I have worked for some really toxic leaders in my lifetime. Over the decades, I’ve figured out that even well-intentioned people can be toxic leaders without knowing it. As a team and leadership performance coach for the past 15 years, my job has been to help leaders show up as people others want to follow; to help employees feel cared for, and as a result, be intrinsically motivated to care about their company’s mission. These books represent the figurative fuel in my tank for this work, and I hope you find them useful.
I wrote
One Drop of Poison: How One Bad Leader Can Slowly Kill Your Company
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.
'If you're ready for a new way of doing business, this is the book for you' Daniel H. Pink, author of To Sell Is Human and Drive
'Bob Chapman is on a mission to change the way businesses treat their employees' Inc.magazine
Do you want to boost the morale, loyalty, creativity and performance of your employees?
In Everybody Matters, CEO Bob Chapman and bestselling author Raj Sisodia challenge traditional thinking about how to run a business and show you how to lead your company so that everyone feels valued.
As CEO of Barry-Wehmiller, Bob Chapman has pioneered a dramatically different…
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.
The New York Times-bestselling author of Start With Why, Leaders Eat Last, and Together Is Better offers a bold new approach to business strategy by asking one question: are you playing the finite game or the infinite game?
In The Infinite Game, Sinek applies game theory to explore how great businesses achieve long-lasting success. He finds that building long-term value and healthy, enduring growth - that playing the infinite game - is the only thing that matters to your business.
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.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In her latest book, Brené Brown writes, “If we want to find the way back to ourselves and one another, we need language and the grounded confidence to both tell our stories and be stewards of the stories that we hear. This is the framework for meaningful connection.”
Don’t miss the five-part HBO Max docuseries Brené Brown: Atlas of the Heart!
In Atlas of the Heart, Brown takes us on a journey through eighty-seven of the emotions and experiences that define what it means to be human. As she maps the necessary skills and…
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.
Does your Agile team experience the following common problems?
Members use established Agile practices and tools, but with little motivation or buy-in.
Even though the team is cross-functional, members don’t collaborate effectively or leverage everyone’s abilities.
Rather than act empowered, they wait for permission and approval.
Improvement has stalled — the team performs okay, but it can do so much better.You can’t solve these problems with more practices, rules, and tools. These are people problems.
If you’re a manager, Scrum Master, project manager, or delivery lead — or you aspire to be — you can make all the difference to…
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.
In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Patrick Lencioni once again offers a leadership fable that is as enthralling and instructive as his first two best-selling books, The Five Temptations of a CEO and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. This time, he turns his keen intellect and storytelling power to the fascinating, complex world of teams. Kathryn Petersen, Decision Tech's CEO, faces the ultimate leadership crisis: Uniting a team in such disarray that it threatens to bring down the entire company. Will she succeed? Will she be fired? Will the company fail? Lencioni's utterly gripping tale serves as…
Most toxic leaders don’t know they’re toxic. They don’t wake up every morning thinking, “How can I destroy my teams today?” When toxic leaders promote and hire other leaders, they always choose people who think about leadership as they do. This is how it spreads into a toxic culture.
My book aims to help leaders understand the hidden costs of toxic leadership, determine whether they are toxic themselves, and determine what they can do to turn things around. The goal is to help leaders of all levels raise their awareness of toxic leadership impacts and bolster their defenses, keeping a vigilant watch to ensure toxic leaders get help before it’s too late.
