Great Leadership Books

One of the tools for developing the Management team reporting to me is what we’ve called “The Flamingo Book Club”.  Each month, we pick a book to read, and one person’s role is to facilitate a discussion about it with the rest of the group. 

I figure we could spend a bomb on sending the individuals off to leadership training; however, generally I think that you can get a lot out of just spending time with people and challenging them, giving them feedback, and working together to set boundaries.

We’ve done about 3 of these now, and they’ve gone really well.  After we have read and discussed each book, a couple of copies are added to the library, and we do a book review for the team at the full team meeting.  This way, we get to share the learnings and include the team in what the managers are up to.

The first book we chose was Susan Scott’s “Fierce Conversations”.  This is about having conversations with people that get to the heart of issues, rather than avoiding them and letting wounds fester.  She explores why this is needed, and how to approach it.  That first month, one of the managers used the techniques in the book to give some difficult feedback to one of her team members, and she was very successful.  Another manager felt extremely challenged by it because he is incredibly passive/defensive and won’t say what’s on his mind enough.  Now, when we give each other a bit of tough love, we say “Uh oh, a Fierce Conversation.”

The second book that we read was John C Maxwell’s “The 360 Degree Leader”.  I have loved Maxwell’s writing for many years, and his take on leadership and teamwork are particularly challenging yet simple and truthful.  I find his writing to be a wonderful checklist at any time.

I picked this particular book because I wanted my people to see that leading from wherever you are in an organisation is critical.  So many people think that they deserve to be leaders and that the world has not yet recognised their stellar leadership potential by making them CEO.  Great leaders have a stillness and self-confidence, and this book really gets into so many aspects of leading.  It was a great trigger for much meaningful discussion, and challenged one of my managers who is particularly competitive with others.

John C Maxwell has a great many other books, and I heartily recommend them, and his website at http://www.maximumimpact.com/

Our third book wasn’t a book: I asked everyone to watch the movie Thirteen Days about the Cuban Missile Crisis.  First, it’s an enthralling film.  Second, it closely follows history, which is borne out by the historical commentary and the book of the same name by Robert Kennedy.  Third, it shows leadership under pressure – stripped of all its flashy glitz, naked and in many ways alone.  It was by far everyone’s favourite leadership learning so far.  I’ll be doing a separate post on Leadership and the Cuban Missile crisis soon (although I do note that the new White House Press Secretary apparently had not heard of it before a couple of months ago…what a shocker).

Our next book is Lance Armstrong’s “It’s Not About the Bike”, which I hear is a corker.  We have a few others lined up to follow: “Good to Great” by Jim Collins, Daniel Goleman’s “Working with Emotional Intelligence”, “Authentic Happiness” by positive psychology guru Martin Seligman.  We ambitously put Nelson Mandela’s autobiography “Last Walk to Freedom” on the list.  I suspect it will take us a while to read.