Leadership isn’t something fixed; it shifts as the world and our challenges change. Leading well is more than just telling people what to do – it calls for purposeful attention, emotional intelligence, flexibility, vulnerability, curiosity and more. The 5 books below will give you solid frameworks and time-tested practical wisdom to help you lift your leadership game. But your leadership journey is still your own. So use these leaders’ ideas to create your own personalised leadership framework; one that fits your specific experience, goals, and current challenges.
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The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You – Julie Zhuo
Julie Zhuo’s The Making of a Manager is a down‑to‑earth guide for people who suddenly find themselves in charge of others and feel a bit out of their depth. It’s based on her journey from designer to VP at Facebook, so it’s full of real stories, not theory. The big message: managers aren’t born, they’re built. Your job is to multiply your team’s impact, not be the star individual contributor who does everything yourself.
She breaks management into three simple buckets: purpose (is everyone clear on why we’re doing this?), people (do we have the right folks in the right roles, and are they growing?), and process (are our ways of working helping or getting in the way?). When something’s off, you usually have a problem in one of those three.
For new managers, she focuses hard on the first three months: listen more than you talk, build trust in 1:1s, ask “dumb” questions, and get clear on what success looks like before you try to fix things. Being honest about what you don’t know is better than pretending you’ve got it all handled.
Feedback is treated as a core skill, not a formality. Keep it frequent, specific and tied to behaviours, not personalities. Use 1:1s for coaching and career conversations, not just status updates, and stretch people with real responsibilities so they grow faster.
She also takes a strong stance on hiring and culture: who you hire now is what your team becomes later, and “brilliant jerks” aren’t worth the damage they do to trust and morale. Culture shows up in everyday decisions—who you promote, what you tolerate, and how consistent you are.
For leaders and managers, this book is useful as a practical playbook: shift time from doing to enabling, use purpose–people–process to diagnose team problems, turn 1:1s into development time, and treat hiring and culture as some of your highest‑leverage work.
To buy The Making of a Manager, go HERE.
When They Win, You Win: Being a Great Manager Is Simpler Than You Think – Russ Laraway
When They Win, You Win is a straight-talking handbook on how to be a reliably good manager without overcomplicating it. Russ Laraway boils great management down to a few simple moves you repeat over and over, rather than a big, fuzzy list of “leadership qualities.”
The big idea: your job is to help your people win, consistently. When they’re clear on what matters, getting regular coaching, and making real progress in their careers, everyone wins – them, you, and the business.
Laraway’s core framework is “The Big 3”:
Direction: Making sure everyone knows exactly what success looks like and how their work ties to the bigger mission.
Coaching: Giving frequent, specific guidance, both on what to keep doing and what to improve, with lots more positive reinforcement than criticism.
Career: Having real conversations about people’s long‑term goals and building concrete plans to help them move toward those goals, not just this quarter’s targets.
Laraway gives simple tools for each pillar: using a short list of priorities instead of endless “top 10,” turning vague feedback into clear “continue” and “improve” messages, and running three structured career chats (life story, dreams, action plan). He also pushes managers and organisations to actually measure how good their managers are, instead of guessing.
The book is a simple, easy‑to‑learn operating system to help you set sharp direction, make coaching a normal part of 1:1s, and bake career conversations into the rhythm of the year. It’s especially useful if you want a small, memorable set of habits you and your team can actually stick to.
To buy When They Win You Win, go HERE
Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts – Brene Brown
Dare to Lead is Brené Brown’s playbook for leading with more courage and a lot less armour. It’s about building teams where people can speak honestly, take smart risks and do hard things together without pretending they’re fine all the time.
The big idea: vulnerability isn’t a soft, “nice to have” – it’s the entry ticket to real courage. Brave leaders are willing to have tough, honest conversations, own their mistakes and show up as human, not as bullet‑proof heroes.
Brown organises the book around a few core skills. First is “rumbling with vulnerability”: instead of sidestepping hard topics, you lean into them with curiosity and clear language. That might look like naming the elephant in the room, or saying “Here’s the story I’m telling myself…” in a tricky moment, and inviting others to do the same.
Second is “living into your values.” You don’t just have a long list on a poster; you pick one or two values that really matter and define what they look like in everyday behaviour. Those values then guide how you hire, make decisions, give feedback and hold people to account.
Third is trust, broken down into her BRAVING checklist (boundaries, reliability, accountability, vault, integrity, non‑judgment, generosity). Instead of “We just don’t trust each other,” you can point to specific behaviours- maybe reliability is slipping, or the “vault” is broken because confidences aren’t being kept – and work on those directly.
Finally, she focuses on “learning to rise” after failure or conflict. Leaders learn to catch their emotional reactions, question the quick stories their brain invents (“They don’t respect me,” “I’m terrible at this”), and replace them with a more accurate, more generous narrative. That’s how you build resilience and psychological safety without dropping standards.
Dare to Lead is a guide for leaders who want to create braver, more honest team cultures: fewer armoured behaviours like avoidance and blame, more clear values, cleaner conversations and stronger trust. It especially useful if you’re looking to level up on psychological safety, feedback skills and values‑based leadership.
