Books that have made me stronger in my work. Part 1. Personal Development

It all started several years ago when I decided to end one of my conference presentations with a bonus slide on the best relevant books I read on the subject. It seemed like the audience appreciated it and the slide ended up being one of the most shared ones from that deck online, with further offline requests, too. It soon became a tradition, which resulted in recommending four distinct collections of books. (You can explore some of them on the hashtag #booksthatmakemestrongeratwork on Linkedin, too).

Now I am going to share them here separately, every week for the next month. Once all four collections are published, I will link them across all four articles too. The collections are going to be published in priority order, based on the results of unscientific polls conducted with my networks, followers and friends on Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook. 

1. Personal development - 30,2% of the votes
2. Content/Product alignment - 27.8% of the votes 
3. All things Innovation - 24.5% of the votes 
4. Leadership development - 17.5% of the votes

Each entry will cover five books and I invite you to contribute your recommendations on the subject in the comments. So, without further ado, this is the first entry covering the subject of personal development.

Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust and Get Extraordinary Results by Judith E. Glaser. 

When I first came across the concept of different types of intelligence, from linguistical, logical-mathematical to spatial, I realised how much more work I need to do to prepare myself for challenges ahead of me. This development naturally was connected to the area of working with other people. Stumbling upon this book helped me enormously, as it tackled one of the building blocks of human interaction - conversations and influencing through them.

Quote: To put Conversational Intelligence to work, stop thinking of your job as managing resistance and instead accept resistance as a natural part of the change. People need to challenge new ideas before they can accept them. For full ownership and accountability to take place, people need to be in the conversation about how to change rather than being asked to merely comply. When leaders reframe in this way, they see that conversations release new energy for change—which will propel their efforts forward faster. 

 I placed this book in the personal development rather than leadership bucket because before reading it I never actively considered conversational intelligence as one of the most potent tools in my portfolio. This book helped me to grow, and we’ll look at this topic in more depth in a separate article on leadership development, where the excellent Start with Why book will be featured.  

Once you got your conversations right, you’d also remember that 65% of information shared by someone is delivered by non-verbal communication, and that’s where the second book comes in - What Every Body Is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People by Joe Navarro. 

Joe spent decades with the FBI before becoming one of the most well established and media-friendly specialists in body language and non-verbal communication. He authored several books on the subject, but if I were to choose one to recommend, it would be this one.

Quote: By examining what’s normal, we begin to recognize and identify what’s abnormal. When you interact with others, try to establish their baseline behaviours. For our purposes, any touching of the face, head, neck, shoulder, arm, hand, or leg in response to a negative stimulus (e.g., a difficult question, an embarrassing situation, or stress as a result of something heard, seen, or thought) is a pacifying behaviour. These stroking behaviours don’t help us to solve problems; rather, they help us to remain calm while we do. In other words, they soothe us. Men prefer to touch their faces. Women prefer to touch their necks, clothing, jewellery, arms, and hair.

The third book - Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges by Amy Cuddy - taught me a lot about how to remain true to myself, even in the most challenging situations. I am not at all saying I perfected this approach, there is a lot more to be learnt, but I certainly have been trying to bring my full self to most situations, striving for a state of ‘presence’. It’s a state where we stop worrying about what impressions we are making on others. It’s not about longing for some sort of spiritual transformation (although it should certainly lead you there!), but instead nudging ourselves to manifest our potential at any moment. 

Quote: Presence stems from believing our own stories. Power affects our thoughts, feelings, behaviours, and even physiology in fundamental ways that directly facilitate or obstruct our presence, our performance, and the very course of our lives. when you become present, you allow others to be present. Presence doesn’t make you dominant in an alpha sense; it actually allows you to hear other people. And for them to feel heard.   

Interestingly, while I don’t really enjoy auto-biographies as a genre, I have learnt a lot from some particular ones, and they all come from the football realm. The Italian manager Carlo Ancelotti, one of the most decorated coaches in the history of the sport, is considered by many to be a true leader, an empathetic person, who in the course of his management career was able to build strong, effective relationships and get teams to win at the highest level while remaining gentle and kind to those around him. 

Sport is often associated with alpha-males and a certain ruthlessness and I was delighted to learn from someone representing a completely different style, a servant leadership - Quiet Leadership Winning Hearts, Minds and Matches by Carlo Ancelotti. This book follows the trend set by other great coaches, sir Alex Ferguson and Sir Clive Woodward, with their autobiographies resembling corporate leadership books, rather than sports anecdotes, as some might expect them to be. 

Quote: I'm in favour of innovation, just as long as the game does not suffer for it. A calm mind, its thoughts well-organised and its plans well-considered is the most necessary ingredient for a quiet leadership. My approach is born of the idea that a leader should not need to rant and rave or rule with an iron fist, but rather that their power should be implicit. It should be crystal clear who is in charge, and their authority must result from respect and trust rather than fear. If you wish to lead, you need to be respected. Where lack of respect is present, leadership does not exist. If you fail to be respected, you can’t guide people to aspire working in your favour.

I was always struggling to come up with credible, interesting answers to a popular question of whom I would invite to a dinner party if I could invite anyone who ever lived on this planet. Having read this book - Trillion-Dollar Coach The Leadership Handbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt - I can safely say that I am sure of one of my guests. 

Bill Campbell seems like a person everyone should have in their inner circle - warm but direct, strategic yet attentive to detail, considered yet imaginative. A former football coach turned business coach and board(s) member, who worked with the Silicon Valley greats - from Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google, Susan Wojcicki at YouTube, Steve Jobs at Apple, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Marissa Mayer at Yahoo, and Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook. Reading a book about him really made me think a lot about the role of mentors and coaches in my own career and life and how I could be better at developing and serving others. 

Quote: Pick the right players, the top characteristics to look for are smarts and hearts: the ability to learn fast, a willingness to work hard, integrity, grit, empathy, and a team-first attitude. People are most effective when they can be completely themselves and bring their full identity to work. Studies show that positive leadership makes it easier to solve problems, so Bill would praise teams and people, give them a hug, and clap them on the shoulder to boost their confidence and comfort. Then, when he asked the tough questions, everyone understood that he was on their side and that he was pushing on things because he wanted them to be better, to be successful. He would always get to the heart of a problem but in a positive way. 

Thank you for making it to the end, hopefully, you’ve found it useful - next week I’ll be recommending the best books I have read on content/product cooperation. Meanwhile, I am inviting you to send me your recommendations on the best personal development books in the comments. Thank you and happy reading!