8 Best Books on Leadership and Management in 2024

Looking to become a stronger leader? If you have read some of my other blog posts, especially about book choices, you will know to expect some unexpected recommendations.

I find enormous value in the ability to take pieces of information, ideas, and philosophies from a multitude of sources, and weave it all into something that works well for myself and my organizations.

So, today we’re going to talk about the best books on leadership and management. Let’s get into it!

How I Chose the Books on this List

I love a book that provides real world examples, that are based on scientific research, and that validates it in multiple ways! My personal belief is that the best books on leadership and management have data to back up their real world examples.

While I enjoy the science and data, I have found through my personal experiences in management and leadership positions as well as from reading dozens of books, that this is as much art as science.

Great leadership is an amalgamation of art, science, and emotional intelligence, and when done properly, it is extremely satisfying.

Despite what many authors, and so called experts like to claim, there is no guaranteed formula for management and leadership success, and no one person has all the answers.

Therefore, guidelines in even the best books for managers are tools to be used in the appropriate place not on all occasions. As the saying goes “if the only tool you have is a hammer…” everything looks like a nail.

The tools we choose to put in our leadership box are no different. Thinking that any one tool is the best or only option is dead wrong. Highly effective people in leadership roles and the most effective supervisors, have a variety of tools at their disposal.

For that reason, this is a list of books that I highly recommend. Each one offers at least one important tool or perspective for successful leadership.

You will notice some books are conspicuous by their absence, such as The “Art of War” author Sun Tzu, and “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” author Stephen R Covey, so let me address those right now.

The Art of War, I find to be a true classic book and it lives up to everything that people say about it. But, there are two reasons I left it off the list. First, the Art of War is truly an advanced tool.

It is not a tool for someone just finding their leadership voice in my humble opinion. I have found it to be much more effective as my skills as a manager and my leadership experience have developed.

The second reason is that Sun Tzu, whom was likely a blend of leadership skills and ideas from a multitude of great leaders, is a warrior philosopher and doesn’t offer clear actionable advice for the new manager.

How does a manager effectively burn his ships? How do you balance emotional intelligence with “deceiving your enemies”? You need to know who you are before you can really make these principles part of your plan.

If you don’t yet have a philosophy of your own there are many other business books that will be more impactful at this moment.

As for the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, I have done some other blog posts about habits and I will do more in the future, but habits are a totally different ball game than what I intend to discuss here.

Here I want to provide you some actionable ‘one-minute manager’ type information for you to ruminate on. I want you to be able to take away from this post without having read the actual books.

Equip you with some tools and ideas that can benefit you right away and that may encourage you to read the books. You can easily Google the habits or re-hash them from a previous reading.

However, knowing the habits does not make you a great leader or make you prepared for success with your team members. Just as knowing the most important healthy eating habits does not help you unless you put together a plan to institute those habits. I love building habits, but this post is not about that.

Lastly, before I jump into the books that I recommend as actionable resources, I want to make sure that we are talking about the same things. Management and Leadership are not one in the same.

Management is a position, one that can be earned or one that can be offered to someone that is not worthy.

Being a leader is what we strive to be. As I found simplified in Nine Lies About Work recently, you are only a leader if people follow you. Those individuals follow you because they choose to, either due to your charisma, emotional intelligence, management skills, personality, power, etc., but they have chosen.

Individuals cannot necessarily choose to listen to their managers or not, but they do choose whom to follow and that makes you a leader. I will use the terms somewhat interchangeably because some of the books don’t draw a clear distinction. However, I will attempt to avoid using Management in the place of Leadership.

With that understood, I hope that you will find some real life advice in this blog post. If you can come away reading this with some ideas and plans then I will feel as though it was worth it.

If you can come away from this and make the jump from a good to great leader in the way Jim Collins writes about companies going from Good to Great, then we have hit it out of the park!

8 Best Books on Management and Leadership Reviewed

1. Leader’s Eat Last

Last update on 2023-03-04 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API

Simon Sinek, as I have mentioned in other posts, is one of my favorite authors. He has the ability to take these seemingly abstract concepts and put real world examples into place.

If you strive to be a true leader that others choose to follow, this is a book you must read. It is in direct contrast to many of the views that today’s managers take in regards to their people.

The news is filled, not with the best leaders, but the worst managers, that are constantly looking out for themselves one and only.

