5 Reasons Why You Should Start a Company Book Club

If you’ve been paying attention in meetings or listening to conversations around the office, you’ll often hear leaders talking about, or quoting from, their latest favorite read. These are often titles related to leadership, emotional intelligence or innovation and are frequently required reading for your company’s top leadership team. But why limit these reading requirements to a small group?

When you launch a one-book, one-company initiative that encourages all employees to read and engage with the same book, you’re providing an opportunity that benefits both your employees and your company.

Here are the top five reasons you should start a company book club:

 

  1. An all-company book club provides the same development opportunity to everyone across the organization.
  2. Reading a book together allows the entire organization to learn and process the same views and ideas.
  3. Reading a title not chosen on their own challenges employees to think differently.
  4. Book discussions keep the conversation going around the book’s ideas and concepts.
  5. Facilitating a book discussion provides leadership opportunities and presentation practice to a wide range of employees across the company.

 

Though it’s a daunting task to choose a book that will appeal to an entire organization, I’d recommend a company book club to any organization, regardless of how big or small.

Choose books based on your organizational goals or leadership skills you’d like to develop across your organization and continue the discussion around a single title for a significant amount of time, rather than quickly moving on to another book. Encourage the discussion of the book’s ideas and topics through conversations, meetings, presentations, or wherever you have the opportunity to connect the message or idea.

Hold book discussions across the organization. These can be set up in regional offices, on job sites, or via an enterprise social network like Yammer. Ideally, you will choose to hold them in as many locations and across as many channels as possible. The more you talk about the book, the more easily you can apply the ideas and concepts discussed in the book throughout the organization.

Have you implemented a company-wide book discussion? If so, what have you read? How was it received across the organization? I’d love to hear your experience!

Anna Cangialosi, Content Manager at Barton Malow Company

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