InfoQ Homepage Coaching and Mentoring Content on InfoQ
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Progressing with a Gender-Blind Attitude
Individual skills should determine success; we should not distinguish people by gender, said Oksana Afonina at Women in Tech Dublin. In her talk, she explained how she focuses on her own skills and performance, those being the main traits to benefit from career-wise. Change starts with you, she said; there are always opportunities to empower others around you and scale your impact.
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The Tech Coach Strikes Back: The Value of Mentoring and Mob Programming
Technical coaching is all about helping developers grow by finding ways to increase their technical excellence and to work with softer skills, like the ability to be able to communicate and listen to other developers, argued Tobias Modig at GrowIT 2018. The softer part is closely connected to traditional coaching, but it also comes with a tech twist.
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Reflections on Technical Leading: Q&A with Julia Hayward at Agile in the City Bristol
Employers need to adopt fluid structures for people to find balance in their role, technical and managerial paths should lie side by side, you can’t have genuine effective growth without psychological safety, and a good mentor to talk about problems and scenarios is invaluable; these are some of the reflections on technical leading brought up by Julia Hayward, technical lead at Redgate Software.
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Wave 2 Agile: Living the Agile Mindset
Living the agile mindset means actually doing it, not just talking about it. Living agile is only accessible to those who say yes to personal growth in a big way. If you want different behaviours in your organization, change your own behaviour. This is what Michael K Sahota is calling "Wave 2 of Agile", and invites everyone to join.
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Designing Organisations with Purposeful Agile
In a purpose-centric agile implementation, stakeholders make a clear shared purpose come to reality through visible outcomes. It starts with awareness of the organisation’s installed culture, finding installed habits and beliefs that pull back and block change, and deciding what you want to do about that. The second step is to create the necessary time and space for true change to happen.
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Defining the Competencies of Agile Coaching
The International Consortium for Agile (ICAgile) hosted a panel discussion at the Agile2018 conference about the Agile Coaching profession. The panel discussed what an agile coach is, the coaching competencies, where the career has been and the future direction of coaching.
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Author, Teacher, and Consultant Jerry Weinberg Passed Away
Gerald M. “Jerry” Weinberg, author, teacher, and consultant, passed away August 7, 2018, at the age of 84. Weinberg published about 100 books on computer programming, systems thinking, leadership, change, consulting, and writing.
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Brain Based Learning: Applying Training From The Back Of The Room
The human brain learns in many different ways; a training mode must fit the purpose and desired outcome. Practices from Training From the BACK of the Room! can be used to make training stick. Forcing big changes on people can be perceived as a threat; it’s better to create psychological safety, foster curiosity, and give feedback in ways that continue the dialogue instead of shutting down.
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Making Games for High Performing Teams
The gamestorming model describes a process to create games. It provides concepts like game space, boundaries, rules, artifacts and goals, for creating compelling learning experiences in an organizational setting. Such games can be used by teams to experiment, focus on outcomes, and try out disruptive patterns.
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Incorporating Improv into Agile with Games
The rules of Improv provide a short-hand to enhance active listening, collaboration, and mutual reinforcement skills, all of which are integral to Agility. You can incorporate Improv activities and games to reinforce Agile mindset. The game debrief is where the value of the game becomes sustainable, as it explicitly ties emotions and aha-moments from the game experience to working scenarios.
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Culture, Psychological Safety, and Emotional Intelligence for High Performance Teams
Humanity is the heart of the creative intellectual work that many of us are engaged in. The foundation of high-performance teams is people who have freedom and autonomy and feel safer. Games can be used to support self-awareness and connection and build team emotional intelligence onto safety.
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Cultivating Psychological Safety
When we’re feeling stressed, threatened, or unsafe, it becomes harder to think creatively, work collaboratively, and solve problems. You can cultivate a culture of safety by letting folks know that it’s safe to make mistakes, by listening for real understanding, and by practicing mindfulness.
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Dealing with the Broken Human Machine: How to Create High-Performing Teams
To really progress in developing software and build anything at a scale, you have to examine your blind spots and learn to deal with people. The culture we build is important: the difference between a high performing engineering team and a low performing one is orders of magnitude in terms of productivity and quality. Focusing on how we do things is as important as what we’re doing.
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Agile and the Use of Paradoxes
Paradoxes support agile transformations; they make you stop, think, and discuss by using a shared language. They also help to show empathy and provide a way forward. VIVAT, a Dutch insurance company, uses paradoxes in training and everyday work to drive their agile transformation.
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How to Win a Solar Race Using Agile
The Nuon Solar team uses agile and Scrum to take the steps which add the most value to the project first, integrate different disciplines, ensure transparency and focus, and reflect to improve. Their goal is promote and educate the use of clean energy; the mission is to win the Sasol Solar Challenge in South Africa using the power of innovation.