Hardcore Soft Skills Podcast

 Today you will be listening to another podcast Arguing Agile with Brian Orlando and Om Patel.  We talked aboiut the missing patrt when it comes to implementation agile, the how to deal with the people part. That is, how improtrant is it for us to practice our soft skills to become better team members, managers, collaborators. 

Communications are so tricky. When I ask people and teams I work with what skill do you want to improve on I often hear, "I want to be a better speaker or a writer." The thing is, when we try to become that person we think we should use eloquent long speeches with convoluted words. But what if the secret ingredient involved just being YOU and keeping it simple. 

This is what I have learned from Dr Mimi Goss, who was one of my proffessors at Harvard University where she teaches. Dr. Mimi Goss is the author of What Is Your One Sentence?: How to Be Heard in the Age of Short Attention Spans (Prentice Hall-Penguin, 2012). She is a communications consultant,former reporter, and media trainer whose clients and students have include heads of state, diplomats, politicians, military officials, corporate executives.  Today you will learn the actions you can take now to become a better communicator. 

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Connect with me via LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/yadiraycaro/ or email me at [email protected]  

This podcast is centered around helping you refine those skills that help you do your work in tech, and a lot of those skills center around using agile ways of working.

Today, I speak with an expert in one of those frameworks . His name is Richard Knaster and he has more than 30 years of experience in software and systems development, in roles ranging from developer to executive. Richard is the co-author of the SAFe Distilled book series.

While we did talk about this framework, the focus and lesson for us today is about becoming a new kind of leader or manager, where you focus on the big picture, on value and on connecting the dots.

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Connect with me via LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/yadiraycaro/   or email me at [email protected] 

 If you are a frequent listener you knoe I have had a few epsiodes about coaching on this show, especially agile coaching. I think as managers especially in the IT world, knowing that is takes a different skill set to be a good coach is essential as wel as recognize when you need a coach to help you and your team achieve great levels of performance. My guest today is an authority in the world of agile coaching, she literally wrote the book on it and was able to make that transition from a project management mindset to a coach mindset. 

Lyssa Adkins is an internationally-recognized thought leader in the Agile community. She is the author of Coaching Agile Teams which has been a top ranking business bok for over a dozen years.  Her current focus is improving the performance of top leadership teams through insightful facilitation and organization systems coaching. Today you will learn more about what it takes to be a good coach. 

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Connect with me via LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/yadiraycaro/   or email me at [email protected] 

Making teams, especially tech teams, work together effectively may not be something that just happens naturally. Sometimes it requires some coaching. In the world of adopting agile ways of working, agile coaches are a key part of an organization to help those teams to eventually manage themselves and succeed. I have been an agile coach and let me tell you, every team has its own unique challenges and successes. My guest today is a long time agile coach and many of us in this field seek for his advice to help us improve. 

Bob Galen is an Agile Methodologist, Practitioner & Coach. In this role he helps guide companies and teams in their pragmatic adoption and organizational shift towards Scrum and other Agile methods and practices. 

He’s published a few agile related books including  Extraordinarily Badass Agile Coaching: The Journey from Beginner to Mastery and Beyond. We speak today about lessons to help your team and how can you also be a badass agile coach. 

If you want to receive more information, subscribe to my newsletter via https://www.hardcoresoftskillspodcast.com/  

Connect with me via LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/yadiraycaro/   or email me at [email protected] 

You and I have been on this situation. We are looking for a role, get an interview and then it's time to talk about salary expectations. Where do we even start here? How much can we ask for? What if they say no to my ask? Am I really asking for too much or too little? 

My guest today will help us navigate through these scenarios so you can develop the skill of negotiation. Brandon Bramley has over 10 years of experience in negotiating salaries and currently runs The Salary Negotiator, which provides professional job offer negotiation coaching and courses. Take about 30 minute to listen to this episode and you will walk away with the confidence to ask for what you deserve. Lets listen.   

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Connect with me via LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/yadiraycaro/  or email me at [email protected] 

Tell me about your workplace. Are you in a place where there is rarely ANY conflicts, things are good on the surface that is. Or are you in a place where there are multiple fights? Or perhaps, you are in a place where conflict, that is, different ideas are welcomed. My guest today agrees that conflict can be a great tool for teams.  Karin Hurt is the author, alongside David Dye, of Powerful Phrases for Dealing with Workplace Conflict. 

She is the  Founder of Let's Grow Leaders, a global, human-centered leadership development company known for practical tools and training that sticks. After this episode you would have learned tactics to deal with various situations of workplace conflicts that you can share with your teams so conflicts is no equal to fighting. 

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Connect with me via LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/yadiraycaro/   or email me at [email protected] 

Picture this, you are giving a presentation to a new customer about this app or this dashboard your team created, explained all the cool technical features at length. You feel good, you think you killed it since you prepared for so long, and at the end, the customer was not interested. 

What went wrong? They just don’t get it, right? Perhaps you did not bothered to put yourself in the feet of the customer. You did not show enough empathy. Something similar happened to my guest jermy adamson. Jeremy is the author of the book Geek with Empathy. 

Jeremy is a leader in AI and analytics strategy, and has a broad range of experience in aviation, energy, financial services, retail, and public administration

You will learn today how to build empathy with those around you to bring you better results at work. He say at the root of every tech problem there is an empathy problem. 

If you want to receive more information, subscribe to my newsletter via https://www.hardcoresoftskillspodcast.com/ 

Connect with me via LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/yadiraycaro/  or email me at [email protected] 

Lets talk about AI, Artificial Intelligence. You are probably using itn right now to make your life easier, create transcripts, products, images… but are you really using it to make yourself a better person? Today you will learn how in this conversation with Camilo Rojas, Ph. D.

Camilo is the CEO and Founder of ProjectUs.ai, a venture capitalist backed MIT Media Lab spinoff that created an AI tool that seeks to help people become the best version of themselves. 

Camilo did his postdoctoral research at the MIT Media Lab, focusing on the ethical use of AI to help people develop complex skills that we talk about on the podcast such as e.g., empathy, self-awareness, effective communication, etc.), and to help teams and organizations become more creative, cohesive and productive. 

Today, you will learn how Project Us AI was developed and how it works, misconceptions about AI and possibilities for the future.

Iy yoiu want to learn more, click on this form. 

How do I  help my team become agile?

Hello and welcome to episode 100 of the HSS.  If this hapesn to be the first episode you lsten to, in each episode I discuss a difefernt essential skill with the help of an expert. I have spoken to globally recognized authors, Harvard professors, military leaders, psychologists, pscyhitiatrics, people who have done scientific reserahc on how to become better at the so called "soft" skills to help you thrive in your career.

I want to thank you for being with me in this learning journey. I started this alongside my graduate studies in Organizational Psychology at Harvard, and through my own career journey which at this time involves working with multiole technical teams to help them become high perfoming, and create an agile organization. 

This is why today I chose to highlight this topic of agility because it embodies what soft skills are about, how to integrate human dynamics to deliver a solution. 

In this episode I’ll play some excerpts from some of the folks who co-created the famous Agile Manifesto, the base document for all things agile. Let's listen to Jeff Sutherland talking about what makes a great team, Jon Kern, on what we really need or don’t need, to get things done faster, and Arie van Benekum on the essentials of collaboration.