We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Neville Poole. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Neville below.

Neville, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about the best advice you’ve ever given to a client?

I have a client, who is the CEO of an Investment company and prior to being named the CEO he was a longstanding senior level executive with the company for over 15 years. He had built lots of trust and admiration from his leadership team and the employees of the company. He prided himself on his “open door” policy for his executive team and wanted them to always feel comfortable coming to him for anything at anytime. The challenge for him was that his team came to him for EVERYTHING and he found himself always playing the hero in challenges that were not CEO level concerns. As his executive coach he was sharing with me that he felt overwhelmed with things that were taking his focus and time away from critical business issues. My advice to him was to set working agreements with his team, collectively and individually. Instead of coming to him for everything, set some parameters that outlined what issues should come to him and what issues did his team have the autonomy to resolve. Also the working agreements helped create safety for the executive team to make progress on work items that they “thought” needed to go to the CEO first. It released them to have autonomy and clarity in what was expected of them. Now the CEO can focus on high value items and trust that his team will bring him into areas where he is needed freeing up his time and energy.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I started my agile journey as a Project Manager turned Scrum Master in 2009 and never looked back. I knew this was the only way I wanted to work. I have been living and helping others live the principles of agility for over 15 years. I led the largest global agile consultancy practice at Accenture while partnering with many of Forbes Global 2000 companies in their desire to transform into an agile, responsive and innovative organization centered around the beauty of human connection.
My passion lies in guiding change that leads to transformation, from people to strategy to implementation through collaboration, communication, and trust.
It’s all about building strong lasting relationships to unlock possibilities.
I wanted to take the knowledge and experiences from big consulting, Accenture and IBM, to a more intentional and connected approach. I wanted to help businesses leverage agility in ways that not only impact their bottom line but impacted their people’s skill set, mindset and work enjoyment level.
We inspire people to work together in better ways to bring their best work to the world. We do this by igniting the spirit of agility in one heart, one team, one organization at a time.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

This past summer was financially challenging to our company. We had clients in our pipeline but they just weren’t ready to commit to the investment of our services. They wanted to hold off for budgeting decisions that were taking months to get approved. In the meantime our cashflow was getting low and we were 2 pay periods away from not being able to make payroll. We didn’t want to lay anyone off because we strongly beleived that 1 or 2 of our opportunities in the pipeline would sign within the next 30 days. So me and my CFO and Chief Community Officer set up a 15 minute huddle each day to assess the progress of the opportunities in the pipeline and explore alternative financial solutions. We aligned on 3 solutions: 1. Reduce my pay to the federal minimum for an officer of the company for a few months with a repayment period
2. Hold on 401-K matching until we signed another client
3. Cut salaries temporarily for all employees but continue full benefits

We started with implementing solution #1 and would assess if we needed to move through the other options weekly. Two weeks later we signed a contract with a client and didn’t need to move to solutions #2 and #3. My repayment solution wasn’t to turn my salary back on but to gradually move it back up as to preserve cash flow since clients pay net45.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

1. Studying and being committed to learning my knowledge area 2. Learning about each of my clients industries and market challenges to truly have real conversations about their business
3. Staying connected with my clients after the work is completed
4. Showing up at conferences and industry events to connect and not sell
5. Sharing real clients stories and challenges with others
6. Being my authentic self
7. Caring about the learning and opportunities for anyone especially when it doesn’t result in business for me

Contact Info:

• Website: https://instituteagility.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nevillepoole/