Best Books List For Leaders

I was asked by Shepherd, a group dedicated to helping others discover the best books, to share my top books for real-world business leadership. Here are the best books for practical, hands-on business leadership. Of course, I needed to include my book in the list:

Finding and Retaining Stellar IT Employees Screen Image

For additional reading, another list I found helpful is the Best Leadership Books where 90 authors picked their favorite books about leadership and tell why they recommend each book.

My Interview on Employee Engagement with Dave Osh of CEOpeek

My thanks to Dave Osh with CEOpeek for discussing employee engagement and create a great place to work.

When an organization has high engagement, employees are giving extra discretionary effort in their jobs, staying, and referring prospective employees and customers. Also, organizations with high engagement are more profitable and have more productive and less absent employees.

We discuss the core parts of engagement, including:

• Alignment with goals
• Teamwork
• Co-worker trust
• Manager effectiveness and trust in senior leaders
• Job satisfaction
• Feeling valued
• Benefits and pay

Throughout the conversation, there are specific, actionable ways for leaders to increase engagement.

Hiring Top Performers, an Interview Guide

We are hiring.  Getting the right people is vital, obviously, to building a great team.

Building a great team starts with finding great people. Top firms spend an excessive amount of time recruiting.

One worldwide executive recruiting firm, Egon Zehnder International, conducts between 25 and 40 interviews per hire!  Most of us don’t have the time or resources to put job candidates through such a rigorous recruiting process. However, we can take the time to check out a potential new employee thoroughly before asking him or her to join our team. If you’re wowed by someone’s technical prowess but concerned about his or her honesty or attitude, don’t risk it. When we have justified hiring someone—usually in response to a hefty workload—the person may have provided short-term relief but did not work out in the long term.

We have an eight-step process. An essential step in our approach uses an interview from the book Top Grading.  Here’s a link to that interview.

Time for Life Planning

In The 100, I dedicate a section to life planning. Similar to using this time of year to plan next year’s business goals, this is a good time to plan next year’s personal goals.

Goals transform vision into reality. Practical goals are SMART: Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. While many of us make long-term goals; specific short-term goals drive us to achieve our long-term goals.

Writing goals down is essential.  A study by Dominican University professor Gail Matthews found writing down goals, making an action plan, and communicating to others results in being twice as likely to accomplish the goal.

Here are some goal setting tips:

  • Write down your goals.  Then, wait a few weeks to test your conviction.
  • Break your long-term goals into short-term goals backed up by a plan
  • Look at your goals every day
  • Include dates. A goal without a deadline is just a dream.

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz are a couple of great books on goals.

Here’s a goal setting template.