Sofia Katsaouni
Biography
Sofia Katsaouni works as an Agile & Organisational Coach.
Sofia is a coach who cares about people. She always places people and their needs at the center of her attention; when needs are met, people can form effective teams that deliver high customer value.
Since Sofia is passionate about people systems rather than electrical systems, she transitioned from an electrical engineer to an Agile coach full time early in her career. Her electrical engineering background has helped her develop analytical, problem-solving, and empirical thinking skills.
Sofia recognizes that trusting relationships and psychological safety are the basis of human-centric and performance-oriented cultures. Throughout the past few years, she has worked closely with individuals, engineering teams, and leadership to enable startups and scale-ups to create such environments in their organizations.
When discovering the world of NVC Sofia started learning more and more about empathy and empathic listening, and practicing it in private life as well as in coaching sessions.
Soon she realised the tremendous impact that it had on her and the people around her and thus wanted to spread the word of empathy further. In this capacity, Sofia began delivering Empathy@Work sessions at various companies and conferences throughout Europe.
NewCrafts Paris 2024
Bring meaning back to your retrospectives (no matter your role)
Talk
Retros are at the core of agility, however the way we engage in them has become more of a habit and thus retros have lost part of their meaning and magic. It does not need to be like this though, and it’s up to all of us to change that and bring meaning back to our retrospectives.
In some teams, retros have become a constant race towards creation of action items even without having really understood the underlying problem. Devs join the retro because they feel that they have to, but in reality they would prefer to code. Coaches receive silence as a response to questions like “who will take ownership of this action item?”
Does any of this sound familiar?
During this talk we will explore how we can bring back meaning into our retrospectives by showing up with empathy. How we, as agile coaches can create the environment for the teams to engage and interact empathically with one another.
We will explore how we, as retro participants can connect to ourselves, and express honestly the struggles we face, while at the same time showing care to our fellow teammates.
It’s up to all of us, to bring the magic back to our retrospectives by choosing to show up with empathy, no matter our role.
