Recently Published books to Develop Top-Notch Leadership Skills
Share this:
Browse this list of the best NEW leadership books of 2022 to build the skills leaders need today. As an added bonus, we’ve interviewed each author on our leadership podcast, Team Anywhere. By listening to the podcast you will get a strong understanding of what each book is about and the lessons and skills they teach inside their book.
This article contains:
· Recently published leadership books
· The lessons and skills they address
· Why you should read each book
New Leadership Books to Build New Leadership Skills
The COVID pandemic disrupted the world of leadership. It swept the rug right out from under the feet of leaders around the globe pretty much overnight. While many leaders were resilient enough to get back up and continue to lead strong remote teams, other leaders continued to suffer. Leaders were expected to lead a remote team overnight!
Leading remote and hybrid teams requires new sets of skills that were not as important when all employees worked in the office. To succeed in 2022, leaders need skills such as facilitating engaging virtual meetings, building a remote work culture, creativity, promoting employee wellness and resilience.
We created this list of leadership books to read in 2022 to help leaders build relevant skills they need now and in the future.
Browse Best New Leadership Books 2022 By Topic
Problem Solving | Social Influence | Conflict Management | Remote Work Culture | Business Strategy | Leading Virtual Meetings | Creativity | Work/Life Balance Integration | Resilience
Problem-Solving Books
Invisible Solutions
Author: Stephen Shapiro
Category: Problem Solving | Agile | Innovation
Leaders and teams who can solve any problem faster, with less risk and lower cost are at the core of innovation. Inside Stephen’s book, Invisible Solutions, discover how “having all the answers” is not the answer. To create a systematic approach to solving problems, leaders and teams need to ask better questions. Learn how to ask better questions to solve your complex problems.
Why Read this book:
By 2025, Complex problem solving is one of the top 10 skills that you will need to succeed in the future. You should start now!
Mindfully Wise Leadership: The Secrets of Today’s Leaders
Author: Dr. Keren Tsuk
Category: Employee Wellness | Mindfulness | Problem Solving
In the workplace today, leaders need to be mindful, listen deeply, and embrace tension to succeed in uncertain times. In Mindfully Wise Leadership, Keren Tsuk, shares how applying mindfulness techniques improve your leadership effectiveness and helps you meet your own needs better. Learn how to listen to your team in new ways, leverage internal employee motivation, allow creative solutions to emerge, and hold tensions that create flow.
Why Read this book:
Keren has one of the wisest approaches to applying mindfulness to leadership and breaks down how it benefits leaders, teams, and employees in a simple way. Publishes December 8, 2021
Influence Books
720 Haircuts: Creating Customer Loyalty that Lasts a Lifetime
Author: Gary Magenta
Category: Customer Experience | Interpersonal Relationships
Gary Magenta reveals the secret sauce that makes your customers want to keep coming back – like his Uncle Mel, who has driven round trips of up to 100 miles for the past 60 years to get his monthly haircut. That’s 720 haircuts! And that is the perfect example of a customer for life!
Why Read this book:
All leaders and teams have customers and should up their skills in customer experience. Gary is a customer experience Guru and Senior Vice President at Root Inc. (recently acquired by Accenture) and Gary’s approach to leadership aligns with ours. Also, by 2025, social influence is one of the top 10 skills that you will need to succeed in the future.
Light of the Party: Be That Storyteller Who Fascinates Friends, Dazzles Dates, Wows Clients, Wins Promotions and Gets Kids to Make Their Beds
Author: Yamini Naidu
Category: Storytelling | Interpersonal Relationships | Communication
Storytellers connect easily and quickly with people, build instant rapport with clients and charm nearly every person they encounter. They are the light of the party wherever they are. In this book, Yamini helps you connect, engage, inspire and share authentic well-told stories.
Why Read this book:
Storytelling is one of the most effective and powerful ways for leaders to connect with their teams. When leaders gain skills in storytelling, they become more effective in leading their teams, influencing others and connecting at a deep, authentic level.
Conflict Management Books & Collaboration Books
The Good Fight
Author: Liane Davey
Category: Conflict Management | Communication | Teamwork
In The Good Fight, Liane Davey shows you how to create the productive conflict your organization needs to get along and get stuff done. With a 20-year career as an advisor to the C-Suite, Liane shares real-world examples and practical tools you and your team can use to handle even the most contentious conflicts as allies – instead of adversaries.
Why Read this book:
Handling conflict is hard in person, and it can be even harder on a remote team. Don’t let the fear of conflict stop you from being on an incredible remote team.
Reimagining Collaboration
Author: Phil Simon
Category: Collaboration | Teamwork
In Reimagining Collaboration, Phil helps leaders and teams realize the true benefits of their collaboration hubs. This timely, ambitious, and provocative book offers concrete tips for companies and groups on how to transform the way they work by embracing hubs and spokes.
Why Read this book:
The pandemic forced teams to Collaborate in a whole new way. This books helps you leverage the possibilities.