The Adaptation Advantage: Let Go, Learn Fast, and Thrive in the Future of Work – Heather McGowan & Chris Shipley
The Adaptation Advantage is all about how to stay relevant when work keeps changing under our feet. Heather McGowan argues that in a world of automation, AI and constant disruption, the real edge isn’t what you know today, it’s how fast you can learn, unlearn and adapt.
The big idea: stop defining yourself by your job title and start defining yourself by your ability to grow and by the kinds of problems you want to solve. Roles, tools and org charts will change; your capacity to adapt is what lets you thrive through all of it.
McGowan makes the case that the old “learn once, work for decades” model is dead. Instead, careers are now a continuous loop of learning, experimenting, and reinventing yourself. That means “soft skills” like curiosity, empathy, creativity and collaboration are actually the new power skills, because they’re what machines can’t do for us.
For leaders, the book pushes you to build organisations where learning is built into the work, not bolted on as a yearly training. That looks like: treating sideways moves as valuable, creating cross‑functional projects, normalising experiments and mistakes, and leading with more transparency about uncertainty. It’s a great pick if you want to stop just “managing roles” and start growing people who can handle whatever the future of work throws at us.
To buy The Adaptation Advantage, go HERE
Leadership Unblocked: Break Through the Beliefs That Limit Your Potential – Muriel Wilkins
Leadership Unblocked unpacks why smart leaders get stuck and how you can get out of your own way. Muriel Wilkins shows that the real problem usually isn’t skill, time, or org structure – it’s the invisible beliefs running in the back of your mind.
The big idea: if you want different leadership results, you have to update your mental “operating system,” not just bolt on new behaviours. Wilkins calls out common blockers like “I need to be involved,” “I can’t say no,” “If I can do it, so can you,” and “I don’t belong here,” and shows how each one quietly drives overwork, micromanaging, strained relationships, or imposter feelings.
The book is built around real coaching stories: you see leaders recognise their pattern, trace it back to a hidden belief, and then experiment with a new one (for example, shifting from “I need to be involved” to “I’m responsible for outcomes, not every task”). Each chapter ends with “coach yourself” prompts you can use personally or with your team.
Leadership Unblocked is ideal if you already know the basics of management but feel trapped by recurring patterns – overdoing, overcontrolling, people‑pleasing, or self‑doubt. It’s a great mindset reset, with simple language and easy processes for unblocking what’s really holding you back.
To buy Leadership Unblocked, go HERE.
But wait, there’s more…
A few personal stories about the quest for leadership excellence.
Any Dumb-Ass Can Do It: Learning Moments from an Everyday CEO of a Multi-Billion-Dollar Company – Gary Ridge
Any Dumb-Ass Can Do It is the story of Garry’s grand adventure in his own words, broken down into learning moments – those flashes of insight that have made all the difference in the world. In his trademark Aussie storytelling fashion, Garry, fomrer CEO of WD40 Company, shares experiences from his life that combine to create a deep well of leadership wisdom. To buy, Any Dumb-Ass Can Do It, go HERE.
The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life – Steven Bartlett
The Diary of a CEO is a playbook for success, synthesising insights from Bartlett’s own entrepreneurial journey and thousands of interviews for his popular podcast. The 33 laws are organized into four key pillars :
The Self: Laws focusing on self-awareness, discipline, and personal mastery. A central idea here is to “fill your buckets in the right order”: prioritise building your knowledge and skills before chasing network, resources, or reputation .
The Story: Laws about perception and communication, such as “The frame matters more than the picture,” emphasising how context and presentation often shape reality more than the content itself .
The Philosophy: Laws on strategy and mindset, including “You must sweat the small stuff,” which advocates for the power of small, consistent improvements (Kaizen) to achieve massive, long-term results .
The Team: Laws on building culture, including “Ask who, not how,” which is about surrounding yourself with talented people rather than trying to do everything yourself .
A practical, easy read, The Diary o a CEO reveals that excellence is not a matter of luck but of following enduring, fundamental laws grounded in psychology and behavioral science . To buy The Diary of a CEO, go HERE.
My Life in Full: Work, Family and Our Future – Indra Nooyi
Indra Nooyi redefined what it means to be an exceptional leader. She transformed PepsiCo with a unique vision, a vigorous pursuit of excellence and a deep sense of purpose. In this memoir, she reveals the difficulties that came with managing her demanding job with a growing family. Nooyi makes an urgent, actionable call for how we might really blend work and family without compromising our business goals or our connections with those we love. To buy My Life in Full, go HERE.
Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone – Satya Nadella
Nadella examines how people, organisations and societies can and must transform – ‘hit refresh’ – in their persistent quest for new energy, new ideas, and continued relevance and renewal. Yet at its core, this book is about humans, and how one of our essential qualities – empathy – will become ever more valuable in a world where technological advancement will alter the status quo as never before. To buy Hit Refresh, go HERE.
64 Shots: Leadership in a Crazy World – Kevin Roberts
64 Shots is a modern survival guide designed to help leaders and professionals navigate volatile, complex, and unpredictable environments. The book distills Roberts’ extensive global corporate experience – including his long tenure as the Worldwide CEO of advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi – into 64 short, punchy entries (or “shots”) grouped into 16 categories. It’s a comprehensive snap-shot style leadership cheat-sheet; a quick reference guide for busy leaders. To buy 64 Shots, go HERE.