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Designing Powerful Questions To Help You Coach, Create, Connect and Lead

Designing Powerful Questions With Daniel Stillman

Powerful conversations are the environment that drives change. Learn from Daniel Stillman how designing powerful questions helps you to coach, create, connect, and lead (from the 35th Hands-on Agile meetup of October 5, 2021).

Abstract: Core Protocols for Psychological Safety

Peter Senge: You cannot force commitment, what you can do… You nudge a little here, inspire a little there, and provide a role model. Your primary influence is the environment you create

Our lives are lived one conversation at a time. Our teams and organizations are defined by the conversations that they can and can’t have. Powerful Conversations are the environment that drives change. Modern leadership is not leading through statements, fiats, or dictates – it’s leading through questions, through inviting the conversations we want to cultivate and creating the conditions for transformation.

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The 7 Categories Of Engineering Management

Ian Nowland, the SVP of Core Engineering at DataDog, joins the Dev Interrupted podcast to discuss how he takes his ego out of being a manager and the seven categories he uses when coaching his teams.

Coaching Managers at Datadog


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Queen of Hearts: Agile Coaching Blueprint

One of the challenges I faced in my Agile coaching journey was to identify and determine the right coaching strategy based on the team dynamics at play. As we all are aware, each individual in our teams has got a unique set of emotions, priorities and they exhibit unique behavior patterns and personalities. As an Agile coach, it is important for me to identify these patterns and come up with a coaching strategy for implementation and execution.

Based on the numerous coaching sessions and experiences, I have come up with an interesting tool leveraging the gamification way. This involves using a standard deck of playing cards.

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One-on-One Meetings in Agile

All managers struggle with the fine balance between doing work that achieves short term goals vs investing time in activities with long term benefits. Output that's immediately visible may give a feeling of satisfaction in the moment, but it soon fades away and demands more energy to keep up with the pace of growth and scale of the company. Focussing too much on progress in the short term eventually slows down every manager in the long run.

Energy spent in growing business may help you achieve some outcomes, but the same energy invested in growing people can produce remarkable results.

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Agile Scoping — How to Keep the Focus

Some of the people I admire in the agile community avoid working with organizations that are not fully committed to the agile changes they are asking for.

This can create drama and a possible loss of connection between the ‘thought leaders’ and the rest of us. But what if some agile approaches would help us understand how best to support our clients if we do not have the full support of the organization?

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Great Leadership Is All About (Their Own) Time Management

How are you spending your time as a leader? (And how's that working out for you?)

I keep hearing leaders say they're struggling to manage their organizations through change. They've had trouble getting their organization to adopt Agile. They're finding it challenging to find the right talent. They're struggling to establish the right level of transparency.

These are symptoms of the people in the organization not managing their time effectively.