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My favorite leadership books
38
items Leadership isn’t about fancy titles, endless meetings, or memorizing buzzwords, it’s about building healthy teams, making better decisions, and creating environments where people can actually thrive. This list is my curated stack of leadership books ...
Sections
5
The Must-Read Leadership Classics
Books That Make You Better at Communication (and Less Likely to Accidentally Start a Fire)
Team Dynamics & Culture Books (a.k.a. Keeping the Circus Running Smoothly)
Personal Growth for Leaders (a.k.a. Fix Yourself First, Boss)
Others
The Must-Read Leadership Classics
A powerful look at how our own blind spots sabotage our relationships and leadership effectiveness. This book hits harder than expected and gives you language for breaking out of unproductive patterns, both at work and at home.
Leadership and Self-Deception, 4th Edition
A fast, story-driven guide that exposes the real reasons teams fail, and how to fix them.
Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Field Guide for Leaders ...
A must-read for leaders dealing with complexity, scaling teams, and modern organizational chaos. It shows why traditional hierarchies fail and how adaptability, transparency, and trust outperform rigid structures.
Team of Teams: New Rules for Complex World
This one breaks down why great teams don’t happen by accident. They’re built on trust, safety, and leaders who actually give a damn about their people. Sinek digs into the biology behind team dynamics (yes, actual brain chemicals) and shows how leade...
Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together
The playbook for building an organization that actually works together, not against itself.
The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps
This book is basically a spotlight on the difference between leaders who make everyone around them smarter, and the ones who drain the room like a human low-battery warning. Wiseman lays out how “Multipliers” amplify the intelligence and capability o...
Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Smarter
If you’ve ever watched a project crash and burn while everyone pointed fingers like they were in a Spider-Man meme, this book is the antidote. The core idea is brutally simple: you own everything in your world, successes, failures, miscommunications,...
Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead
Books That Make You Better at Communication (and Less Likely to Accidentally Start a Fire)
A simple but surprisingly helpful framework for understanding communication styles and personality clashes. Less about ‘idiots’ and more about decoding how different types think, act, and respond, which makes leading them way easier.
Surrounded by Idiots
If you’ve ever had to deliver tough feedback without detonating the relationship, or survived a meeting where the tension was thick enough to spread on toast, this book is your playbook. It breaks down how to stay calm, clear, and collaborative when ...
Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking, 2nd Ed
Former FBI negotiator Chris Voss basically shows you that negotiation isn’t about meeting in the middle, it’s about understanding people so well that “the middle” suddenly looks like a bad deal for them anyway. This book is packed with practical tact...
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It
Yes, it’s old. Yes, the title sounds like something your grandpa kept on his nightstand. But underneath the vintage vibes is one of the most practical playbooks ever written on how to not be an accidental jerk. Carnegie lays out simple, timeless prin...
How to Win Friends & Influence People
This book nails the balance every leader struggles with: being honest without being a robot, and being caring without turning into a doormat. Scott’s framework, Care Personally, Challenge Directly, is the cheat code for giving feedback that actually ...
Radical Candor
This book breaks down what makes some teams ridiculously high-performing while others can’t survive a single sprint planning session without spiraling into chaos. Coyle studies groups from Navy SEALs to Pixar to figure out the core ingredients of str...
The Culture Code: Secrets of Successful Groups
Team Dynamics & Culture Books (a.k.a. Keeping the Circus Running Smoothly)
Marquet takes the classic top-down leadership model, throws it overboard, and replaces it with something far more effective: giving your people real ownership. This is the book that shows how moving from leader–follower to leader–leader transforms a ...
Turn the Ship Around!: True Story of Leadership
Covey makes a pretty undeniable case: trust isn’t a “soft skill,” it’s a performance multiplier. When trust is high, everything moves faster and costs less. When trust is low, every decision drags, every email feels like a legal contract, and your te...
The Speed of Trust: One Thing That Changes
This book basically says the quiet part out loud: it doesn’t matter how brilliant someone is, if they’re toxic, they tank the team. Sutton lays out the real cost of tolerating jerks in the workplace, from morale drain to productivity black holes, and...
