The Leadership Books I Still Think About

Non-fiction books aren’t everyone’s cup of tea.

Still, there are a few books that I’ve read over my career so far that have drastically changed my thinking around leadership and setting teams up for success.

Some of these books I find myself suggesting so often to people, that I figured I should probably put them down in a list somewhere. So here they are! (in no particular order.)

5 Dysfunctions of a Team

This was one of the first books I read that really challenged my understanding of what a high-performing team looks like. I’ve read some of Patrick Lencioni’s other books and would recommend having a look at them too, but this remains my favourite of his works.

There are plenty of summaries that go into what the 5 dysfunctions put forward by this book are. For me, the model helped me to understand the importance of looking for potential red flags in teams. Do people avoid accountability? Are team conversations silent and lack debate? Are people generally not engaged in the results or success of the team?

The 5 dysfunctions sit in a hierarchy, with trust being at the base. Without trust, a team has no foundation to build upon. Simple I know, but also powerful. Next time you see a team struggling with some of the issues above, have a look for examples of trust. If there aren’t any to be found, building trust would be a good place to start.

Turn the Ship Around

I particularly like books that offer examples and personal experiences (as you’ll see by some of the other titles in this list).

David Marquet was a submarine commander in the US Navy, and this book recounts his experience trying to practice servant leadership.

That process isn’t a wonderous success story. The author goes through their initial attempts to practice servant leadership that ultimately failed, and the subsequent learnings from those failures.

This book was my first exposure to the idea of servant leadership, after someone did a talk summarising this book at a local meetup. That talk was a revelation for me, at a time when I was struggling with my first forays into leadership. As such, I still recommend this book to those beginning to dip their toe into a role where they are leading others.

Team of Teams

While fighting Al-Qaeda, the US Army faced a dilemma. Their command and control approach was woefully inadequate against the decentralised approach of Al-Qaeda. While the US Army troops waited for information to flow up the chain for a decision to be made, Al-Qaeda had already come and gone.

Sound familiar?

This book helped me to see the difficulty command and control organisations face when competing in a market with more agile companies. With that, came my light bulb moment around the benefit of pushing decision making down to those closest to the decision. Pushing decision making down, focussing on communicating objectives over methods, means that teams have the authority to change their approach as needed to achieve the required objective.

I’ve referenced this book when managing up as well as when convincing others to embrace the idea of being given objectives over a list of instructions.

(Another book on this topic is Escaping the Build Trap (which itself makes some references to The Art of Action), which I haven’t listed as it’s not specifically leadership-focused, but still a great read!).

Radical Candor

We’ve all had (and given) that feedback. The type that the receiver walks away from feeling like they didn’t get the full picture. The type that’s so generic, the receiver has no idea what specifically was good or needs improvement.

If you’ve been on a course about giving and receiving feedback in the last 4 years, it’s likely this book was mentioned (or at least the 4 types of feedback). It helped me understand how to give better feedback to others, but also how to receive better feedback through asking for more context.

Dichotomy of Leadership

After I read Turn the Ship Around, my understanding of servant leadership was to always give people the objective and let them figure it out. This led to some situations where teams or team members would be stuck, but I believed they had to find their way out at all costs.

In reality, leadership is a balance. It’s a balance between knowing when to lead and when to follow. When to give people space to learn, and when the situation requires a solution, fast. This book helped me to explore how I could vary my approach, based on context.

Good Leaders Ask Great Questions

I quite often had to pause while reading this book to take down a particular quote, that just really cut to the heart of that particular topic so succinctly.

Through reading this book, I realised the importance of being intentional. Making sure I work on the things only I can do, and enable others to do the other things through giving ownership. More than that, though, the book helped me explore how I could be more intentional in how I grow and identify new opportunities for learning, by being deliberate about change.

There’s a lot of great stuff here, from an author that’s spent a lot of time helping people to grow into leadership.

Upstream

As a leader, you will over time start to deal with more abstract problems. The answers will be less obvious and require more exploration of the context.

I really enjoyed this book, particularly as the author uses some great examples around education, local government, the NFL and personal finances. They use the topics to cover the barriers they believe people often face in tackling upstream issues — problem blindness (“I don’t see the problem” or “it seems inevitable”), lack of ownership (“that problem isn’t mine to fix”), and tunnelling (“I can’t deal with that right now”).

I’d highly recommend this book for anyone looking to better understand how to get to the root of a problem and implement upstream solutions, over constantly dealing with the downstream effects.