InfoQ Homepage Coaching and Mentoring Content on InfoQ
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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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Experience Building a QA Team in a Growing Organization
Shifting the test team to the left brought the whole team closer together, enabled faster learning, and improved collaboration, claimed Neven Matas, QA team lead at Infinum. He spoke at TestCon Moscow 2019 where he shared the lessons learned from building a QA team in a growing organization.
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Experiences from Getting Started as a Lead
Having a transition period to lead teams together with a mentor helped Dan Persa to have a smooth switch from senior software engineer to engineering lead. At Codemotion Amsterdam 2019 he shared some of his experiences and learnings, in order to inspire other developers to take the leadership path.
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Progressing with a Gender-Blind Attitude
Individual skills should determine success; we should not distinguish people by gender, said Oksana Afonina at Women in Tech Dublin. In her talk, she explained how she focuses on her own skills and performance, those being the main traits to benefit from career-wise. Change starts with you, she said; there are always opportunities to empower others around you and scale your impact.
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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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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.
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Designing Organisations with Purposeful Agile
In a purpose-centric agile implementation, stakeholders make a clear shared purpose come to reality through visible outcomes. It starts with awareness of the organisation’s installed culture, finding installed habits and beliefs that pull back and block change, and deciding what you want to do about that. The second step is to create the necessary time and space for true change to happen.
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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.