1. How Nasa Builds Teams by Charles J. Pellerin
Mission Critical Soft Skills for Engineers, Project Teams and Scientists. A must read for team leaders of technical people. After you read it, if you want help with implementing these principles in your organization, contact me, since I am certified to coach the 4-D method.
2. Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves
Succinctly shows how to deal with emotions creatively. Simple, easy to follow steps. Well written and includes enhanced online EQ assessment.
3. Improv Wisdom: Don’t Prepare, Just Show Up by Patricia Ryan Madson
Want to change your perspective? This book, by an Improv instructor teaches simply, how to lead your life, saying yes to what is in front of you and how to open up your perspective to the world. This book challenges you to take a different look at your everyday life. Great to get you out of your old tired ways of thinking, doing, reacting…….
4. Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono
Six Thinking Hats is a flexible and easy-to-use thinking process that leads to amazing results with innovative thinking, improved communication, and reduced meeting time. Leaders will benefit from this problem solving method.
5. Zapp, the Lightnting of Empowerment by William C. Byham, Ph.D.
It will teach the manager to stop fire fighting, inspire and motivate your team. Written in the form of a fairy tale, this book provides situational examples of issues that greatly affect employee performance, attitude, and motivation. It’s a quick easy read, one that details situations most readers have undoubtedly experienced at work. It’s wacky, funny, enlightening and entertaining. Once you get zapped you’ll remember just how simple empowerment and motivation can be, and have some tools to improve your organization. Have a sense of humor reading it, the format is a parable, but the learning is sound.
6. The Thin book of Smart People Skills, 8 Tools for the Savvy Leader by Katina Cremona
For new managers and experienced managers who struggle with emotional intelligence skills. These tips give a quick revision and are perfect for busy managers. All the skills are applicable. Concise, short must have book!
7. What Got you Here won’t get you There by Marshall Goldsmith
Straightforward advise for all leaders. Blunt and clear, this book will give you 20 habits that may be keeping you from the top. Once you identify yourself, you can learn how to improve.
8. Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath or Now Discover your strengths by Marcus Buckingham
For most people, our natural talents go untapped, especially at work. Our society has taught us to focus on fixing our shortcomings, rather than developing our strengths. To help people uncover their talents, Gallup introduced the first version of the StrengthsFinder in the 2001 management book Now, Discover Your Strengths. The book spent more than five years on the bestseller lists. In StrengthsFinder 2.0 Gallup unveils a new and improved version of its popular assessment. While you can read this book in one sitting, you’ll use it as a reference for decades. It’s loaded with hundreds of strategies for applying your strengths, and helps you to understand those around you who have strengths and tendencies that are different from your own.
9. Soar with Your Strengths by Donald O. Clifton and Paula Nelson
This book is good as an introduction to a more fruitful organizational culture. It will help the manager let go and engage tools for helping his/her team to do their best. It teaches the manager to do more of what you do well and stop doing (delegate) what you are not good at. Our culture teaches us to fix weaknesses, when maximizing and honing strengths generates better results.
10. Never check Email in the Morning, and other unexpected strategies for making your work life work By Julie Morgenstern
Deciding what is most important to add more value. How close am I to the revenue line? Am I saving or making money? are the 2 criteria for your daily decisions. Grab and go solutions can dramatically improve efficiency.
11. Managing Transitions, Making the most of change by William Bridges
The Classic guide to the human side of change. Useful for manager leading change. Gives practical staratgies for minimizing the disruptions caused by workplace change.
12. Crucial conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler
How to have more powerful dialogue that gets results without being abrasive.
13. True Purpose by Tim Kelley
A specific and comprehensive approach to finding your purpose. The book is filled with exercises that will help you hone in on your very specific life purpose- the real power of this book is in your application of the exercises as you gain greater and greater clarity about your true purpose. Great for those in mid life or transition or wondering, “what should I be doing with my life?” Most useful if working with a trained coach to provide assistance and support while you do the excercises.
14. Taming Your Gremlin, A surprisingly simple method for getting out of your own way by Rick Carson
We all have inner conflicts that are holding us back from being our best. This is a funny book complete with excercises for helping you identify what limiting beliefs and defeating behaviors you have and then freeing you from them.
15. The Leadership Challenge by James Kouzes
An inspirational and practical handbook, this expanded revision of a bestselling manual originally published in 1987 offers sound advice to corporate leaders and entrepreneurs, to managers and employees and to aspiring leaders in retail, manufacturing, government, community, church and school settings. Drawing on interviews and a questionnaire survey of more than 3000 leaders, the authors identify five fundamental practices of exemplary leadership: challenge the status quo; inspire a shared vision; enable others to act; model the way forward by setting an example; tap individuals’ inner drives by linking rewards and performance. Kouzes, chairman and CEO of TPG/Learning Systems, and Posner, managing partner of Santa Clara University’s Executive Development Center in California, write insightful, down-to-earth, jargon-free prose