Bookshelf
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This section contains a collection of books on a variety of leadership topic’s aimed at assist you in developing you into an effective leader. The books are arranged into subject areas as follows:
- Leadership Development- This is a collection of books I recommend to those seeking to develop and improve their leadership skills and capabilities.
- Personal Productivity- In todays busy world it’s important that we all get better an improving our personal productivity and effectiveness. This section contains recommended reading to help improve your personal productivity and effectiveness, to assist you in getting things done more productively.
- Leadership Biographies- Learning from great leaders of the past is one of the most effective ways of learning and gaining insight into what shaped and influenced some of the worlds greatest leaders.
- Managing Change- Managing change is central to effective leadership, these books will assist you in managing change.
- Effective Communication- These books provide the tools and techniques to manage communication, conversations and presentations. Remember no communication = no leadership!
- Influence, Power and Politics- Although influence, power and politics is often a topic that we shy away from and see the topic as taboo, it essential to effective leadership. Understanding how to use our influence and power, guided by sound character and intent is necessary for effective leadership.
- Inspiring and Motivating Others- One of the tasks of effective leadership is to motivate and inspire others. This section contains a selection of books that deal with how to effectively inspire and motivate others.
- Business Leadership – This section contains a selection of books that will assist you in developing the necessary business leadership skills.
What To Do With What You Read
Reading to learn and reading for personal development is not the same as reading for leisure. Reading to improve our leadership effectiveness requires a focused and structured approach. Firstly, we need to ensure that we select the most significant leadership books, secondly we need an approach that will help us get the most out of the books we’ve selected. To assist with these challenges I recommend you read the following posts:
I highly recommend you consider either using the approach outlined in the above posts. The key insight is that unless you make time to digest and apply what you learn your leadership will not develop effectively.
Keeping This Bookshelf Current
This collection will be enhanced and updated as and when I stumble across books that I regard as significant and valuable as a leadership resource. When compiling this list I only included books that I believe are significant and will add value to our readers.
What great book did you read lately? Why not let us know by recommend it to us for consideration for inclusion, by adding a comment below.
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Another good read is “Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?” by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, published by Harvard Business School Press.
Might I also recommend The Bass Handbook of Leadership: Theory, Research, and Managerial Applications. This is a comprehensive compendium of all the scientific findings regarding leadership and management in organizations. I must admit, I am very partial towards empirical evidence and justifiable propositions regarding leadership. While many authors listed, including Drucker, offer a tremendous amount of insight and practicality to the business world regarding the social influence of others, they also contain a tremendous amount of redundancy or unsupported recommendations. I would add Bass & Stogdill to the mix just so individuals can actually consult the scientific evidence in order to justify the claims made by these other authors. For instance, the Clark & Crossland book speak all about the leader’s voice. While this is important for the inspirational and charismatic element of leadership, it is also a minor facet despite their claim it is a “crucial competence.” There are so many other elements missing, such as symbolic representation, bases of power, emotional appeal, follower identification, intellectual stimulation and creative thinking, inspirational motivation, initiating structure, integrity, expertise, empowerment, development, decision making, dyadic exchanges, and so forth. My point is, simply being an excellent communicator will help, but will not solidify your stance as a leader. In fact, research has shown that you do not even necessarily need to be a “great” communicator, you just need to speak more to simply be perceived as “leaderlike.” So, artificially increasing the amount you talk may be enough in some situations.
Three must read books in our leadership toolkit are: Crucial Conversations, Crucial Confrontations and Influencer – The Power To Change Anything. Thanks for all the writing that you do. I really enjoy your blog.
I love leadership reading. Thanks for the list. I just published a new review on my site for one of the best leadership books I’ve read in a while.
“It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy” by: Captain D. Michael Abrashoff the Former commander, USS Benfold.
This leader transformed his ship by giving ownership to and empowering his crew. The changes I made I my approach to leadership based on this read have very positive results. Check out my review for a preview through the first chapter of the book, and an outline of the book’s key contents.
I have just completed a course in Knowledge Management. I was amazed how many of the principles I learned in the course were demonstrated in It’s your ship. It really reinforced how really excellent the book is. I recommended it to everybody in the course.
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