Want to improve your leadership style? Here are 10 books that could transform your approach to people management

Anyone who knows me and my coaching work knows I’m a prolific reader and have three or four books on the go at any one time.

Back in the mid-1990s, the company I worked for introduced a transformation programme. This changed my career and my life – I became less interested in bricks, blocks and concrete and switched my working focus towards people, more particularly groups of people, teams.

For the past 25 years, I have been coaching leadership teams that run big businesses and big projects.

My reading tends to be about people; first, about figuring out me, then leadership and management and humankind. I’m partial to a bit of anthropology.

So, these books are about people. Here’s my top 10 for 2024 so far:

1. The Art of Living by Thich Nhat Hanh. This book raises my spirits and inspires me. Working with leadership teams, sometimes I ask them: ‘Where do you get your inspiration?’ and ‘Why?’. They are smart people, they realise they can’t give what they haven’t got and so they become more alert to their own spirits and how to raise them, so they can inspire others – a big part of leadership. I noticed the effect this book was having on me as I was reading it – a sense of wholeness, connection and calm. “We all need to train ourselves in our way of being, and that is the ground for all action” – this is my work, on myself and with the people I coach.

2. How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner.Flyvbjerg has assembled a huge database of big projects and how well they were delivered. He extensively studies the data and draws out the reality of these projects across the world, and offers a heads-up for those involved in such affairs. “In the world of civic projects, the first budget is really just a down payment” – how true when we think of recent mega projects in the UK. I think it’s great that Rod Sweet, editor of Global Construction Review, has interviewed three project leaders with this type of experience for the CIOB’s 21CC podcast with reference back to this book. My takeaway – it’s all about people.

3. Anti-fragile. Things that Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This book has helped me rethink ‘resilience’. If you go into a difficult and uncertain situation with resilience, you come out the other end the same. Good, on face value. The anti-fragile come out stronger. According to Taleb: “Anti-fragility is the secret to success in a world full of uncertainty.” Most of everything man-made is fragile. Mother Nature, in its billions of years, has gotten here “without much command and control instruction from an Ivy League-educated director nominated by a search committee”. Pithy and real, breadth and depth. But how to become anti-fragile? Read the book.

4. The Management Myth by Matthew Stewart. Every manager should read this; it’s essential CPD. Early in the book I was wondering if this guy was just plain cynical, soured by management consultancy. But no, I think this is an in-depth, no-holds-barred review of the short history of management as a discipline and its current state. It goes back 100 years to theorist Frederick Taylor’s so-called ‘scientific management’ and the early development of business schools and their MBAs – and how it’s all still alive in the outdated management education, thinking and approaches we suffer from to this very day. No wonder there is a skills shortage. I breathed a deep sigh when reading that “competency frameworks are a failed ‘90s management fad” – at least I’m not the only one who thinks that when I hear talk of them now as the big solution.

5. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. I seem to see, read and talk a lot about dysfunction – an interesting self-reflection. I bought Lencioni’s classic book, subtitled ‘A Leadership Fable’, years ago, though only read it recently. I was struck by the parallels between this book and the work I do as a leadership team coach. For a taster, watch ‘Team Number One’ video by the author on YouTube. It’s two minutes long with a fascinating insight.

6. Making Sense of Construction Improvement by Stuart D Green. More dysfunction I’m afraid, but this is a very important book, one that ought to be essential reading for every construction professional and especially the new construction minister. It’s a fascinating history of government reports on construction, policy initiatives and improvement effort dating back to World War Two. It sets out the big issues, the numerous discrete ‘solutions’, political manoeuverings and the impact, or lack, of it all – drilling into some of the more recent key reports: Latham, Egan, Farmer and the like. It seems we could learn so much from history but apparently we don’t. And I can feel another government review of construction coming anytime soon, bandwidth permitting.

7. Politics On the Edge by Rory Stewart. Sticking with politics and dysfunction for a moment longer (uplifting books coming), I came across this book in a LinkedIn post. The person said after reading this book he felt sorry for UK politicians – a rare sentiment, so I thought I’d better find out why. As an individual, as a team, organisation, industry, country, we are living systems within nested living systems and are subject to what happens at levels above us. This book illustrates the absurdities and dysfunction within the corridors of power shaping the UK living system – if it’s rotten up there, it’s going to feel rotten down here at times. This stuff affects us, we need to be careful what we wish for and who we vote for. I would vote for Rory Stewart, but he is no longer in that game. Shame.

8. The Promise that Changes Everything: I Won’t Interrupt You by Nancy Kline. Honestly, I’d recommend anything by Nancy Kline, she is like a god in the world of coaching. Can you imagine being able to think, articulate yourself, get your point across without being talked over, unwittingly dismissed or, worse, slapped down. Being heard, really heard, is uncommon in industry. Everyone is so busy, remote working, open plan offices, 200 emails a day, social media, quiet quitting, we want your input, though compliance is the order of the day. There’s not much listening going on. “Leadership is the conscious creation of culture.” What culture would you create?

9. Coach for Results: Empower your people to achieve the extraordinary by Dave Stitt. Yes, I read my own book this year, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s a solutions book. If we change the nature of our conversations, we change our interactions, our relationships and our results. When I wrote this book in 2022, I dreamt of thousands of young people coming to work and having empowering conversations with each other, uplifting each other. And that positive effect becoming viral, changing the construction industry from the ground up. I still believe that’s possible, and this book shows how. I think it’s a companion to Green’s Making Sense of Construction Improvement (above) – his book charting the effort to here, and mine pointing the way forward. At a micro level you will be a better engineer or manager after you have read this book. Practise what you learn and you will become a great leader.

10. The Song of Significance. A new manifesto for teams by Seth Godin. Maybe I have unwittingly saved the best till last. I hear lots of people talking about wanting to make a difference. And good on them. So do I. Well, if you really want to make a difference in your team, read this book and you will see what a difference looks like, or could look like. In true Godin style, there is so much hidden away in this book – I’ve read it several times and unearthed more each time. In fact, I am going to read it again.

A version of this article was recently published in CIOB People