My blog is called agile for everyone, but is agile really for everyone? Some workplace cultures aren’t (yet) set up for this way of working. I think more could adapt to agile than you might think, but there are a few pre-requisites. Over the next few weeks, we’ll explore how to spot if there’s more…

The best managers ask more questions. The Leader Lab cites a study which found that great managers ask five times more questions than average ones: 10 questions in a 15 minute conversation. You might know the benefit of questions from your own experience. Managers who default to asking questions rather than telling you what to…

So, you’ve gotten started with coaching and perhaps are starting to leave some of the basic models behind. What’s next? How can you get better at coaching? As with growing any skill, practice and reflection are key. Find opportunities to put what you’ve been learning into practice, and take a few minutes afterwards to think…

You are not an expert in everything. Hopefully you already know this! But the most difficult hurdle in coaching is to avoid jumping in with your own expertise. As I wrote last week, creating space for others to think without creating answers for them results in much better quality outcomes. But this is difficult to…

At the core of agile is appropriately distributed power. Like facilitation, coaching helps distribute power by equipping people to find their own answers. Coaching creates space for good thinking, without a manager jumping in with the answers all the time. This is good for the coachee, because stretching your thinking is how you develop skills.…

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman has changed how I think about agile. That’s despite the book being in no sense about agile. It doesn’t even mention it beyond a passing discussion of Kanban. But this book has been fundamental in shifting how I think about time, with some serious lessons for agile working. Many…

Cal Newport’s A World Without Email has a provocative theme: that we should structure our work so as to minimise email and other constant electronic communication that’s become the norm for many of us. It’s another sneaky agile book. Whilst it doesn’t describe itself as being about agile, many of the ideas resonate with agile…

The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Jim Huling and Sean Covey is another book like last week’s that seems to me to be sneakily about agile. Despite never mentioning the word ‘agile’, a lot of its key concepts resonate strongly with agile practices and mindsets. It gives a process for implementing strategy without…

Leadership is Language by L. David Marquet is my favourite book about agile that doesn’t describe itself as being about agile. At it’s heart, it argues that leadership is about people, and how we lead people is ultimately about how we talk to them. That’s a very agile idea: prioritising individuals and interactions over processes…

David Allen is a hugely influential writer and thinker on productivity. His book Getting Things Done is a classic for a reason, and introduces a system for personal productivity that I’ve followed for well over a decade. So you can imagine my excitement when he released Team: Getting Things Done with Others a couple of…