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Culture & Methods

Increasing Team and Individual Motivation with the Motivational Diagnostic

Being motivated can make a positive difference to both our engagement and our success in the workplace. The same is true of teams - a motivated team is much more likely to be engaged at work and achieve results. The motivation diagnostic tool helps people understand more about how motivated they feel, and the factors that are contributing towards that motivation or demotivation.

Suzanne Morrison
on Jan 09, 2023
Culture & Methods

Group Coaching - Extending Growth Opportunity beyond Individual Coaching

This article provides an introduction to group coaching and explains how it is different from individual coaching. It sheds light on the benefits of using group coaching, skills that coaches would need and the challenges they would face, with an example scenario using one of the group coaching techniques, and describes the context in which such a technique can be used.

Nafees Butt
on Dec 26, 2022
Architecture & Design

Going from Architect to Architecting: the Evolution of a Key Role

This article explores the cultural change of moving towards shared architecture, and the role that the architect has evolved into; from one with an air of authority and singular vision, to one in which system design issues are surfaced, which require team-wide input to resolve. Teams being coached and guided towards shared ownership might be struggling with the paradigm shift of ownership.

Leigh Griffin Chris Foley
on Dec 09, 2022
Culture & Methods

Employing Team-Based Agile Coaching to Establish SRE in an Organization

Establishing SRE in a software delivery organization typically requires a socio-technical transformation. Operations teams need to learn how to provide a scalable SRE infrastructure to enable development teams to run their services efficiently. This paper presents how agile coaching has been employed to run an SRE transformation in a 25-teams strong product delivery organization.

Philipp Gündisch Vladyslav Ukis
on Aug 23, 2022
Culture & Methods

Transitioning into the Staff+ Engineer Role - from Player to Coach

This article describes how staff+ engineers transition to supporters, enablers and force multipliers of others and what technical leadership looks like away from the management track. It explains the benefits organisations get by having leadership roles that are focused on technical enablement and support.

Nicky Wrightson
on Jul 12, 2022
Culture & Methods

What Kind of Coach Does Your Team Need?

Coaching is primarily client-driven; the client chooses the right coach for a particular need at a particular time. However, the team may first need to understand what coaching is before deciding what kind of coach they need, and why they need it. This article examines the role that a coach can play in establishing, maintaining and nurturing a safe space for teams to grow and achieve their goals.

Leigh Griffin Arjay Hinek
on Jun 24, 2022
Culture & Methods

How to Optimize for Fast Flow Using Alignment and Autonomy: the Journey of a Large Bureaucracy

This article describes how NAV (Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration), Norway's largest bureaucracy, has achieved alignment in over 100 autonomous teams. It shows the techniques it uses to align teams with respect to technology: two descriptive techniques - the technology radar and the weekly deep dive, and two normative techniques - the technical direction and internal platforms.

Truls Jørgensen Audun Fauchald Strand
on Jun 17, 2022 1
Culture & Methods

How to Run Your Product Department Like a Coach

Having found what I thought was my calling as an agile coach, I took the tough decision to move sideways into Product Management in the hopes of using what I’d learned to one day run my own department. I believed that coming from coaching would allow me to see things others could not and create something special. Time will tell if I have succeeded. This is the story of where I am so far.

Benji Portwin
on May 23, 2022
Culture & Methods

Building an Effective and Enjoyable Remote Onboarding Experience

The onboarding experience will make up the new hire’s first impression of your team and company, so it’s really the ideal place to set standards, and therefore requires thoughtful planning, patience, and compassion. In this article, I will dive into some of my own learnings as I onboarded new team members remotely as well as my own wonderful experience joining a new organisation in 2021!

Kate Wardin
on Feb 17, 2022
Culture & Methods

Agile Coaches, Agile Guides and Other Family Members

Companies look at agile coaches as agile experts to guide teams through agile working. But that is at odds with the deeper philosophy of true coaching. Perhaps they should be engaging agile guides instead. Calling out Agile Guide as a distinct role when moving into uncharted territory can be especially effective and allows true coaches to maximise their effectiveness too.

Allan Kelly
on Nov 25, 2021
Culture & Methods

How Tech Leaders Can Leverage Their Mentoring and Teaching with Coaching

You may have heard about coaching and wondered what it entails and how you might incorporate it into your role. Do you need to have “coach” as part of your job description in order to use coaching skills? This article defines coaching and shows how anybody can use it in their role. It also shows how coaching can be incorporated into management and technical leadership roles as examples.

Damon Poole
on Sep 01, 2021
Culture & Methods

Thoughtfully Training SRE Apprentices: Establishing Padawan and Jedi Matches

This article shares how Padawans and Jedis can inspire and teach us how to help people of a wide variety of backgrounds, ages, and experience levels to observe and understand failures in production. It covers practical lessons learned and shares how you can create and rollout a program for SRE Apprentices within your organization. It also shares feedback from the SRE Apprentices themselves.

Tammy Bryant Butow
on Aug 04, 2021