Summer reading
As I am getting ready to go North for some family time and a brief respite from the sweltering summer heat I thought I'd leave you with a select few summer reading suggestions. For those moments in between total chilling and all-in action. When you’ve managed to clear some space in your head for new ideas.
Unleashed - the unapologetic leader's guide to empowering everyone around you by Frances Frei and Ann Morris
Leadership isn't easy. It takes grit, courage, and vision, among other things, that can be hard to come by on your toughest days. When leaders and aspiring leaders seek out advice, they're often told to try harder. Dig deeper. Look in the mirror and own your natural-born strengths and fix any real or perceived career-limiting deficiencies.
Frances Frei and Anne Morriss offer a different worldview. They argue that this popular leadership advice glosses over the most important thing you do as a leader: build others up. Leadership isn't about you. It's about how effective you are at empowering other people—and making sure this impact endures even in your absence. As Frei and Morriss show through inspiring stories, the origins of great leadership are found, paradoxically, not in worrying about your own status and advancement, but in the unrelenting focus on other people's potential.
Unleashed provides radical advice for the practice of leadership today. Showing how the boldest, most effective leaders use a special combination of trust, love, and belonging to create an environment in which other people can excel, Frei and Morriss offer practical, battle-tested tools—based on their work with companies such as Uber, Riot Games, WeWork, and others—along with interviews and stories from their own personal experience, to make these ideas come alive.
The fearless organization by Amy Edmondson
The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth offers practical guidance for teams and organizations who are serious about success in the modern economy. With so much riding on innovation, creativity, and spark, it is essential to attract and retain quality talent―but what good does this talent do if no one is able to speak their mind? The traditional culture of "fitting in" and "going along" spells doom in the knowledge economy. Success requires a continuous influx of new ideas, new challenges, and critical thought, and the interpersonal climate must not suppress, silence, ridicule or intimidate. Not every idea is good, and yes there are stupid questions, and yes dissent can slow things down, but talking through these things is an essential part of the creative process. People must be allowed to voice half-finished thoughts, ask questions from left field, and brainstorm out loud; it creates a culture in which a minor flub or momentary lapse is no big deal, and where actual mistakes are owned and corrected, and where the next left-field idea could be the next big thing.
This book explores this culture of psychological safety, and provides a blueprint for bringing it to life. The road is sometimes bumpy, but succinct and informative scenario-based explanations provide a clear path forward to constant learning and healthy innovation.
The thin book of trust: an essential primer for building trust at work by Charles Feltman
The Thin Book of Trust: An Essential Primer for Building Trust at Work is based on three decades of experience working with individuals and teams to build, maintain, and, when necessary, restore trust. It offers a framework for trusting people based on four categories:
Competence - can they do what they say they will do?
Reliability - do they do what they say they will do?
Sincerity - do they mean what they say they will do?
Care - do they care about you?
This also applies to trusting ourselves. Do you trust yourself enough to press on when the path isn't clear?
Thank you Oliver Coqui for giving me the idea to suggest a summer reading list in his #3questions to conversation with me.
Hopefully you’ll find something here that sparks for you.
Have a wonderful, relaxing summer!
