Leaders are a constant work in progress. To inspire you all, I’ve compiled a list of seven books that I would recommend to anyone who wants to hone their leadership skills. The headline on this list is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but I can attest that the books below are worth reading. Some of these authors you’ll likely recognize from events at Metropolitan State University of Denver, such as panels, fireside chats or as a part of my speaker series.
1. “Call Sign Chaos, Learning to Lead,” by Jim Mattis and Bing West.
My new favorite is from one of the most brilliant and inspiring leaders I’ve ever worked with. He loves his Marines, empowers them with purpose, owns and learns from every mistake at every level and describes how his leadership had to adapt to various roles and at various levels of responsibility.
2. “Dare To Lead,” by Brené Brown. I love Brown’s philosophy because it’s a stellar reminder that leadership is not about “power.” It’s about responsibility, people and communication. This book also discusses lessons on humility — something we can use sometimes.
3. “Team of Teams,” by Stan McChrystal. This book discusses how to catalyze collective action across large, dispersed enterprises. I love this, but I think his model depends on having highly competent leaders at all levels, which cannot be taken for granted in many organizations, including higher ed.
4. “Good To Great,” by Jim Collins. I’ve adapted his “flywheel” concept for MSU Denver. Collins has a separate flywheel pamphlet you can read too.
5. “Traction,” by Gino Wickman. I used this book for the January 2019 senior-leader offsite event and referenced it again in the January 2020 offsite event. I don’t think about this in terms of our entire University but often have senior leaders do Vision/Traction Organizers as a tool for our performance reviews (with one to seven “rocks” identified in their portfolios for the semester and year).
6. “The Speed of Trust,” by Stephen M.R. Covey. It’s amazing how much more effective an organization is when people trust one another. And when they don’t — how miserable and inefficient everything is.
7. “The No Asshole Rule,” by Robert Sutton. This book shows how the one person you might think is indispensable to your organization may actually be dragging the whole team down (and how to determine if that person is you!).
Bonus: “Forged in Crisis,” by Nancy Koehn. Each chapter is a mini-bio on great leaders in crisis, including Ernest Shackleton, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rachel Carson.