How to Have a Great Team Book Club - My Approach

Getting a book club going within the team is tough. Everyone’s already going to the max on delivering awesome work, having them read and discuss about a book just adds to imbalancing the “work-life balance”, especially if the book is technical!

Through rapid iterations - I created a book club that:

• self organized
• inclusive of other teams
• read and discussed the book at a regular interval
• did not add stress to team members’ work-life balance

How did I do this? (and reasons why I did them):

• Bought books for all book club members - from my own pocket!
  • Why: this removed the “I don’t have access to the book” and increased the range of books. This includes buying for other team members.
• Made book club optional to members - every book club is optional to attend.
  • Why: Having motivated book club attendees makes for a better discussion than forcing uninterested people to attend.
• Let book club members organize the book and interval to meet.
  • Why: the goal I have for a book club is for the team to have another way to spend time together - to learn together instead of “delivering”.
• Do a “lean coffee” style meeting for book club - where each member would share one learnings from the reading and one question they had.
  • Why: Get to the parts which everyone learned the most or have questions about instead of talking through the main points linearly.
• Reminded the book club organizer to tell people book club meeting is coming up and how much of the book they would discuss.
  • Why: people do get busy and a gentle nudge helps.
• Open book club to any adjacent teams we work with.
  • Why: increasing range of perspectives helps, especially with those that you work with.

Easy, right?

Do you have a book club going? What are some of your experiences with it? What would you like to improve about it? Contact me