We hear stories all the time of CEO’s nearly bankrupting companies and walking away with golden parachutes. We hear about banks that defrauded customers and get a fine and a slap on the wrist.

You probably experience small scale travesties where you work such as poor managers taking the most prime vacation times from their staff. Those that consider themselves leaders but lack all emotional intelligence and sometimes regular intelligence.

The term eating last is both figurative and actual, because in the military it is said that the best leaders actually eat last. Their troops go through the chow hall line first then they get to eat only after their people have.

From a figurative sense, I spent the first 3 years of building my business making almost zero dollars but always ensuring that our staff was paid, vendors were paid and that we reinvested every dollar we made back into growing the business.

Not everyone is built to be able to put their finances, ego and wants behind those that follow them. But, to truly be a leader and absolutely to be a great leader you have to be ready and willing to do that.

What many leadership books don’t tell you is that who you are as a leader is truly built in the crucible. Until you have had the sky seemingly falling around you had to inspire everyone to take action that you would not have though about previously it is hard to know who you truly are.

Some managers may go their whole lives doing a good job but are never put in a situation that forces them to choose to put the good of their team members before themselves.

Even without facing calamity you can show your team members how you feel about them by doing the small things Show them that you understand that your success relies on them and therefore you will put them first. The customer might be number one, but your people should be 1A and you should be eating last.

2. Talking to Strangers

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Malcom Gladwell is not a traditional “management” author, so this may be one of the surprises, but he has the ability to make you put more thought into one minute of his books than most business book authors do through a whole series.

Malcom Gladwell makes me think of things in ways that I had never considered or did not even realize I was missing. Successful managers and the most successful leaders are able to open their minds to new ways of looking at the same old things.

Literally every manager that has ever lived has needed to at one point communicate with someone different than them.

Prior to this book I never realized how much of success is our ability to connect with others and to speak the same language. We can actually speak the same language, say English but effectively be speaking completely different languages.

There is story after story in this book of disastrous mistakes in communication on a personal or world scale.

Leadership is built around communication and understanding that we may be saying the same words and meaning different things has been eye opening for me.

Many poor leadership structures have failed because they assumed that everyone else understood what they intended and that they understood it in the same way. Gladwell opens our eyes to understand that much more often than we think that is not the case.

The take away from this is that you absolutely cannot assume others understand you the way you intend to be understood.

Leadership and management success require you to be able to see the world through the eyes of those that you are communicating your message to.

Great leaders inspire everyone around the, but you can’t do that if they don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.

3. Ego is the Enemy

Last update on 2023-03-04 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API

Everyone has an ego, including those in leadership and those being lead and despite the title I don’t believe that all ego is the enemy.

The author Ryan Holliday is a modern day Stoic and stoicism is an extremely interesting subject that I recommend you check out. Many a business book is written by a self important egomaniac.

Sometimes the enlarged ego comes from their success in their field, sometimes it comes from their success as an author and sometimes they are born with it. Growing ones ego could be counted among the habits of highly effective people if not for one thing.

A large unencumbered ego is not a positive, it is a negative. And when allowed to be out of control it can be yes an enemy to your own success and happiness.

True leadership is built on bringing out the best in others and allowing them to shine in their own right. That is difficult to accomplish if your concern is about making sure your own star shines bright.

Believing too greatly in your self importance keeps you from considering other perspectives and other course of action. Leaders with large egos rarely eat last and rarely focus their messaging on those needing to hear it.

When one thinks of Winston Churchill you may think of a man that lead the world from the clutches of Nazi Germany and you would be correct.

He was also a man with a significant ego, and in previous times in his career his ego had lead him into disaster.

However, if he had no ego it is hard to imagine him being confident enough to stand in the face of annihilation and continue on.

For that reason I do believe that a certain level of ego in important leadership roles is necessary but there is a fine line.

To my mind the best leaders can balance a level of self confidence that few can match with a level of humility that few others can match.

If you can be both, humble and confident I believe you are what leadership and management are meant to be. Where you can never allow yourself to go is to an air of superiority to those around you.

Keep in mind that there is ALWAYS someone smarter, richer, better looking, more educated, taller, etc. We are made of the opportunities we have and what we make of those opportunities, and nothing more.

4. Work Rules

Last update on 2023-03-04 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API

Lazlo Bock the author of this book was formerly a Googler , a company that took a leadership role in the renaissance of rethinking what corporate America looks like and what culture truly is.

