Rarely a week goes by in the life of a developer where he or she isn’t asked to learn something new. It’s interesting to watch different teams approach such challenges; one characteristic that provides a clear advantage is a culture of learning. Teams that work in this sort of culture are more open to acquiring and sharing knowledge, ultimately allowing employees to take risks and integrate new skills.
Some ways to promote a culture of learning are obvious – continuing education, conferences, and meetups all come to mind. However, these opportunities aren’t always available due to time, location, or budget restraints. A relatively quick way to promote learning within teams is through a book club. There’s a simple three-step process for implementing a book club at work: pick a book, read that book, and then discuss. Here are a few key tips and tricks to getting your book club started.
Pick a Book
Picking a book is the most critical step because you need to find material that appeals to your team. Including team members in the decision is a helpful way to ensure participation.
- Identify a domain learning subject. The topic may be clear, depending on the project queue and needs, or you could poll team members to see where they want to expand their knowledge.
- Ask team members to select three relevant books about the identified topic and then purchase one copy of each selected book. By purchasing three books on a topic of interest, your team can select the one that is most relevant technically and best matches their needs. Buying books is cheap – what is expensive is reading them!
- Circulate the three selections among the team members. Ask each member to just read one chapter to get a sense of the content. Then, hold a vote to select the book.
- Purchase copies of the book. One helpful tip is to allow busy engineers to read books in their own preferred media, which often means on their laptop computers. The websites of technical publishers often bundle a hard copy and a watermarked PDF that can be delivered almost immediately.
Read the Book
Allocate 45 minutes each week for team members to read quietly whenever and wherever they want – at their desk, at a coffee shop, etc. Set a goal of reading one or two chapters per week, depending on the intensity of the topic.
Discuss the Book
Unlike your neighborhood book club, there’s no need to hold off on discussing the reading until the end of the book. Plan a 45-minute meeting each week to discuss that week’s reading. Make this meeting more social than your typical office meeting – maybe consider an alternate location, more comfortable seating, or bringing a tasty treat.
Book club discussion time with your development team will help bring everyone naturally to a common vocabulary around a new technical topic, which can dramatically reduce time spent in meetings arguing philosophical points. The book club idea is also applicable within other teams, or even across teams, at your company. There is certainly no shortage of useful topics to explore! Consider an executive team embarking on collaborative reading about business strategies, or a company-wide read about market trends or communication styles. As the book clubs become an integral part of the week at the office, you’ll notice obvious signs of your culture of learning, such as team members “checking out” books from your expanding office library and existing employees dropping helpful books on the desks of new hires.
Writing and editing services provided by long-time collaborator, Kelly Garrett.
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