InfoQ Homepage Coaching and Mentoring Content on InfoQ
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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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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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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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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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The Spotify Model is No "Agile Nirvana"
At Spotify, management and the way the organization works support teams and agile practices by growing people. But Spotify isn’t an “Agile Nirvana”, it’s hard to reach high performance with teams that are constantly growing, changing, and splitting into new teams.
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How GlobalLogic Used a Bottom-up Approach to Become More Agile
Yuriy Koziy, delivery manager at GlobalLogic, argued at the Agile Eastern Europe 2016 conference that organizational change should start at the team level rather than in senior management. He formed a group of like-minded engineering managers and agile coaches who act as change agents, transforming the organization bottom-up from the inside.
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CoachRetreats: A Way to Practice Coaching Skills
A coachRetreat is a "safe to fail" learning platform where participants can try different approaches to coaching. In a coachRetreat participants explore the way that people interact in a given situation and can learn to view a situation from different perspectives to improve their coaching skills. An interview with Oana Juncu, Elad Sofer and Yves Hanoulle.
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Agile with Internal Coaches and Facilitators
An interview with Andreas Schliep and Peter Beck about why internal coaches and facilitators are important when organizations want to increase their agile maturity, advantages and disadvantages of working with external coaches, how internal coaches contribute to agile adoption, what internal coaches and facilitators can do to be ready to work effectively, and qualification of internal coaches.
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How a Scrum Master Helped a Team to Increase Their Agility
Here's an experience story from a tester who decided to move onward and become a Scrum master to help her team to become more agile, with learnings from their agile journey and pieces of advice for doing change in organizations.
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Managing the Expectations from Agile
InfoQ did an interview with Gil Zilberfeld about managing the expectations that organizations have of agile and how to prevent misconceptions, valuable ideas and practices from agile and what the future will bring for agile.