Lazlo was in charge of the People Operations at Google, what most places call human resources.

Due to it’s size, and breadth Google is a place that people go to study leadership and management on a large and small scale. Countless leadership books have been written about Google.

Few books have been written by an insider with the first hand knowledge of the successes and pains that Google deals with regularly.

This book is about the approach that Google takes with its employees and for me as a business owner was a hell of an eye opener. For years I had been trying to reinvent the corporate culture in the business I had created.

We had build a system in which people were replaceable and while we did our jobs managing we failed at leadership.

We were not producing people that left us better than they came to us, and we rarely learned from our mistakes.

When we tried our hand at create a positive “culture” we looked at other companies, ready some of the best books about culture and did some other things. None of it made a difference, on employee satisfaction, retention, etc. What were we missing?

Well we though culture was created by a few pot lucks and a tv in the break room. We were so wrong, because our team couldn’t are less.

We offered to give the employees a budget to decorate the break room as they wanted and we had no takers. We had minimal involvement in any of the community service projects we coordinated, and we only received negative feedback.

Then I read this book and realized I lacked the emotional intelligence to even understand why it was failing.

Culture is not a one time thing, it is literally a way of life. I learned in an environment in which information was held back and openness was not the norm. Those are things that do not build corporate culture or foster strong leadership.

Executives, managers, and employees should have access to information in order to feel empowered. People that are empowered buy into the culture.

The moral of the story is that you can not build the ultimate team without a culture, and you cannot have culture without openness and honesty.

If you see yourself as a leader you have to embrace the truth about what motivates, and it is not receiving very little information and being told to just do your job. If you show leadership, people will follow you.

5. How to Lead when You’re not in Charge

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Each one of us will in some way fluctuate between a leadership and subordinate roles from one minute to the next. Nobody is immune to having to answer to someone including the CEO.

A CEO has shareholders, board members and employees to answer too. Even a founder and co founder have to answer to one another as well as employees. We are never in charge all of the time so this is a book that looks at the perspective of someone that does not have the final say.

Business has an ebb and flow and the people that answer to you today might be your boss tomorrow or vice versa.

As I discussed earlier, leadership is defined by whether or not someone will follow you. The leader in a particular situation isn’t always the most senior manager, best employee, or even a member of the team in charge.

Leadership can show its face in many ways, and you do not have to be limited by being in charge to show that leadership.

Business books normally approach leadership from a position of strength and decision making power but what about when you are not in that place.

If you are unable to influence the flow of events in front of you without being in charge, you will like never get to the level of being a trusted leader put in charge. The best leaders and certainly managers have the ability to drive success from an ancillary role.

If you want the ability to influence those things lateral and upward from you I highly recommend this book.

6. Start with Why

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I used to hate the word WHY! If I made a request or gave instructions as the one in charge and paying the bills I thought just do what I ask you to do.

Wrong way to think! I learned over time that the employee that just does everything they are told is not the best employee with the company’s best interests at heart. They are just the employee that does not want to make waves.

(Now, that is not to say that you want to be surrounded by people that argue and change things after you make a decision.)

The best managers, employees and leaders ask questions and they want to understand why. I would venture to say that the world’s greatest managers MUST consider the why and that their teams understand the WHY.

This is another masterpiece by author Simon Sinek and it relates primarily to how companies and business leaders should start with the “Why” of what they are doing.

Spending the time considering deeply the why of your venture will help you come to the how and what. The same concept applies to the department, team or individuals you lead. Everyone wants to understand why they are doing what they are doing?

I used to take the question of why as a challenge to what I know or what my plan was, but most of the time that is not what it is.

Pick up a business book written by someone that has always been in charge, and you will likely not get much acknowledgement of understanding the reason. They always know the reason, and the answer and those below them may not be willing to stand up and ask the questions nobody else will.

Those are the questions and answers that allow your message and vision to be carried throughout every decision.

As even the best manager you can’t be around for every decision. So if you want decisions made in line with your vision and your Why, then others need to understand that why.

They will then own that why the same way you do, and that becomes the rallying cry for all other managers. What kind of a business leader would you be if it was like you were there in every situation even when you’re not? You would be a damn good leader with a hell of a business!!

7. Sales Management Simplified

Last update on 2023-03-04 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API

I have included this book because many leadership positions either directly or indirectly require some for of sales or management of a sales team. For those taking on a sales leadership role this is among the best books to get yourself organized.