Company Culture Books
We’re All in This Together: How a Culture of Trust & Belonging Creates High Performing Teams
Author: Mike Robbins
Categories: Culture | Psychological Safety | Inclusion & Belonging | Teamwork
What makes one team successful and the other team not as successful? In this book, Mike Robbins shares insights on how teams build trust, collaborate, and operate at their best. Mike has worked with top companies such as Google and Microsoft and had a successful baseball career with the Kansas City Royals. Learn universal qualities that can help you understand how to create a team that can thrive.
Why Read this book:
Many people think at the core of every successful team is a successful leader. We believe at the core of every successful team is that every person commit to the future success of their team members. Mike’s book supports those skills and approaches to creating a high performing team.
The Secrets to Happiness at Work
Author: Tracy Brower
Categories: Culture | Satisfaction | Happiness | Empowerment |
Do you have the power to create and choose the conditions for happiness, wellbeing, fulfillment and success at work? Inside this book, learn how to foster belonging and a sense of community at work, as well as the power of culture to be a source for happiness, fulfillment, and success. Dig deeper into inspiring purpose and creating tight-knit teams inside this book.
Why Read this book:
The pandemic led many employees to question their satisfaction with their jobs. As they’ve looked for work that has deeper meaning and more purpose-filled, this book gives employees great perspectives.
Own Your Culture: How to Define, Embed and Manage your Company Culture
Author: Brett Putter
Categories: Culture
Leaders often don’t know where to start when it comes to creating a strong culture. Culture is mostly invisible, so issues can build up over time and often go unnoticed by leadership.
In Own Your Culture, Bretton Putter helps leaders understand the consequences of the good and bad decisions that affect culture. He offers techniques to prepare for the inevitable changes in how we build companies and adapt to remote/hybrid work in this uncharted environment.
Why Read this Book:
Since the pandemic, the role of culture has changed. Leaders need to know how to build remote and hybrid cultures – a much different approach from the in-office environment.
Second Wave Millennials: Tapping the Potential of America’s Youth
Author: Warren Wright
Category: Generations | Coaching | Talent Development
Retaining top talent is a number one priority for nearly all companies. As a result, leaders must understand the needs of their growing, younger workforce. The Second-Wave Millennials are those born from 1995 and 2004. The research inside this book helps leaders craft an ideal workplace for all generations by illustrating the primary traits of Millennials and how companies can create long term loyalty with their ideal employees. This book is great for leaders looking to dive into a deeper understanding of generational differences in the workforce.
Why Read this Book:
This one made the best new leadership books 2021 list because successful leaders have the skills to develop a workplace culture that fits a multi-generational environment.
Business Strategy Books
Charting the Course: CEO Tools to Align Strategy and Operations
Authors: Tara Rethore and Catherine Langreney
Category: Strategy | Operations
Your company’s strategy is only as good as the execution of the strategy. Leadership teams that find the sweet spot between having a strategy and delivering that strategy are the ones that are succeeding in this new business environment. Inside Charting the Course, you will gain an enhanced strategic mindset to help you manage strategic and operational changes as they arise. Applying the concepts in this book will also help you gain greater alignment within your teams and have a shared understanding of the language and practice of strategy.
Why Read this Book:
Strategy should be the number one priority for all businesses, leaders, and teams.
Leading Virtual Meetings & Remote Work Books
Engaging Virtual Meetings
Author: John Chen
Categories: Virtual Meetings | Virtual Team Building Activities | Virtual Events
John’s book can help you build a cohesive and high-performing virtual team. Gain concrete strategies and practical tips for bringing teams together across the digital divide.
While many struggle to build teams in a virtual environment, accomplished author, John Chen, has found ways to create team cohesion, promote engagement, and increase virtual participation. This book is a must read for remote leaders and teams.
Why Read this Book:
Because even though you might have been leading virtual meetings since the pandemic, this book is packed with ideas to lead meetings that people will always look forward to.
Listen to John’s Team Anywhere Podcast Episode Here.
From Physical Place to Virtual Space: How to Design and Host Transformative Spaces Online
Author: Gwen Stirling Wilkie
Category: Virtual Meetings | Remote Teamwork | Teamwork
Become a master virtual meeting facilitator from initial contact, designing and sequencing the interventions, to a series of online events for a large multi-divisional corporation. Learn new models, tools, and insights for using virtual platforms and understand how design is different in the virtual space. Learn how to increase participation, create effective group work, and create energy online.
Why Read this Book:
This book gives great information on both facilitating and the tech tools to lead in virtual meetings.
Surviving Remote Work
Author: Sharon Koifman
Categories: Virtual Meetings | Remote Company Culture | Onboarding
Sharon Koifman has survived building and leading a fully remote business spanning four continents…while having two toddlers in the room. “Surviving Remote Work” is the distillation of a decade of lessons he learned while doing so. Learn the tools, strategies, and tactics to survive and thrive as a leader and entrepreneur in the remote age.
