ELP recommended library for leaders that want to continue to improve their leadership game that impacts business performance and the lives of others they touch every day.
Lead Like You Were Meant To by Rob McKinnon
Rob’s book, Lead Like You Were Meant To, is a must purchase for your leadership library. The process Rob outlines is the one I use with my coaching clients that leads to transformative change. I was the first leadership coach to embrace the McKinnon Way process and I am glad I did. This is not your ordinary leadership book where you read it and apply one or two things you learned. No, this is a book with unique and rich content, lessons, and exercises that will change you as a leader forever.
Rob’s book comes at a perfect time. With the unrest politically and socially and the COVID pandemic, some have found themselves in an environment of isolation, fear, stress, and uncertainty.
To lead effectively, it is critical we develop an extraordinarily strong and attuned self-awareness of how you are showing up in every situation and encounter with others. How you show up is the key difference whether people flee from your presence or respect and follow you.
Essentialism by Greg McKeown
Each day we are faced with multiple opportunities. It is impossible for us to invest our time and energy in all of them. Some may be relevant, but most are not important or essential. McKeown says, “essentialism means differentiating among the options and selecting just a few essential ones and eliminate the rest.”
If you want to do the right things versus doing all things, this book is for you.
Triggers by David Richo
To be an effective leader it is critical to build our self-awareness skills. All of us have emotional triggers. We must identify their origins and ask ourselves why they trigger us?
Richo does a beautiful job helping us to identify our triggers. There are multiple sources. He also provides the reader a useful guide on how to manage our triggers so that we are at our best.
The Soul of Shame by Curt Thompson
A business associate recommended this book. Shame is an emotion we all deal with. It is important for us to see how our shame can and will manifest itself in our daily work and personal lives. This is an honest and thought-provoking story of our shame that is ever present and how we can heal ourselves from the voice who tells us we are not good enough!
The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle
As a leader it is critical that you create the proper culture within your team and organization. Studies have proven teams with great cultures out perform teams with toxic cultures two to three times. If you want to understand how great teams work, what their behavioral cues are and understand how they work together to build transparency and trust, this book is for you.
The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier
I received this little nugget of gold at a recent leadership summit I attended in the fall of 2018. If you lead and support others, you must read Michael’s book. He rather simply breaks down coaching others using 7 simple key questions. Game changer!
How Women Rise by Sally Helgesen & Marshall Goldsmith
If you read Goldsmith’s What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, this book is a must read. The authors outline 12 habits that hold women back as they progress upwards and what to do about it.
Radical Candor by Kim Scott
I love the title of this book. Radical candor is what we need. Getting real and being transparent as a leader is very important. If you want to elevate your role as a leader/manager, Kim’s book is a must read.
Quiet Leadership by David Rock
This book is for leaders who want to be more effective and inspire their leadership teams to think and act differently. As a leader, it is your job to bring out the best performance of your team. Learning six simple steps, you can help members of your team to think differently and perform at higher levels, unleash higher productivity and increase engagement and job satisfaction.
I highly recommend this book for all leaders who want to improve how they coach and develop their teams.
Little Book of Big Emotions by Erika Hunter
What I have learned about myself, parenting and work with leaders these past seven years, our emotions drive everything. Emotions have a huge impact on our thoughts and behaviors, actions and our results. We either express our emotions or we suppress them. Either way, emotions impact how we show up and behave. It is time to become more self aware of which emotions are driving your thinking and behavior. Now is the time to start controlling your emotions instead of your emotions controlling you!
This little gem identifies the four primary emotions each of us are born with. They are MAD, SAD, GLAD and SCARED or FEAR. Hunter’s book will enable you to better understand each primary emotion, how to identify them and help you to take control of your emotions.
The Energy Bus by Jon Gordon
I first learned about this book from an article on Brianna Stewart the All-American forward from the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team. She read the book over before her senior year and she said it had a profound impact on her as a student-athlete, teammate and as a person. I was sold so I bought it. If the most decorated athlete in women’s college basketball can get something out of reading this book, I had to see what it was all about.
The Energy Bus will take you on a ride that will reveal ten steps for approaching your life and work with the kind of positive, forward thinking that a leads to better results and accomplishments. The book will also help you turn negative energy into positive achievement and will provide you a simple guide to overcome obstacles and to bring out the best in you, your team and your family.
