An increasing number of people within tech are talking about compassion, empathy and kindness as being necessary to build great DevOps teams and solutions - and yet not everyone seems to view these as things that can be learned or taught. As a discipline, coaching uses all three to great advantage - and the good news is that basic coaching skills can be learned by anyone. Not only that, but they can be applied to a wide variety of contexts.

In this talk, I will describe the GROW model for holding coaching-style conversations, with the aim of giving the audience some practical tools to take away with them. I will also show how I have applied this framework to help everyone in a DevOps environment work together more effectively - with compassion, empathy and kindness.

Nik Knight is not entirely sure how, as an English Lit and Philosophy graduate, she ended up in tech. However, having served time on first-line support, led multi-discipline Delivery Teams, and spent