Why Read this Book:
Remote work can be daunting, and having tools in your pocket to help yourself, or your teams is beneficial to creating remote work that you enjoy.
Suddenly Virtual: Making Remote Meetings Work
Author: Karin Reed and Joe Allen
Category: Virtual Meetings
This book is a guide for businesses looking to make their virtual meetings as effective as possible. Leveraging insights from some of the foremost thought leaders in meeting science and on-camera communication, learn best practices backed by research to lead more productive and effective virtual meetings.
Why Read this Book:
How you show up on camera and how you sound is so important. Karin is an Emmy Award Winner and has tons of experience to share with leaders on leading virtual meetings.
Creativity Books
The Human Edge
Author: Greg Orme
Categories: Curiosity | Creativity | Teamwork
WINNER OF THE BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2020!
The new world of AI is working hard to replace human brains and hands, and it’s challenging the very essence of what it means to be human. Greg Orme believes that humans have four superpowers that AI and technology don’t have that will create a working edge for us in the future. Those four superpowers are consciousness, curiosity, creativity, and collaboration. Those superpowers are curiosity, creativity, and connectivity. This book is for any leader or team looking to flex these three superpowers.
Why Read this Book:
This book made the best new leadership books 2021 list because in remote and hybrid work environments, the need for creativity is rising, and for leadership, curiosity is key.
Banish Your Inner Critic: Silence the Voice of Self-Doubt to Unleash Your Creativity and Do Your Best Work (A Gift for Artists to Combat Self-doubt and Listen to Their Inner Voice)
Author: Denise Jacobs
Category: Personal Development | Creativity
Learn to banish your inner critic and allow your most creative self to lead at work and in your life. Learn techniques to make the creative process more fluid, create an environment that helps improve productivity and unleash more innovation. In Banish Your Inner Critic, Denise Jacobs shows you how to defeat barriers that are holding you back and achieve success through a positive mental attitude.
Why Read this Book:
One of the reasons why you could be running short on creativity is that you’re standing in the way of yourself.
Work/Life Balance Books
The Power of a Graceful Leader
Author: Alexsys Thompson
Category: Work/Life Integration | Personal Growth | Professional Growth
Many people still believe in the separation of work and home life. This can lead to feeling a division between who you are at work and who you are at home. In the Power of a Graceful Leader, Alexsys explains how to integrate who you are with how you lead. Gain powerful insights and tools for your journey towards becoming a more integrated and graceful leader.
Why Read this Book:
You’re looking for a more integrated version of yourself as a leader and at home.
I Know: A Practical Guide for Awakening to What’s Within and Finding Work-Life Integration
Author: Michael Seaver
Category: Work/Life Balance
Two years ago, Michael contemplated suicide after an intense, deep transformation. Michael wrote “I Know” to empower you to transition from believing life’s answers come from outside yourself to knowing you can discover the answers already inside yourself. If you feel unfulfilled or unappreciated, this book will uplift and realign you with your life’s purpose. Michael challenges you to live up to your potential and live in your purpose.
Why Read this Book:
This one made the best new leadership books 2021 list because many leaders are finding themselves in a period of transformation.
The Full Body Yes: Change Your Work and Your World from the Inside Out
Author: Scott Shute
Category: Work Life Integration | Compassion
Work shouldn’t be a burden that takes place outside of your “real life.” It should, and can, be a source of happiness and authentic meaning ― if you work from the inside out. In The Full Body Yes, uncover how the evolution within companies lies in the evolution of ourselves. After all, a company is the sum of its people: we decide where, how, and why we work.
Why Read this Book:
This book is great for those looking for greater satisfaction at work.
Resilience Books
Work without Stress: Building a Resilient Mindset for Lasting Success
Authors: Derek Rogers and Nick Petrie
Categories: Resilience | Stress Management
Most people think that stress is an inevitable part of life. The truth is: it’s not. In a groundbreaking 30-year study, Dr. Derek Roger discovered that stress is a choice, it’s not a natural response to the pressures of work. It’s a choice that you make – consciously or not – to worry about the work you need to do instead of just doing it.
Why Read this Book:
This one made the best new leadership books 2021 list because it will help you discover a different approach to stress inside this book and become more resilient, flexible, and present.
Strong Like Water: How I Found the Courage to Lead with Love in Business and in Life
Author: Laila Tarraf
Category: Personal Development | Professional Development | Work Life Balance
Before losing her husband, her mom and her dad in a short period of time, Laila spent her life leading from her head. After uncovering the realization that vulnerability doesn’t make you soft, Laila was able to connect with her heart and lead in an entirely new way that made her a better mother, better leader and better person. Learn who you are, at the core, and learn how reclaiming and embracing all parts of yourself helps you become the most authentic leader you were meant to be.
Read all these? You may also be interested in building leadership skills through leadership development programs.
