As we learned in The Leadership Challenge®, the best leaders are the best learners! As we look for ways to grow our leadership skills 10%, sometimes finding just the right book to read is the best way to do so! We thought we would share what the iLead team is reading (or one of our favorites from the past!) in case you are looking for a good read during a little downtime, need a holiday gift for a teammate or colleague, or the perfect stocking stuffer for the leader in your life!
Change Your Questions, Change Your Life: 12 Powerful Tools for Leadership, Coaching and Life by Marilee Adams, Ph.D. is a quick-read business and relationship fable about executive coaching and inquiring leadership that illustrates the power of asking the best kinds of questions for the most desirable results that people want in their professional and personal lives. You’ll learn what kinds of questions help (or hinder) your chances for success, satisfaction, and even breakthroughs. Change Your Questions Change Your Life outlines simple, practical and powerful tools for new thinking, possibilities and results.
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler with a Forward from Stephen R. Covey. When stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong, you have three choices: Avoid a crucial conversation or handle the conversation badly and suffer the consequences or discover how to communicate best when it matters most. Crucial Conversations gives you the tools you need to step up to life’s most difficult and important conversations (whether they take place at work or home, with your neighbors or spouse), say what’s on your mind, and achieve the positive resolutions you want.
The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact by Chip Heath and Dan Heath help us explore why certain brief experiences can jolt us and elevate us and change us – and how we can learn to create such extraordinary moments in our life and work. Many of the defining moments in our lives are the result of accident or luck – but why would we leave our most meaningful, memorable moments to chance when we can create them? The Power of Moments shows us how to be the author of richer experiences.
While not a leadership book, the iLead team LOVES Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. In this exquisite ode to the natural world, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story, and a surprising tale of possible murder, Owens reminds us that we are forever shaped by the children we once were, and that we are all subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.
Happy Holidays and Happy Reading!!
Tom, Denise, Amy and Kim
