Leadership books, briefed
Eighteen leadership books in five points each. Most are written for people who already have the job, which is worth knowing before you buy one.
Work out which reader the book is for
The shelf gets treated as one genre and is really three, aimed at people in very different positions:
- First-time managers. The concrete problems: running a one-to-one, giving criticism that lands, delegating without either hovering or vanishing. The most immediately useful books on the shelf, and the least glamorous.
- People running an organisation. Culture, incentives, how decisions get made three levels down. Genuinely valuable if you are there, and close to useless if you are not, because it presumes authority you do not have.
- Everyone, aspirationally. Vision, purpose, character. The best-selling group and the hardest to act on, because it describes a destination without a route.
Most disappointment with a leadership book is a mismatch between these, not a bad book.
What holds up across all three
The recurring, well-supported finding is that specific behaviours beat traits. Clarity about what good looks like, feedback close to the event, and consistency between what is rewarded and what is stated. Every book on the shelf arrives at some version of this, dressed differently.
The part the genre avoids
Very little of it deals with leading badly-resourced teams, or leading when you disagree with the direction, or the ordinary situation of having responsibility without control. Those are the common cases. They are also the ones without a satisfying framework, which is presumably why they go unwritten.