All too often sales people do not look at sales as a process, but any successful sales channel has processes and procedures.

Sales Management Simplified is really a guide for developing or outlining your sales program as a process. If you happen to have a leadership style that shies away from process then this is a great book for you.

Any team that is built with no processes is bound to fail now or in the future. I am an ardent believer in process for 80% of what we do so that we can better respond to the remaining 20% of real issues that arise.

Think about process like this: You walk into your favorite restaurant and most of the time it is clean and the food is delicious.

But sometimes you walk in, it is dirty, you get bad service and the food isn’t good. Would you consider that place a successful restaurant, and is it a place that you would highly taught to your friends and family? Probably not right?

This is a business without processes, or in which one person is the process. When one person is the process, the whole machine shuts down when that person quits, gets sick, or moves away.

A business reliant on one person is no way to build. That is also no way to build a successful team within a department. If you ever want to know what the greatest managers do differently, it is process and procedure.

(I am a bit of a process fiend, so any help you want turning your current work into processes just let me know.)

8. Extreme Ownership

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This is a book written by ex Navy Seal Operators about their time in the military and some of the most dangerous battlefields on earth.

During their time they took principles that made the Seals and the Military agile and successful organizations to accomplish their duties and turned it into a program for the rest of us.

The principle of the book as noted in the title is Extreme Ownership of everything you do. This means throwing out the idea of, that’s someone else’s job, that isn’t my responsibility, I can’t be held accountable for my people, and all of the other excuses that are prevalent in modern business.

Extreme ownership in a leadership role is just what is sounds, taking ownership of everything in your sphere and everything that is connected.

True leaders understand how each piece of the puzzle connects and effect one another. There is not brushing off onto someone else, but ensuring that the job is done. And if the job is not done properly find out why so that those mistakes do not happen again.

The military is an organization that is built on structure, and procedures so that the vast majority of what you do is based on training.

However, each individual understand the mission objectives and takes extreme ownership of their tasks and what is within their sphere.

Extreme ownership is only possible with a team or or department that feels in control and empowered to complete their tasks. If you are tired of making excuses and hearing excuses taking Extreme Ownership over your responsibilities is right for you!!

These are 8 of the best books I can recommend for management and leadership. Each principle and takeaway is connected because no success in business is built on its own.

Takeaways from Each Book

I hope that you will take the time to read or listen to these books, but if not here is a reminder of the principles that I took away from each of these books.

Leaders Eat Last teaches us that no leader is more important than those that they lead. Therefore those managers and bosses that put themselves and their well being ahead of the ones they rely on are not truly leaders.

They will not receive sacrifice from their teams because their teams know that they are not willing to sacrifice for them. Author – Simon Sinek

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From Talking to Strangers we see that communication is not as cut and dry as we believe it to be. We can be deceived either intentionally or entirely unintentionally by those that we communicate with.

Even in the best of circumstances we can misinterpret one another with dire outcomes. As leaders we must work to ensure that we are on the same page as those around us. Book Author – Malcom Gladwell

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Ego is the enemy reminds us that humility and possibly stoicism allows us to focus and make the right decisions. Our personal feeling of worth when not managed properly can often get in the way of what we want to accomplish. Book Author – Ryan Holiday

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Google and Work rules teaches us that culture is not a thing or a one time decision. The culture that we want to create in our environments has to be a way of life. It is an ongoing struggle and must be maintained and nurtured. Book Author – Laszlo Bock

How to Lead When You’re Not In Charge opens our eyes to understanding that leadership doesn’t always come with power. On occasion we must lead from the rear and guide others to make the decisions that we believe are best. Book Author – Clay Scroggins

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Start with Why is a rallying cry for all millennials, that need to know not just what to do but why they do it. Embrace that your invested teams need to understand their place in the picture and how what they are doing effects the big picture. Book Author- Simon Sinek

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Sales Management Simplified helps to turn our sales and management knowledge into a repeatable process. Focus on consistency through process so that your sales staff and team members can shine. Book Author – Mike Weinberg

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Extreme Ownership is just that, taught by former Navy Seals. There is no excuse that can brush off our responsibility for the tasks and responsibilities we are given. Take Extreme Ownership and nobody in your organization will ever be able to say that isn’t my problem.

Book Authors – Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

Conclusion

I hope that this list has been something of value for you, and I truly hope that you have something actionable to put into place. Let me know what you think and if you were able to make any of these work for you and your teams.