The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace
Catmull takes you inside Pixar and shows how one of the most consistently innovative companies on the planet actually protects creativity, not with beanbag chairs or inspirational posters, but with honest feedback, psychological safety, and leaders w...
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming Unseen Forces
This book flips the script by focusing not on giving feedback, but on the far trickier skill: receiving it without shutting down, getting defensive, or mentally packing your desk. Stone and Heen break down why feedback so often triggers us, how to se...
Thanks for the Feedback: Science & Art of Receiving
Personal Growth for Leaders (a.k.a. Fix Yourself First, Boss)
Manson’s whole message is basically: you’ve only got so many f*cks to give, so stop wasting them on things that don’t matter. It’s a refreshing punch of honesty in a genre that usually tries to “optimize your vibes.” Instead, this book pushes you to ...
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
An essential deep dive into how habits form and how to reshape them. Great for personal leadership development and for understanding how to create cultural change inside a team or organization.
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do
Clear lays out the simplest, most practical system for making real change stick: tiny habits, repeated consistently, beat grand plans that die by Tuesday. The book shows how to redesign your environment, your routines, and even your identity so good ...
Atomic Habits: Easy Way to Build & Break Habits
Dweck’s core idea is simple but wildly powerful: people succeed not because they’re “naturally talented,” but because they believe they can grow. She breaks down the difference between a fixed mindset (“this is just who I am”) and a growth mindset (“...
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Holiday goes straight for the jugular: your biggest blocker isn’t the market, your competition, or your team, it’s your own ego. The book breaks down how ambition, success, and even failure can warp your perspective if you let your ego drive the bus....
Ego Is the Enemy
Newport makes a brutally clear case: the ability to focus without distraction is a superpower, and most of us are running on whatever’s left of our attention after email, Slack, and a dozen shiny tabs steal the rest. Deep Work lays out how to carve o...
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success
Others
This one’s mine. I wrote it because I’ve spent over a decade in the trenches of software development and leadership, and I wanted to strip away the buzzwords and corporate fluff. Instead of abstract theories, it’s practical guidance for leading engin...
Tech Leadership Made Simple: Practical Lessons
How to spot (and grow) teammates who make every team stronger.
The Ideal Team Player: Recognize & Cultivate
Turns the meeting everyone dreads into the tool your team actually needs.
Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable
Leadership isn’t about perks, it’s about responsibility.
The Motive: Why Leaders Abdicate Key Roles
Break down the walls that turn coworkers into rivals.
Silos, Politics and Turf Wars: A Leadership Fable
The no-fluff guide to surviving (and thriving) as an engineering manager.
Engineering Management for the Rest of Us
What if the best leaders aren’t the ones making all the decisions?
The Decision Maker: Unlock Potential
Sometimes the simplest tool, like a checklist, can save lives and transform teams.
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
This book flips the old-school view of IT as just a “support department” on its head. Schwartz argues that in the age of agility, IT leaders shouldn’t just be waiting for a “seat at the table”, they are the table. The book digs into how CIOs and tec...
A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership - Schwartz
Data-backed habits that separate top performers from the rest. Practical, sharp, and actionable, especially useful if you're coaching developers or leaders who want to stand out in crowded, competitive environments.
Be the Unicorn: 12 Data-Driven Leadership Habits
The definitive playbook for starting strong in any new leadership role. Clear, structured, and full of strategies to build momentum fast, whether you're joining a new company or taking over a team.
The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies
A refreshing take on unlearning, humility, and intellectual flexibility. Perfect for leaders who want to make better decisions by questioning their assumptions instead of clinging to them.
Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know
A relatable business fable about vulnerability, trust, and serving clients without ego. Sounds cheesy, but the lessons are gold, especially for leaders in consulting or service-focused roles.
Getting Naked
A practical model for understanding how you and your team naturally contribute to work. Great for diagnosing burnout, improving collaboration, and aligning people with their strengths instead of forcing them into the wrong roles.
Working Genius