Speakers

Independent quality and testing consultant Isabel Evans has more than thirty years of IT experience in quality management and testing in the financial, communications, and software sectors. Her quality management work focuses on encouraging IT teams and customers to work together via flexible processes designed and tailored by the teams that use them. Isabel authored Achieving Software Quality Through Teamwork and chapters in Agile Testing: How to Succeed in an eXtreme Testing Environment; The Testing Practitioner; and Foundations of Software Testing. A popular speaker at software conferences worldwide, Isabel is a Chartered IT Professional and Fellow of the British Computer Society, and has been a member of software industry improvement working groups.

Leading, following or managing? Efficient and effective ways to help your group thrive

In this practical workshop, Isabel works with you to explore how we interact with individuals, teams and groups both as leaders and followers. Do we have a mentoring, coaching, managing or leadership role towards others? Are we following or learning from others? Do we influence our colleagues and organisations in public or behind the scenes? Are these interactions built into a formal hierarchy in our group? Have we informally adopted an interaction role? Or have we even been forced into a particular interaction role?

In order that we work together as efficiently and effectively as possible, we need to understand the range of approaches or styles for leadership and management, what styles we feel most comfortable with, and how we react to both being leaders and being led. We’ll discuss slaves and masters, parasites and epiphytes, and the richness of symbiotic partnership.

Regardless of the project model/software life cycle model you use, you’ll need to understand these interactions, and when to adopt a leadership, mentoring, coaching, following or learning attitude in order to help your group thrive.

Workshop activities include taught sections, interspersed with discussions, practical exercises, games and Q&A.

Three key benefits:

• Gain an understanding of leadership styles and how you react to them;
• Learn to differentiate between leadership, management, mentoring and coaching;
• Understand when to use these approaches most effectively and efficiently.