Using a Book Club to Foster a Continuous Learning Culture

We have a strong learning culture at Fidelity. We constantly encourage our employees to stay ahead of the curve, continuously monitor the industry’s latest developments and use them to gain experience, identify growth opportunities, and drive innovation.

As part of my role as a Chapter Lead in Cloud Infrastructure and Experience, my focus is on combining the team’s personal development and performance cycle with coaching for engineering excellence, hands-on learning, and growing expertise in our space.

In Fundamentals for an Empowered Environment, Nick reflected on members of a team being able to speak openly, staying vulnerable, and looking for collaboration-focused opportunities. Book clubs are an excellent vehicle for all the above. They are an effective way to learn with your colleagues safely, build social connections and collaboration across teams, and enable group members to share their expertise.

What are the benefits of participating in a Book Club?

• Empowered environment: It builds rapport, comfort, and teamwork in the group of employees who attend. It is a great way to share knowledge, an all-embracing team-building activity.
• Trigger discussions: By reading the same book, people learn the same concepts, share the same language, and discuss the same ideas.
• Leadership skills: leading a group discussion or presenting a chapter summary is an excellent vehicle for encouraging people to step up and practice leadership roles.
• Nudge: Having regular meetings create little deadlines that will motivate you to read (and finish!) books.

What book do we choose?

We vote on the books we would like to read and discuss. We also read a few chapters to see if a book would be easy to consume for the group and have a decent set of challenges to tackle.

Sometimes a book is so fundamental that it chooses itself — “Infrastructure as Code” (Kief Morris, 2020) was one.

Remember the premise; the book should always relate to the work context and lead to beneficial discussions and learnings.

A selection of titles we have in our library

Ten tips for running your book club

1. Invite people from different groups in your organisation to participate. You want a diverse set of skills and expertise to help the group learn new things.
2. Use the first session to agree on the purpose, rules, and format for the club. Write this contract for those who join at a later stage; adjust if necessary.
3. Ask a volunteer to “drive” the next chapter and rotate every session. The driver’s role is to summarise the chapter, ask the group questions, and keep the debate on track throughout the session.
4. Have a wiki page where you keep track of the summaries and any additional resources that are part of the discussion.
5. Set up a chat channel where people can keep the conversation going through the week and share other related information you encounter, such as videos, podcasts, and blogs.
6. As most books reference others, create a Git repository with recommendations for those interested in delving deep into details.
7. Recognise those who participate actively in the sessions and apply the acquired knowledge to their teams.
8. Sometimes people will miss a week or two due to conflicts. However, encourage people to attend even if they have not read the chapter to learn something from the discussions.
9. Run each book for not more than four months to keep people motivated and focused.
10. Do not hesitate to re-run a book multiple times, especially if new people recently joined the organisation.

Any book recommendations?

The books you choose will depend on your context, preferences, and the results from the poll, among other factors. However, here is the list we ran in the past three years that could trigger some ideas:

• Continuous Delivery (Humble, Farley, 2010) — We ran this one twice!
• Site Reliability Engineering (Beyer, Jones, Petoff, Murphy, 2016)
• Site Reliability Engineering (Beyer, Jones, Rensin, Kawahara, Thorne, 2018)
• Infrastructure as Code, 2nd edition (Morris, 2021)

These books are a great point to start. We have noticed that ideas and concepts were quickly adopted and applied in the day-to-day job.

Here are some of the following books we have chosen for the rest of the year:

• Team Topologies (Skelton, Paris, 2019)
• Release it! 2nd edition (Nygard, 2018)

What books would you recommend?

Conclusion

Having a solid continuous learning culture is now paramount in today’s work environment. Book clubs are excellent to drive cultural change, foster engagement, initiate collaboration, and grow expertise in your teams.

Happy reading!