At this point, 2019 is officially halfway over, but that does not mean that it is too late to work on your New Years resolution of being more productive at work. If you need inspiration from other leaders who were able to shape their careers, I have compiled a list below of some of the top books on leadership for the year.
“The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance” by Steven Rogelberg
Meetings are hardly the highlight of most people’s workdays, so what if there was a way to attend fewer but more effective meetings? Steven Rogelberg delivers evidence-based ideas on how to improve meetings, drawing on his work as a researcher of teamwork and meetings at the University of North Carolina Charlotte.
“Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World” by Cal Newport
This book follows Newport’s first book, “Deep Work,” and explores the effects of technological interruptions on our personal lives. Newport suggests that people adopt a “full-fledged philosophy of technological use,” and fleshes out the steps to do so that are a little bit more drastic than simply not keeping phones at the bedside.
“Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries” by Safi Bahcall
In this book, Safi Bahcall explains how goal-oriented teams start to reject new ideas and suggests, instead, better ways to nurture them. One of the arguments that Bahcall makes is that structure is underappreciated, meanwhile, culture is appreciated too much, and that this contributes to the problem of not embracing the crazy notions.
“Nine Lies about Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World” by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall
Buckingham and Goodall assert that many of the basic truths of the workplace are not actual truths, but are distorted conventions and wrong assumptions. Their book examines ingrained ideas and challenges them, which can help one to rethink their organization’s thinking.
“The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World” by Melinda Gates
Gates weaves in personal stories of her life and of the women she’s met to call to action the need to empower women in order to change the world. She organizes the book by topic to explain that empowering women is the key to lasting change.