As I’m constantly reading, this is the first of probably quite a few book recommendations. Ye have been warned 😉
Up first is not one, but a set of three books by the same authors:
You’ve probably heard of them, but if you haven’t read them yet, let me give you a nudge. More of a shove, really. Given, my knowledge of difficult conversations was limited to “I-messages, not You-messages” before reading these, but I found them highly insightful. The “Now that you point it out, it’s so obvious. Why haven’t I realized this before?” kind of insightful.
- Crucial Conversation is handy advice for scrum masters on how to talk about difficult stuff in a healthy way
- Crucial Confrontations shows you how to hold people accountable when they’ve violated agreements. For me, this book held the biggest insight: I made out a most surprising culprit for our quality problems – I’ll dive into that in a separate post
- Influencer helps you implement changes by looking at what factors make or break change endeavors
Update: There’s a good review on this one here.
From the top of my head these books taught me at least 5 lessons valuable enough to merit separate posts. Here’s what I want to cover (in random order):
- Make it safe and you can talk about virtually everything
- Talk about what really matters – Content, Pattern, Relationship
- My big “Root cause of our quality problems”-realization
- Want change? Start with yourself!
- Look at the environment in which you want change to stick. Does it punish or reward the desired behavior?
- Phrase how you’ll change your behavior, not some abstract goal
What about you? Have you read them? What did you take away?
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