The best (practical) books to help you thrive not just survive as a leader

I remember vividly the moment, while researching change, when I read an article by Jeffrey Pfeffer on power in organisations. It was an ah-ha moment for me in making sense of some of the behaviours I was witnessing at work. Marie McIntyre, who studied with Pfeffer, wrote Secrets to Winning at Office Politics and writes in a much more accessible and practical way on understanding and working with these politics, while maintaining your own integrity. Many a mentee has said to me, ‘I’m not interested in the politics, I just want to do my job.' And my response to that is that if you want to be successful in your career, then you need to not just understand but work with the politics. But there are ways to do this, while still being you. And this book helps with how.

I met Susan while doing an Exec Leadership Program with McKinsey and her talk and this book have been pivotal in helping me navigate how I respond to challenges within the workplace. Despite our best intentions, sometimes things go awry, and our emotions can flood us in these moments rendering us ineffective. This book helped me to learn that our emotions are data not direction, and the practical techniques to use to not just learn to live with these emotions, but rather to learn from them. It has made me more resilient as a leader, buffering the challenges by learning my emotions. 

Like most people, my brain can let me down at times with the endless chatter or ‘classroom inside my head’ as I like to call it. There was an amazing moment on a McKinsey course I did, where we all had to share our deepest darkest secret internal chatter about ourselves, and it was all versions of ‘I am inadequate.’ I love this book for how it normalises that chatter, but also provides practical, relatable strategies to use to help harness it. It explores what we can do ourselves, how we can change our environment to help us, what we can ask of our ‘board of advisors,’ and also how we can return the favour in helping others, when that voice of doubt gets too loud. 

While we would love to think we are always rational, we are hard-wired for story not the rational data (albeit key data can be a strong anchor in a story). I started my career far more in the assumption of rational data trumps all, but recognised, through bumps and bruises, how stories can overtake decision-making. When I learned how to tell a better story, I learned how to get the results I needed. Gabrielle is such a down-to-earth, energising speaker and writer, and this book provided me with such a practical, relatable framework for always having a good story or two in my back pocket.  

This book was recommended to me just as I accepted a big Executive role. I had the benefit of a two-week break between the two jobs and spent time on Hamilton Island with my feet up, processing its content and developing from that a clear but simple approach to how I was going to have the most impact in that next role. It worked. And it set up my career from there. I keep going back to this book each time I take on a new role, and while I don’t read it end to end anymore, the prompts within it are always useful practical reminders to help anchor my focus before starting a new senior role so I can have effective impact fast.