The Extraordinary Coach by John Zenger and Kathleen Stinnett
One of the most important skills leaders need to develop and excel in, is coaching others to be their very best. This book is a must read for anyone who manages and leads a team. It provides many examples and applications of how to be an effective coach, how to structure the coaching relationship, building people’s commitment to change and how to demonstrate accountability.
If you want to take your own personal leadership to another level, improve employee engagement, improve your staff’s performance and accelerate the performance of your team and organization, this book is for you.
Daring Greatly by Brene Brown
Vulnerability is not weakness,” writes Brown. In fact, “Vulnerability is the core of meaningful human experiences.” Without vulnerability, there can be no achievement, there can be no authenticity, there can be no strong connection with others, there can be no greatness. Being vulnerable is not easy for us. We avoid it. Avoiding it will eventually take its toll on us. Do you want a path forward? Read this book and learn to live a life of authenticity.
Thanks for the Feedback by Douglas Stone & Sheila Heen
As leaders, we receive feedback everyday from our boss, colleagues and others. Everyone has a suggestion how we can get better. Feedback is critical to our development. This wonderful book will not only discuss how to give feedback but outlines the art and science of how we receive the feedback provided to us. Understanding the receiver’s perspective is critical to successfully providing meaningful feedback that will help support their goals and objectives.
Well Being The Five Essential Elements by Tom Rath
The Gallup Organization has produced research based books on developing and focusing on your strengths, employee engagement and on our well being and it implications for us individually and within our organizations. Their research outlines 5 critical areas of well being that we can measure and create plans to boast them. The 5 areas are: Career, Social, Financial, Physical and Community well being.
Individual well being has a direct correlation to employee engagement which impacts organizational financial performance and success. As a leader it is important that you not only know your own well being and put a plan in place to improve it, but also to understand what you can do within your organization to help create and build a culture of well being amongst your members of your team(s).
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
Charles Duhigg, takes the reader on a journey filled with science, neurological principles and psychology to help you understand why habits exist and what can we do to break them. People and leaders can change their habits when they first understand what they do, identify their patterns that shape what they do and then develop new patterns to help change. As a leadership coach, I have used these same principles to help my clients change over the past 5 years.
Traction by Gino Wickman
This is a must read for any leader, who is driving an organization. It helps answer the question do you have a grip on your business or does the business have a grip on you? Wickman outlines a simple The Entrepreneurial Operating System® a practical and simple process to achieve business success. He outlines six key components (vision, people, data, processes, issues and traction) of the EOS. This is a very practicable book that provides simple but powerful tools to help the leader and team develop more focus, more growth and more fun.
The principles in this book will elevate the leaders game but also the combined effort, focus and achievement of the executive team.
I am currently working with a CEO of a mid sized company who is using Traction with his leadership team to help triple the size of his organization.
The Power of Presence by Kristi Hedges
Leaders need executive presence in order to be effective. This is the best book I have read about presence. Kristi shows everyone how to improve their presence. From Kristi’s experiences she developed a unique I-Presence™ model, which is equal parts communication aptitude, mental attitude, and authentic style. Leaders focus on the three core aspects of presence:
1. Intentional: Determine the type of presence you want and the values you want to convey, and how they match up with the way people currently perceive you.
2. Individual: Understand how to build relationships that foster trust, and that drive business, loyalty, and career success.
3. Inspirational: Learn what the master communicators do to inspire others, including using powerful language, motivating through change, and presenting to audiences effectively.
I help leaders increase their presence effectiveness. I use this book and its principles to support my presence work with my clients. This is a must read as an individual leader.
Your Brain at Work by David Rock
Want to understand how your brain works and what you can do differently to lead change, improve your performance and the performance of your teams. Then you must read this book as a leader. Neuroscience is becoming a very hot topic in respects to driving change, leading and performing at a high level. David Rock does a brilliant job outlining a complex topic into useable information. He does this by weeding in leadership challenges and examples using two ordinary people. The challenges he uses are very similar to the ones that you face on a daily basis. After presenting a particular scenario, Rock provides a thorough analysis of what each of the characters did wrong and how they could have approached a particular challenge or activity in a much more efficient way.
This book is practicable, fun to read and provides useful tips how to change your brain works that will lead to a more fulfilling life. I have used many of the principles in this book with my clients to great success.