A well written book can help you learn about new topics and open you up to new perspectives. Agile books in particular are really great because applying scrum or any other framework in real life isn’t as straightforward as I thought it would be. Amazing books like Coaching Agile Teams can give you insights on how to deal with situations where, as a scrum master, I have to be the source of upholding scrum values and lead a team towards some sort of agile transformation.
Lately though, my biggest source of learning has come from books not related to agile at all. More frequently, I’m applying skills and insights from these non agile books. This is because the situations that I’ve been with, require a skill set that many agile books may not cover as thoroughly. With that being said, here’s 5 non agile books that have helped me level up my skills and become a better scrum master:
- Never split the difference: A book about hardcore negotiation helped me out big time in one of the major challenges I have faced: interacting with management. It’s easy to get buy-in from the team into being agile and focusing on what’s important. But management can sometimes be stuck in its command and control ways. My interactions with management usually involve them panicking over something, and through labeling their feelings and the situation I try to deescalate even if it’s a little bit. This can help me support my team when negotiating deadlines and having to protect them from external things that might affect their work. and also try to give a little bit more clarity to management on what’s truly important. Speaking of that…
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Chapter 3): This book is amazing on its own and I can’t recommend it enough. However, for this post I want to focus on one chapter in particular. Putting first things first. I’ve previously written about how my days can be filled with meetings on things that are apparently critical. I hate these days because they feel like a waste where you’re busy with calls but not really doing nothing at the same time. This chapter helped me organize my day to truly focus on what’s important, and even better, how to analyze these critical situations so that I can work on getting to the root cause and propose a solution instead of being caught up in the middle of a crisis.
- Drive: My goal with any team I work with is to create a high performance team that can both deliver value to the business and feel empowered along the way. That second part is where this book comes in. I used to be lost when it came to having one-on-one sessions with my teammates because I didn’t really know where to take these conversations. This book helped me focus towards finding out what truly motivates them while also providing ideas on how to create an environment where each individual can feel empowered.
- Pre-suasion: Capturing and holding people’s attention can be hard, especially after a team has been really focused on a problem that they want to solve. You can facilitate all the events in the world but if it’s not engaging enough, your team won’t be interested. I’ve used the ideas from this book to improve my communication, especially in those sessions where I really need input from a team like a retro. I highly recommend this book to improve your communication skills and also the added bonus of learning how to interact properly whenever the police interrogates you.
- Escaping the build trap: I’m cheating here I know. This isn’t an agile book but it does reference agile as it is a book focused on product management. After reading this, I think this role can help guide a product owner and a team better on how to better deliver value. The default mindset is that if you’re delivering more things and faster, your team is agile and everything should be great. This book challenges this idea and provides a different take. Applying the lessons here has been hard because of strict management, but having the experimental mindset this book proposes and influencing your team with it, should help everyone focus on fulfilling real goals of a business instead of just delivering features just because someone said so.
As I mentioned earlier, really good books can teach you new perspectives but they can go even further. They can also give you solutions for problems you have in various areas of your life. In this case, these books have helped me become a better scrum master and a better agilist by focusing on the skills necessary to truly make a change in teams and in company culture. I’d also be happy to hear your non-agile books that helped you out!
