My Leadership Bookshelf

The leadership books I go to & recommend again and again. These are unsponsored & unaffiliated, just from my shelf to yours.

Enjoy. -K

Playing Big - Tara Mohr

Read this years ago with an employee resource group book club, and it resonated with me as a new leader & woman on so many levels. It normalized the self-doubt I was feeling, provided a powerful self-reflection and visualization exercise that I still use to this day, and I’ve shared it with so many leaders facing the challenge of wanting to be fully themselves but struggling with whether or not that is “enough”. The quote I needed to hear, then and now: “Feedback gives us facts about the opinions and preferences of those giving the feedback. It can’t tell you about your merit or worthiness…Feedback is emotionally neutral information.” This quite literally blew my mind.

Dare to Lead - Brené Brown

Those who know me well know I’m a Brené fan-girl. We are imaginary-friend-besties. This book is dog-eared, written in, and well loved - and I come back to it again and again when I’m looking for grounding in principles and data that are proven. Recently, I reread some sections and was reminded that the toxicity I was objecting to at work was not me being unreasonable - it was me knowing that there was a better way that was no longer being modeled around me. Too many quotes to count, but one of my faves is “Who we are is how we lead.” It gives us permission to bring our instinct and authenticity, because why would you want to be any other way? This is also where I got “paint done” as a tactic, how I learned to build safe containers, and defined my core values. So good.

Strengths Based Leadership - Rath & Conchie

In complement with StrengthsFinders & Gallup’s long standing legacy of survey & data rigor, this book crystallized what I could identify as strengths into applied leadership. In other words, it wasn’t serving me to only use my strengths as a leader, but it did start serving me to understand those strengths in context of leadership and in compliment with other leaders. We did this as a team, so it also helped me understand the needs of my directs more deeply and how to leverage them in their strengths and to connect them to meaningful development. There is great overlap with core values work and other profile assessments as well. I’m a mystery to myself - I love this kind of stuff!

That’s it for now - but maybe I’ll do an updated version at some point!

—K