Leadership and Organisational Behaviour: the books worth your time

Why this matters to an executive

Promotion changes the job before it changes the title. Up to a certain level you are paid for your own output. After it, you are paid for the output of people you do not supervise directly, through meetings, decisions and the habits of a team you inherited. Most executives learn this by trial and error, and the errors are expensive: a stalled first quarter, a direct report who should have moved on sooner, a leadership team that agrees in the room and disagrees in the corridor.

Organizational behavior is the MBA name for this. Business schools teach it through motivation theory, team design and change management. The books below are more useful than the theory because they deal with the ordinary problems: what to do with your calendar, how to run a one-on-one, how to tell a peer their plan will fail.

How I ranked these

I ranked on one question: will this change what a senior manager does next week? Evidence counts too. A book built on research beats a book built on a story, unless the story is short and the point is one most teams need to hear.

High Output Management comes first because it is the most complete manual for managing managers. Grove argues that a manager's output is the output of the parts of the organization they influence , and from that he derives practical rules for meetings, delegation and reviews. The Effective Executive is the companion: shorter, older, and still the clearest case for knowing where your time goes before you try to manage anything else.

If you are changing roles this year, read The First 90 Days before either, ideally the week you accept the offer. After Grove and Drucker, read The Fearless Organization. Edmondson's research on psychological safety explains why bad news reaches senior people late, and what a leader can do to hear it sooner.

Leadership on the Line is for the executive pushing change that people resist. It ranks fifth only because fewer readers need it at any given moment. When you do need it, nothing else here does the same job. Horowitz, Scott and Lencioni complete the list. Each makes one point well, and each is a quick read.

Where people go wrong

The common mistake is reading leadership books for encouragement and then changing nothing. This subject is learned through practice: a calendar audit, a new format for the weekly staff meeting, one difficult conversation held rather than postponed. If a book does not end in a change to how you spend Monday, it was entertainment.

The second mistake is treating any framework as universal. Feedback norms, hierarchy and the meaning of silence in a meeting vary a great deal between countries, and most popular leadership books are written from one American setting. Take the principle and adjust the delivery to the people in front of you.

The third is reading only about leading down. Much of an executive's work is leading across and up, to peers, a CEO and sometimes a board. Pair this list with general management, and if you report to directors, with ethics and governance.