 | Leaders Eat Last – Simon Sinek Reading Leaders eat Last was the first time that the lightbulb lit up in my mind that I might actually want to manage a team. I strongly value egalitarianism and humility. Managers, by their very nature, sit at a higher level in a hierarchy. Hierarchy challenges humility and equality. This book showed me a path to align leadership and service to a team in a way that deeply resonated with me. |
 | Start with Why – Simon Sinek Purpose, the why, is the most powerful factor in uniting people to work toward a common goal. Start with Why made me stop and think about my why. Ultimately that introspection led me into people management. Now, I try to keep a clear focus for my team. The team focus should be unifying, but also allow individuals to align their own individual whys to the team’s purpose. It is easy to make quick decisions in a fast-moving business world. Stopping to think about the why is time well spent and will keep you on the right path. |
 | Extreme Ownership – Jocko Willink Dealing with critical feedback is difficult for everyone. When you are an individual contributor, how you view your own efforts and the influence of other people’s work on outcomes can seem very clear cut. Effective team leaders need to take a different approach. As a team leader you own responsibility of the outcome regardless of whose “fault” any mistakes were. Extreme Ownership makes this incredibly simple and clear, which made it much easier for me to own failures as a team leader. |
 | How to Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carnegie How to win friends and influence people is a classic recommendation. Most of your management peers will have read it. This alone is enough of a reason for you to read it. A shared connection point like a book is a good icebreaker for networking. I am a naturally introverted person, and I was not very interested in networking before becoming a people manager. This book helped me understand the value of networking, which in turn increased my motivation to do it. |
 | The Fearless Organization – Amy Edmondson The Fearless Organization helped me connect the dots on what is needed for diverse teams to meet their promised higher performance output. Diverse teams only achieve better performance when the culture is inclusive. This book gives insight into the micro-behaviors that can create or destroy inclusion for a team. |
 | Radical Candor – Kim Scott Radical Candor provides specific structures that you can leverage within a team to improve critical discussions and drive decision-making. I found the ideas helpful to think about how different process structures support different types of conversations. I think the examples from the book work well in highly connected teams working on larger projects. |
 | The Coaching Habit – Michael Bungay Stanier I read this after taking a training class from the author. The training was better than the book, but the book is definitely worth a read if you don’t have access to the training. The main theme is to stay curious and quiet a little bit longer to tame your advice monster. This approach helps you guide coaches to find their own solutions to the real underlying problem as opposed to giving an answer to the first superficial problem you hear. The techniques feel a bit silly at first but really do work. You will see this if you role-play coach for someone who works in an area you don’t understand. This book will teach you the difference between giving advice and coaching. |
 | Lean In – Sheryl Sandberg This is a great read to learn about the specific challenges facing women in leadership roles and why the representation there is still lower than it could be. While this is useful to expand your diversity and inclusion perspective as a manager, it spoke to me even more as someone who values time with my family. I think many modern Dad’s will relate to the challenges and desires discussed in Lean In. Reading this book now may not feel as revolutionary as when it was written. Keep in mind that a lot of priorities have shifted in the direction of this book, but it was not always that way. |
 | The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership – Richard Branson This is more of a leadership book than purely people management, but I include it here for a few reasons. I read this book right around the time I first started managing people, so I will always associate it with that time. I also find that this book’s lessons on achieving success while having fun and being unique are important reminders for people managers. It is easy for people managers to fall into the trap of acting as a cog in large machine. You need to have the courage to manage with your own individual flair and energy. |
 | StrengthsFinder – Don Clifton We all have natural default strengths that shape how we view the world. Strengthsfinder helps you understand your own specific strengths. More importantly for people managers, it helps you understand that your direct reports may look at the world differently than you do. Understanding someone’s individual strengths and uniqueness is the key to managing success. |