How to Work with (Almost) Anyone: Five Questions for Building the Best Possible Relationships

We all want to be happy at work right? You're more likely to be happy if you're getting on with people. This is a quick and simple guide to how you can develop, maintain, repair and even end business relationships well. The book is a quick and easy read with templates, sample questions and lots of further resources available. MBS revits his TERA framework for optimising psychological safety that we first read about in The Coaching Habit and puts it into context for this situation. I found that part most useful.

How to Work with (Almost) Anyone by Michael Bungay Stanier is a concise yet impactful read, packed with practical advice on improving your working relationships. It delves into the complexities of interpersonal dynamics in the professional world, offering actionable guidance on navigating different personalities, work styles, and even conflicting agendas within a team. The book introduces five essential questions for building and enhancing successful working relationships, making it a valuable resource for anyone seeking to foster better connections at work.

Simplicity! Michael writes simple and powerful books. This can only be achieved through experience, credible research research and wisdom. Clearly Michal has all 3.

This is a good book but I have it 3 stars because it's so much information in a small book.

Another wonderful and transformative book by MBS, relationships are the basis of pretty much everything fun in life and this book offers a kind of eloquent "Cheat code" to give relationships the best chance of success and make them recoverable if conflict ever arises. I'll be using this as a manager, leader and executive coach as well as working to embed into my own life. Every book I've read of Michaels immediately adds value and facilitates prompt and sustainable change and I'd highly recommend this to (almost) anyone ;)

This was great for appreciating what questions we can be asking and conversations we can have to build stronger and less judgemental working relationships. What makes this book so practical, is Michael has skilfully made it simple and digestible. There is lots of humour and interesting historical analogies which kept me engaged.

This book is pretty impressive - it manages to make complicated ideas simple to use, without missing any of the important details. What's great is that you can read this book in just one sitting and start putting the ideas into action right away. As someone who often forgets that, as MBS says, "the quality of your working relationships determines your success and your happiness", this book is a reminder that work relationships can be warm, deep and keep getting better. If you think your relationships could do with a boost—this book is worth a read.

This review is a recommendation for you to have a crack at the book, not about why I have yet to read it. I look forward to getting stuck into this book and working with it. I have recently started a new job, changed my employment situation in another job, and am setting up my own business simultaneously. Yes, I do have a life, too. How I can work with people in all three situations, the people I choose to work with, and those I have to work with, is the determining factor of success. Can you think of too many relationships you would have liked to have worked better in the past, and can you think of others that have worked well and are still lasting? Why have some worked positively and others haven't? Do you know? So, why this book to help with this and not others? I have read and worked with two of MBS's other books, 'The Coaching Habit' and 'How to Begin', both quite extensively. And I am still using them to improve my life and those around me. I have given the 'Coaching Habit' to many friends and colleagues. What I like about MBS' work is that he distils things we all struggle with into approachable problems, breaks them down and delivers tools we can all use to solve them. He offers his work with self-deprecating humour, but he respects the suffering caused by those things we struggle with. He is trying to help us find our way to get out of the struggle and strive for what is most important to us, with who we are. The other thing I like is MBS' ability to build a community of like-minded individuals struggling with similar things and using his processes to grow. To me, that has been equally powerful to the work itself. So, in short, try it. I am. Now.