New Ways of Working: Books & Podcasts 📚 📻
Books on #newwaysofworking have been coming thick and fast in recent years, which is great and also a little overwhelming! So in this newsletter, I’ve listed the books that I feel are particularly helpful when kicking off or continuing your new ways of working journey.
And if you prefer listening to podcasts to reading then beneath the list of books I’ve shared two bountiful podcast series that are really leading the way in this space (including my favourite episodes).
Here goes, in no particular order 😊
Books 📚
📗 The Emotionally Intelligent Office, by School of Life
Modern businesses place huge emphasis on technical training, yet a lot of what determines the success or failure of an organisation has nothing to do with the traditional 'hard' skills taught at business school, but rather the sophisticated 'soft' skills that are key to emotional maturity. The Emotionally Intelligent Office introduces us to twenty core emotional skills that can help businesses and individuals to flourish.
📘 Moose Heads on the Table: Stories about self-managing organisations from Sweden, by Karin Tenelius & Lisa Gill
What does leadership look like in a company with no bosses? How do you develop a culture that allows self-managing organisations to thrive? What mindset and relational shifts are required? Rather than looking at complicated frameworks and models, this book reveals a perspective of organisational transformation based on the simple but powerful premise of facilitating different kinds of dialogues.
📙 The Leader Lab, by Tania Luna & LeeAnn Renninger, PhD
Combining research, tools, and a playful, fluff-free style, The Leader Lab aims to teach you how to quickly finetune your coaching, productivity, feedback, one-on-one, strategic thinking, meeting facilitation, people development, and leading change skills. The Leader Lab is a high-speed leadership intensive, equipping managers with the Swiss Army Knife of skills that help you handle the toughest situations that come your way.
📕 Wilding Organisations: A ramble about human growth at work, by Jon Barnes (a free PDF book)
Mono-culture, a lack of diversity, the exploitation of precious resources... these are just some of the ways in which we’re causing huge damage to not only the natural world, but to human nature in the workplace. The human instinct to interfere is the root cause of both these catastrophes. Yet, it also points us towards the simplest of possible solutions: to get out the way.
📗 Going Horizontal: Creating a Non-Hierarchical Organization, One Practice at a Time, by Samantha Slade
Now more than ever, successful organizations must respond quickly and nimbly to change – they need every employee’s best thinking. Self-management expert Samantha Slade presents seven practical, proven and incremental approaches to help your organization create a more dynamic structure and develop a horizontal organization. The result will be enhanced creativity, great growth, increased employee retention, productivity, and resilience.
📘 Lead Together, by Brent Lowe, Susan Basterfield & Travis Marsh
Despite the advent of disruptive technologies that have upended the business landscape, the structure of most companies remains largely unchanged, with traditional top-down leadership still the norm. Couldn’t there be a better way to organize work that reflects our modern world - one with nimble, invested leaders rather than disengaged employees? Lead Together teaches you key principles and methods to transform top-down leadership into dynamic human systems of shared responsibility and accountability.
📙 Brave New Work, by Aaron Dignan
Aaron Dignan helps teams around the world completely reinvent their operating systems—the fundamental principles and practices that shape their culture—with extraordinary success. He helps them see that organizations aren't machines to be predicted and controlled. They're complex human systems full of potential waiting to be released. In Brave New Work, you'll learn exactly how to reinvent the way you work, not through top-down mandates, but through a groundswell of autonomy, trust, and transparency.
📕 Corporate Rebels: make work more fun, by Joost Minnaar & Pim de Morree
8 radical lessons from 100 of the world's most inspiring companies. Today's workplaces are broken. Badly broken. With 85% of employees disengaged, 23% feeling burned out and 37% believing that their job makes no useful contribution to society, work as we know it today is simply not working. This book is for people who know workplaces could, and should, be better. Whether you're in the leadership team, a rebel who has been suppressed by corporate dogma or a manager who is trapped in the broken system.
📗 Reinventing Organisations (illustrated version), by Frederic Laloux
The uplifting message of Reinventing Organizations has resonated with readers all over the world, and they have turned it, one conversation at a time, into a word-of-mouth phenomenon. The book has helped shift the conversation from what’s broken with management today to what’s possible. It is inspiring thousands of organizations—corporations and nonprofits, schools and hospitals—to adopt radically more powerful, soulful, and purposeful practices.Â
Podcasts 📻
I’m only sharing my two favourites here as between them they have produced over 200 incredible episodes. But don’t be overwhelmed, as I’ve also listed a few episodes for each podcast that are all awesome places to start listening:
The Leadermorphosis podcast, hosted by Lisa Gill
I recommend starting with: Margaret Heffernan (ep. 66); Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless (ep. 30); Amy Edmondson (ep. 45); Gary Hamel (ep. 23) Chuck Blakeman (ep. 22); Perry Timms (ep. 1); Miki Kashtan (ep. 37); Meg Lightheart (ep. 38)
The Brave New Work podcast, hosted by Rodney Evans & Aaron Dignan
I recommend starting with: Leading Through Transformation w/ David Marquet (ep. 8); The Future of Feedback w/ Kim Scott (ep. 13); Ready For Anything: Meetings (ep. 28); Remote Facilitation (ep. 38); Participatory Governance (ep. 43); Embracing discomfort w/ Lisa Gill (ep. 73); Brave New Work 101 (ep. 85).
Let me know your thoughts on this list… which are your favourites? And what would you add to the list?
Happy reading and listening!