Best Leadership Books

1. Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action

Management, Business Development, Marketing, Leadership, and Living is best done with a purpose. Start With Why, by Simon Sinek, looks deeply at the power of purpose to motivate, inspire the self and others, and to produce great outcomes. Ostensibly about leadership, inspiring loyalty and devotion is something that also applies as a goal in modern marketing and in the quality of what you produce for your customers.

2. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

One-sentence summary of the book “The 7 habits Highly Effective People”: In his book, the author lays out the seven habits of successful people, the seven fundamental principles that enable the most successful and entrepreneurial people to achieve their goals. Used on a daily basis, they will help those who practice them to live a happy, well-balanced and successful life.

The 7 Habits

1: Be proactive

2: Keep the final goal in mind

Personal success

3: Prioritise the priorities

Independence

4: Think win-win

Public success

5: Try to understand first and then be understood

6: Synergy

Interdependence

7: Sharpen your skills

3. Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader

Life can have a habit of getting in the way, and not having enough hours in the day is a common concern. This isn’t so much a problem if your sole personal objective of a Sunday evening is to sit on the sofa watching Antiques Roadshow. Yet being time poor is somewhat more problematic in the workplace, especially if you’re looking to step up and lead with greater impact and confidence.

You aspire to lead with greater impact. The problem is you’re busy executing on today’s demands. It can often feel like spinning plates; you know you have to carve out time from your day job to build your leadership skills, but it’s easy to let immediate problems and old mind-sets get in the way. In ‘Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader’ Ibarra offers advice to help you:

· Redefine your job in order to make more strategic contributions.

· Diversify your network so that you connect to, and learn from, a bigger range of stakeholders.

· Become more playful with your self-concept, allowing your familiar — and possibly outdated — leadership style to evolve.

Ibarra turns the usual “think first and then act” philosophy on its head by arguing that doing these three things will help you learn through action and will increase what she calls your ‘outsight’ — the valuable external perspective you gain from direct experiences.

As opposed to insight, outsight will then help change the way you think as a leader: about what kind of work is important; how you should invest your time; why and which relationships matter in informing and supporting your leadership; and, ultimately, who you want to become.

What you could learn from it:

· You have to push yourself outside of your comfort zone and invest time and effort in learning new things. It’s dangerous to get stuck in the competency trap where you will always know one or two things.

· At its most base level, outsight is a self-confidence trick encouraging you to not fear failure, an almost JFDI approach to experimentation and new experiences.

Take little risks often, not big risks rarely — the only way to change how you think and work is by doing different things, and that doing new things is obviously far more important than simply thinking, deliberating and even worrying about doing them

4. Leadership and self-deception

“Leadership and self-deception” book is one of these books that can change your life if you listen, it tells stories which you can relate in your life every single time. I think this phenomenon of trying to close ourselves from others and see yourself better than anyone else, blame others and justify your own actions is something I could relate myself so much. Simply seeing others as an object to you rather than people is just such a simple but powerful way to put it.

The lessons that you read about, the advice that this book gives in so precious and so important to everyone. One might not notice or realize that they went towards self-deception in their lives towards family members, towards coworkers.

It is definitely a book that turned my world upside down. I always knew I was struggling with these things in my life but had no idea how common it is and how to overcome it.

Powerful learning material, that I will definitely print it and keep it with me all the time.

After you read the book know the following things

Knowing the material:

• Self-betrayal leads to self-deception and “the box”
• When you’re in the box, you can’t focus on results
• Your influence and success will depend on being out of the box
• You get out of the box as you cease resisting other people

Living the material:

• Don’t try to be perfect. Do try to be better
• Don’t use the vocabulary -”the box and so on…” — with people who don’t already know it. Do use the principles in your own life.
• Don’t look for others’ boxes. Do look for your own.
• Don’t accuse others of being in the box. Do try to stay out of the box yourself.
• Don’t give up on yourself when you discover you’ve been in the box. Do keep trying.
• Don’t deny you’ve been in the box when you have been. Do apologize, then just keep marching forward, trying to be more helpful to others in the future.
• Don’t focus on what others are doing wrong. Do focus on what you can do right to help.
• Don’t worry whether others are helping you. Do worry whether you are helping others.

5. Developing the Leader Within You 2.0 and Leadershif

It covers the essential topics that make the difference between average leaders and great leaders. It is completely built on biblical principles and teachings of Jesus, but most devotionals, bible studies, and sermons do not effectively cover the topics included in this book. Every ministry should urge their team members to read and apply this material.

6. Humble Leadership

“Humility is the base and foundation of all virtues, and without it, no other virtue can exist.” — Cervantes

Humble leaders are rated higher than arrogant leaders on an overall leadership effectiveness index. A comparison of arrogant and humble leaders on an overall leadership effectiveness index composed of 54 behaviors that differentiate the most effective from the least effective leaders. Arrogant leaders were rated at the 34th percentile, while humble leaders were rated at the 66th percentile.

· Humble leaders demonstrated that people are just as important as results. The arrogant leader believes that results are the ultimate goal, and if a few people get negatively affected, that’s just the cost of doing business. The humble leaders understand the balance of achieving while still being sensitive to individual needs. They also believe if you take care of people, they will be more engaged and dedicated, which will produce better results in the long run.

· Humble leadersfocused on gaining trust from others.Humble leaders do everything they can to build up trust with others. They are more effective on the key levers that build trust, which are: creating positive relationships, consistently delivering on their promises, and providing expertise and good judgment.

· Humble leaders believe that success comes from cooperation and collaboration.The arrogant leader believes that they can accomplish goals on their own. They resist collaboration because they want all the credit for themselves. The humble leaders know that organizational success comes from people working together. They ask others for help and resist taking credit for the accomplishments of others.

· Humble leaders are role models and walk their talk.When humble leaders ask others to do something, they make sure they do it first. Arrogant leaders are okay with asking others to do what they do not do. They are fine with having a double standard, or perhaps they don’t see it. In many ways, they act as though they are a privileged class where rules for others do not apply to them.

· Humble leaders ask for and acts on feedback from others.Humble leaders ask others for feedback and work hard to implement their suggestions for change. Arrogant leaders feel that they do not want or need feedback from others. In fact, they often feel that asking for feedback would signal a lack of confidence in themselves. Therefore, they resist asking.

· Humble leaders resolve conflicts productively. Arrogant leaders tend to create conflict with others. This is due, in part, to a belief that conflict is a good thing that fuels competitive energy from others. Humble leaders feel that conflict creates a negative work environment and work hard to resolve conflicts.

· Humble leaders give others honest feedback.The arrogant leaders believe their job is to be the judge and let others know when they make mistakes. Their feedback is almost always negative and corrective. The humble leader realizes that honest feedback needs to reflect an individual’s performance.

Folkman says these behaviors listed above represent the largest differences between arrogant and humble leaders. “Looking over the list,” Folkman says, “it isn’t difficult to realize why humble leaders win. In many ways, humble leaders believe that leadership is the ability to get work done through others. In contrast, arrogant leaders believe leadership is the ability to get work done by others.”

7. Tribal leadership

here are 5 stages of Tribal Leadership and you can consciously transition a group to the next level.

1. “Everything sucks”

2. “My Life Sucks”

3. “I’m Great”

4. “We’re Great”

5. “Life is Great”

Tribal Leadership focuses only two things — words people use and types of relationships they form

language is the first sign of the state of the culture

8. The leadership challenge

Read this book for a class the book had a lot of interesting concepts but not enough practical solutions for real world, on the job problems. Had a very "rose colored glasses" way of looking at leadership which is not always true when faced with real people