InfoQ Homepage Coaching Content on InfoQ
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Fostering High-performing Work Environments for Software Development
According to Eb Ikonne, leaders should provide a motivating challenge or mission so that the software engineering team understands what success looks like. They can provide an enabling structure for effective teamwork, address things that negatively impact team success, and reduce or remove friction. Coaching can help people discover how to work effectively together.
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How Growing Tech Engineers Enables Growing Yourself as a Leader
It’s challenging to grow into a new role when you are still holding on to what you have been good at and really love, and what you’ve been doing in your previous role. By attaching to everything you used to do, you are also depriving the people around you of an opportunity to grow and learn to master those skills and take on those responsibilities too.
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How to Improve Testing by Using a Gentle Nudge
Nudging gives us opportunities to positively influence our behavior. Its principles can be applied in testing to increase attention or to enhance the product's quality. Nudging makes use of our biases. This term may cause concern for testers as it poses a risk to delivering useful software. However, scientists have also recognized its potential to positively influence our behavior.
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Creating Environments High in Psychological Safety with a Combined Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approach
Leadership is critical for making psychological safety happen, but they need to lead by example and show that it’s safe for people to take interpersonal risks. Complementing leadership with team workshops in communication skills can enable people to speak up and feel safe to fail.
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Transitioning to Modern Testing: How Testers Can Stop Being the Training Wheels for Teams
Traditional testing, where testers act as safety nets and testing is separated from implementation, can have a detrimental impact on quality. Testers can instead act as coaches, collaborate in teams, and foster change, to stop becoming the training wheels for teams. Culture is key, particularly in that the environment provides psychological safety.
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Becoming a Better Tech Leader with Coaching
Coaching, both personal and professional, can help to understand your potential and discover ways to exercise that potential in your daily work. For Maryam Umar, coaching has proved to be highly useful in her tech work of leading testers and engineers.
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Draft Published of the Code of Ethical Conduct for Agile Coaching
The Agile Coaching Ethics Initiative has published a draft code of ethics that aims to raise the standards around agile coaching. It runs under the auspices of the Agile Alliance to independently represent the wider agile community.
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Organisational-Level Agile Anti-Patterns - Why They Exist and What to Do about Them
Agile anti-patterns can affect organisations, morale, and quality if left untreated. The critical first step is acknowledging the existence of the pain point. Effective root cause analysis helps to understand what causes the anti-patterns to arise in organisations, where actions can be taken to address those causes.
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Establishing Change Agents within Organisations Using Shu-Ha-Ri
Shu-Ha-Ri provides us with a learning path toward being agile by mastering the basics and understanding the fundamentals to gain incremental success. By having their own change agents, organisations can adapt quickly to changing market needs and get a competitive edge.
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How Leaders Can Foster High-Performing Teams
A leader can act as a coach, provide opportunities for ownership, and find out what motivates people to foster high performing teams. It also helps teams if leaders have powerful and meaningful conversations with team members and give vocal feedback face to face to team members.
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Avoiding Loneliness as a Servant Leader
Team success is often celebrated without recognizing or acknowledging the role the servant leader has played. A lot of what they do can go undocumented or is not always visible to others. To avoid loneliness, servant leaders can create support networks to share what they do, celebrate successes with peers, blog about how they do it, and give demos to management about their accomplishments.
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Lessons on the Competencies of Coaching from Spotify and ICAgile
Erin McManus and Fiona Siseman of Spotify presented a talk at AgileAus in which they explained how Spotify's Agile coaches follow six principles and can provide "full-stack coaching" at all levels. Shane Hastie, ICAgile's director of learning, has also recently written about the competencies required of Agile coaches as they begin their journey to mastery.
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Systemic Coaching as a Leadership Approach
Leadership and culture drive every transformation. An organization will not accept structural or process changes without being open and ready for such changes, said Matthias Gebhardt at Agile Leadership Day 2019; the way to go with a transformation is to transform your leaders first.
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Effectiveness or Efficiency: Agile Shouldn't Feel Like a Fight
Have you ever felt like the “agile” you’re advocating for is completely different from the “agile” your organisation or managers wants? If so, you need to stop and reassess, argued Tony O'Halloran in his talk at Agile Business Day 2019. Having a mismatch in these fundamental goals causes stress and anxiety in change agents and can put you in an isolating and lonely place professionally.
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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.