to include learning; leadership style: dictator/protector. Learning mode: there is time to learn and slowly practice; goal: increase skills; things to do: challenge people out of their comfort zones, one skill per person at a time, monitor skill growth; leadership style: coach/dictator. Self-organizing mode: the team can solve its own problems and handle unknown situations; goal: stay; things to do: facilitate self-organization, set goals not actions, monitor for mode changes; leadership style: facilitator.
The Elastic Leadership Model by Roy Osherove

Inside the book

Table Of Contents:

  1. Part 1 Elastic leadership

    1. Striving toward a team leader manifesto
    2. Elastic leadership
    3. Bus factors
    4. Survival mode

  2. Part 2 Survival mode

    1. Learning mode: learning to learn

  3. Part 3 The learning phase

    1. Commitment language
    2. Growing people
    3. Using clearing meetings to advance self-organization

  4. Part 4 Self-organization mode

    1. Influence patterns
    2. The line manager manifesto

  5. Part 5 Notes to a software team leader

Watch

The Coaching Architect Manifesto

Play “The Coaching Architect Manifesto”

Roy's talk at the DevTernity conference on leading and growing technical teams. Watch on YouTube (opens in a new tab) →

Part 5

Notes from other leaders

The second half of the book collects thoughts and notes from other software leaders, each with annotations from the author on how it fits the elastic leadership framework and compass from the first half.

Training

The Elastic Leadership workshop

Two days with Roy on the essential skills for leading software teams: the three team modes and how to tell which one you're in, getting out of survival mode, commitment language, delegation as a growth tool, clearing meetings, and the six influence forces behind how people behave.

See the workshop agenda

From the 5 Whys blog

Articles on team leadership

Read the 5 Whys Blog (opens in a new tab)

About the author

Roy Osherove

Roy Osherove leads, coaches and consults for software teams. He is also the author of The Art of Unit Testing (Manning) and writes about team leadership on the 5 Whys blog.

Get the book

Start with the free excerpt, or get the full book from Manning.

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