Culture has a huge part to play in moving a team to high performance and the leader of the team plays a critical role in creating that culture. Sam uses the voices of the diverse scaled agile team he led for 2 years from their entries in his leaving card, and shared how the key themes of their feedback, energy, caring and fun came together to create a culture where team members feel valued, trusted and able to do their best every day regardless of their cultural background or which team or company they work for.

What's winemaking got to do with an Agile mindset I hear you ask. Do keep reading!

I've been fortunate enough to work with and learn from Agile teams and organisations since 2012. And since 2017, I'm proud to say that I've also jumped into the winemaking industry.

In this talk, I'd love to share my learnings from working in these two diverse fields and draw some parallels between my two passions - Agile and winemaking.

Are you born as an Agile leader or can you develop or pivot your leadership style to be one? This talk will uncover ten Agile leadership attributes in a fun and engaging way, gives participants an opportunity to reflect on their own capabilities and then self focus areas for further development of their leadership capability

There's a huge problem in our industry, I call it "inertia-driven leadership".

We promote our "rock star" engineers, with their excellent technical skills, into leadership positions; then we sit back and watch as they fail.

We wonder why they fail at leadership but the answer is simple, we don't support them to improve their people skills!

In fact, we often don't even help them realise that the role of a "senior developer" is drastically different to that of a "leader"

What we can we do to stop inertia in our new leaders?

How can we support them to learn the soft skills they need?

How can we position with them that those soft skills are important to their career?

That is what we will discuss in this session.

"Soft skills" is a terrible name, isn't it? There are all sorts of challenges in leadership that one would typically class as "soft skills" but are most definitely hard. Letting someone go, for example.

I prefer "Emotional Intelligence" or "EQ", to counter-balance your IQ.

For the past 2 years I've been teaching EQ to Software Developers and I will layout the model I use train it ... and the concepts I use to convince the more technically minded individuals that it's important.

Oh, and we will also test your own individual EQ.