InfoQ Homepage Coaching and Mentoring Content on InfoQ
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Augmenting Organizational Agility Through Learnability Quotient (LQ) - an Architect’s Perspective
By creating a robust learning framework for the organization, and involving architects and other key technical leaders, Halodoc improved their organizational agility.
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Preventing Transformational Burnout through Collaboration, Transparency, Feedback, and Coaching
Burnout is not only an individual issue; it happens in teams and organizations. This article explores probable sources of mental breakdowns, lack of motivation and confidence, along with types of burnout, and describes the role agile coaches and organizational leaders can therefore play in addressing burnout.
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Leveraging Small Teams to Scale Agility - a Red Hat Case Study
This article gives you a sneak peek into the adoption of Agile methodology at Red Hat. It shows how they have split the existing large subsystem team into smaller durable Scrum teams. Small teams scale well. They can more easily clarify dependencies and increase focus, leading to an increase in the ability to complete work, can mature faster, and can learn from a “fail fast” mentality more easily.
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How to Spread Technical Practices Like TDD in an Organization
One of the success factors for Agile and DevOps is developers changing the way they work and adopting practices like Test-Driven Development (TDD). It’s not something that just happens by itself, and many of the “usual” ways of introducing change fail for TDD. This article outlines some of the things that actually do work and explains “Samman,” which is a coaching method used with developers.