InfoQ Homepage Coaching and Mentoring Content on InfoQ
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The Value and Purpose of a Test Coach
Introducing business-oriented automated testing can involve a huge cultural change. For this we really need a Test Coach role, just like we have agile coaches and scrum masters. In this article we hear from someone living this new role, using Domain Oriented Testing on a daily basis to ensure acceptance tests have full story coverage, and unit tests verify business behavior, not implementation.
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Engaging and Being Engaged as a Professional Coach – Candid Advice for Coaches & Clients
As a coach, what do you need to know to have more success, getting your foot in the door of a client company? What obstacles will you have to overcome? As a company, what do you need to know about a coaching profession, not to brush off an experienced and qualified coach, while opening flood gates for charlatans, cheer-leaders, and 'best-practices" experts - and by doing so, hurting yourself
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Leading through Experimentation in a Distributed Agile Organization
Change is our work as agile coaches and leaders. When your teams and organizations are distributed, experimentation becomes the primary tool to aid our change navigation. As online collaboration technologies improve and we begin to understand how flexibility and choice become critical in distributed work, modeling and teaching experimentation are important for agile coaches and all leaders.
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Q&A on the Book Agile Leadership Toolkit
Agile leadership is the art and craft of creating the right environment for self-managing teams. The book Agile Leadership Toolkit by Peter Koning is a practical book that supports existing agile managers and leaders in growing their agile teams and creating the right environment for them.
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Liberating Structures - an Antidote to Zombie Scrum
Although many organizations use Scrum, the majority struggle to grasp both the purpose of Scrum as well as its benefits. They do Zombie Scrum; it looks like Scrum from a distance, but you see that things are amiss when moving closer. This article describes what Zombie Scrum is about and gives you tangible examples of how to recognize, treat and prevent Zombie Scrum by using Liberating Structures.
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Agile Coaching Around Conflict Management
Conflicts are not bad, it is the way we handle them that makes a difference. In a healthy team environment conflict can be a catalyst for creativity and innovation . A coach is not responsible for resolving conflict, the help the team keep conflict healthy and provide guidance and tools which enable positive outcomes
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Q&A on the Book Level up Agile with Toyota Kata
In the book Level Up Agile With Toyota Kata, Jesper Boeg explores how to apply Toyota Kata to drive improvement in organizations that are using or striving to use agile ways of working. He shares his experience from combining agile with Toyota Kata to enable organizations to keep improving towards their goals.
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Q&A on the Book Helping People Change
The book Helping People Change by Richard Boyatzis, Melvin Smith, and Ellen Van Oosten describes how you can coach people with compassion for sustained learning and change. It explains how connecting to people's vision and dreams and using the energy that that brings can help people grow in a meaningful way.
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Q&A on the Book Empathy at Work
The book Empathy at Work by Sharon Steed explores the role empathy plays in team communication and interaction, and provides tools to help people become better empaths in difficult situations. It describes the steps we can take in order to show empathy daily and contribute to a healthy, collaborative, positive work culture.
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Power to the People: Unleashing Teams through Liberating Structures
Liberating Structures are a great way for teams to find their voice. They make this happen by asking us to think creatively about the kinds of invitations we are making, and by subverting the normal power dynamics in a meeting. In this article, Greg Myer shares how he is using Liberating Structures at Capital One.
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Q&A on the Book Elastic Leadership
The book Elastic Leadership by Roy Osherove shows how teams have a need for different types of leadership depending on the state that they are in and what can be done to grow teams towards true self-organization. It provides values, techniques, and practices that leaders can use in their daily work.
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A Simple Mindset Shift Turns Ineffective Teams into Productive Organizations
To help teams become more effective: #1 Develop and Use a Coaching Mindset #2 Respect Your Team As Experts #3 Allow People Doing The Work To Make The Decisions. To make rapid progress on developing a coaching mindset, learn about the Path to Coaching Program which has five modules: professional coaching, systems coaching, scaling, sustainability, and coaching leaders.