20 books like The Human Side of Agile

We’ve heard that trust is a foundational part of high-performing teams for decades, but no one does as good a job connecting the dots between a lack of trust and low performance as Lencioni does in this book.

I continually use his five dysfunctions model in reverse to spot toxic company cultures and then walk leaders backward to see how the root cause is a lack of trust. Once leaders see this with their own eyes, they can’t shake it, and they immediately start to see how detrimental it is when they make their organizations unstable with constant reorganizations and layoffs. An understanding of what’s in this book was foundational for me to help leaders who don’t want to be toxic.

Simon Sinek exposes how the twisted incentives of short-term profits are causing leaders to steer their companies off course. The book had a huge impact on me because it starkly revealed and explained the game my clients are really playing despite their claims to the contrary.

Because of this book, I was able to connect these motives to some of the worst toxic behaviors I observe in leaders and better understand why they behave this way. As someone often tasked with helping them change course, this book really helps me meet leaders where they are and help them move in a better direction.

I believe that emotional intelligence and the capacity for empathy are required tools for twenty-first-century leadership. This book is the map I keep with me for that journey. It is basically an encyclopedia of human emotion. So many people move through the day only able to describe their feelings with one of four emotions: Happy, sad, angry, and none-of-the-above.

This book really expanded my emotional vocabulary, helping me paint much clearer pictures of my emotional state. If you want to increase your emotional intelligence, start by reading this book. I found the audiobook, read by Brown, to be priceless, as she added a lot of off-script commentary that made me laugh out loud.

I love this book because it soundly silences leaders who act as if caring about the people who work for them isn’t compatible with profits. Bob Chapman, the CEO of Barry-Wehmiller, proves that you can care about employees and also be a successful $1.7 billion company.

This is an important part of my belief structure as a leadership and team performance coach. This book also introduced me to the connection between the health of our work cultures and the health of society in general. We make our marks as leaders when we leave the world a better place, not just when we increase our company’s share price. Chapman shows us how it’s done.

Many of us have fully embraced agile programming, but doing it well, really well, requires discipline. In Clean Agile a number of world-class programmers discuss what it takes to put Agile programming into practice with y our team. This book has made me a much more “agile” agile programmer, and the section on SCRUM is worth the price of the book.

This is the most recent book I'm recommending, and it’s also more than just a book on Test-Driven Development. I often proclaim that Test-Driven Development and software design are two sides of the same coin. One cannot separate one from the other. So learning about Test-Driven Development also means that one has to learn about software design principles. This book teaches both. The first part of the book is all about Test-Driven Development, while the remainder of the book also touches on object calisthenics, refactoring, code smells, design patterns, the S.O.L.I.D. principles, connascence, the four elements of simple design, and much more. Whether you’re new to programming software, or whether you’re a seasoned developer, there’s much to learn from this book.      

While this book was still in the writing, Crispin and Gregory published draft chapters on the internet.

At the time, I read them, and managed to introduce many of the great insights into my own work. Even though I was working in a more traditional environment, the ideas from the two ladies inspired me on my journey to the agile methodologies.

I even managed to contribute some of my own real-world examples from my own experiences to their writings – and they decided to include some of them.

The second book from Gregory and Crispin brought me up-to-date on the different trends in the Agile world, ten years after having delved into their first book.

How do you share the quality mindset in a DevOps culture? What about Design Thinking? With many more examples from the industry, the two authors made me curious about some of the things that I had ignored until I read their book.

This book gives the philosophical underpinning for why creating a leadership development culture in all parts of your organization is essential for working in our VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) business landscape. And, it shows you how to do it with specific practices and new-mindset concepts. It is geared toward organizations with Agile ways of working in the environment, but is also useful if Agile is not present. I especially enjoy the way several theories of adult development are interwoven in this book which makes using them to guide leadership development strategies (your own and others) simpler and more immediately applicable.

I love writing good clean code. There is something refreshing about writing or reading code that reads more like a book than some obscure instructions to a machine. This book goes into the details of how to write “clean code” and what makes it clean.

I felt like I learned so much about writing good code from reading this book about things that you are never really taught in school or on the job as a software developer.

I found so much of the book so interesting because I could use what I was learning right away to become a better programmer.

If you want to become a better programmer and are looking for a book that will entertain you and be fun along the way, I highly recommend Clean Code.