The best books to help you avoid being the leader everyone wants to leave

I love this book because it soundly silences leaders who act as if caring about the people who work for them isn’t compatible with profits. Bob Chapman, the CEO of Barry-Wehmiller, proves that you can care about employees and also be a successful $1.7 billion company.

This is an important part of my belief structure as a leadership and team performance coach. This book also introduced me to the connection between the health of our work cultures and the health of society in general. We make our marks as leaders when we leave the world a better place, not just when we increase our company’s share price. Chapman shows us how it’s done.

Simon Sinek exposes how the twisted incentives of short-term profits are causing leaders to steer their companies off course. The book had a huge impact on me because it starkly revealed and explained the game my clients are really playing despite their claims to the contrary.

Because of this book, I was able to connect these motives to some of the worst toxic behaviors I observe in leaders and better understand why they behave this way. As someone often tasked with helping them change course, this book really helps me meet leaders where they are and help them move in a better direction.

I believe that emotional intelligence and the capacity for empathy are required tools for twenty-first-century leadership. This book is the map I keep with me for that journey. It is basically an encyclopedia of human emotion. So many people move through the day only able to describe their feelings with one of four emotions: Happy, sad, angry, and none-of-the-above.

This book really expanded my emotional vocabulary, helping me paint much clearer pictures of my emotional state. If you want to increase your emotional intelligence, start by reading this book. I found the audiobook, read by Brown, to be priceless, as she added a lot of off-script commentary that made me laugh out loud.

One of the core concepts of how we live our lives–including how we lead–is our mindset. This book, better than any other I’ve read, captures what a mindset actually is: values, beliefs, and principles, and how the three combine to make us feel right about our behaviors–even when we’re wrong.

We all have mindsets for driving, parenting, leading, being a partner, and many other areas of life. I find that in my work, the more that I can help someone examine their values, beliefs, and principles, the more success they will have in changing their behaviors. While the book is about more than mindsets, I continually use Broza’s explanation of the concept in my work.

We’ve heard that trust is a foundational part of high-performing teams for decades, but no one does as good a job connecting the dots between a lack of trust and low performance as Lencioni does in this book.

I continually use his five dysfunctions model in reverse to spot toxic company cultures and then walk leaders backward to see how the root cause is a lack of trust. Once leaders see this with their own eyes, they can’t shake it, and they immediately start to see how detrimental it is when they make their organizations unstable with constant reorganizations and layoffs. An understanding of what’s in this book was foundational for me to help leaders who don’t want to be toxic.