75
This article showcases our top picks for the Leadership Books For Young Professionals. We reached out to industry leaders and experts who have contributed the suggestions within this article (they have been credited for their contributions below).
We are keen to hear your feedback on all of our content and our comment section is a moderated space to express your thoughts and feelings related (or not) to this article This list is in no particular order.
This product was recommended by Jake Irving from ClueRx
When this book was first handed to me, I was a 24-year-old first-time manager attempting to lead my team by verbal force, and we consistently fell short of our team goals. In How to win friends and influence people, Dale Carnegie shares simple but powerful stories on how to connect with people and create great relationships. Once I realized that you do not always need to be right and the dominant voice, my team started to achieve our desired results.
This product was recommended by Lauren Cook-McKay from Divorce Answers
Young professionals can learn a thing or two from this book. Kahneman discussed profound concepts about decision-making. It centers around human cognitive biases, which lead to judgment errors. Aspiring leaders need to understand the two systems that shape our judgment – intuition and slow thinking. There are also multiple factors that need to be considered when making a decision. Young professionals who strive to become leaders someday will benefit from the decision-making lessons discussed in this book. It can help them further explore and understand their thinking patterns.
This book is a fantastic read because it contains lessons for leadership at all levels of an organization. The book is a product of two former navy seals who started a management consulting company; applying combat skills to business problems. This is such a cheesy premise that I almost didn’t give it a shot. I’m glad I did! Young professionals need to lead smaller teams while building skills that will apply to much bigger problems. Extreme Ownership teaches: * own the overall success or failure of the team * communicate properly to people higher and lower in the organizational hierarchy * foster a team atmosphere among peers or those just a half step removed from you on the org chart The values of simplicity, communication, teamwork, and humility will serve you well in any leadership role, no matter how small. You’ll make yourself indispensable to the organization and ripe for advancement.
This product was recommended by Emma Thompson from Jaxery
Leadership is often about crafting great relationships, sometimes more than it is about the skills you need. And to sustain relationships with people you lead, or people that are leading your department – you will need to have some difficult conversations. How you have those difficult conversations will make all the difference. This book really taught me the best way to be able to talk to anyone, about any topic, and to embrace hard chats rather than shy away from them. I’ve seen it take years for people to understand the nuances of a good conversation and so, I’m really glad I read this book while kick starting my career.
This product was recommended by Mimi Paul from SR22 Insurance
The book was perfect for those beginning his/her career. The author shares his life, his lessons, his winning habits, and his losing habits. The author makes sure we got the point regarding life and growth and growing up in career and taking up leadership positions. Highly recommended.
Young Professionals of the new era need exceptional leadership skills to excel in the growing competitive business scenario and the book “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership” by John C. Maxwell is exactly about learning the art of leadership. The book is full of inspirational stories of leaders who excel in their fields. Relating to their stories, John C.. Maxwell defines 21 rules of leadership for managers that are unparallel and help young professionals become more effective leaders that thrive and let others guide and flourish. The book is written in plain business language, avoiding the typical jargon and indulging the young professionals from a different perspective; i.e helps map their journey to learn leadership. In addition, the book has a workbook with practical exercises to memorize the 21 rules of leadership. I highly recommend this book for young professionals, since this book is a guidebook for them to learn and implement managerial skills in their respective fields.
The book explores the principles that guided Nelson Mandela through his long career in leadership. One of the key lessons is the importance of looking the part. As the book explains, people are more likely to follow a leader who projects confidence and authority. Another important principle for young leaders is the importance of playing the long game. In today’s fast-paced world, it can be tempting to take shortcuts or make impulsive decisions. However, as Mandela demonstrated, true leadership requires patience and discipline. Finally, the book stresses the importance of being measured in one’s words and actions. Leaders must always be mindful of the impact their words and deeds will have on others. By following these principles and others taught in this book, young leaders can inspire others to achieve great things.
This product was recommended by Marijke van Breda from Oliver Wicks
If you a high school student, soon to be a graduate and heading off to college or to work full time? Or wish that they had been given guidance on money matters before they’d finished school. This book answers that need. In Personal Finance for Teens Carol H. Cox offers practical advice on how to build a rock-solid financial & leaedership foundation for life after high school. Now is the time for young adults to get a handle on their finances, before life gets more complicated. Carol covers how to choose, open, and manage a student checking account; network, write resumes, and impress interviewers; control spending and achieve savings goals; build a high-ranking credit score and manage credit cards wisely; assess the cost of car ownership and select an affordable car; evaluate college from a financial perspective; and take advantage of time and start building a retirement account now. This book is a great reference tool for any library and a great graduation present for recent or soon-to-be grads. Personal Finance for Teens is the book that every teen needs to read before leaving home.
This product was recommended by Deepa Tailor from Tailor Law
It is crucial for a young professional to read leadership books in order to take on challenges, lead, be competitive, and be innovative. In terms of leadership, this book is very insightful. There are a number of leadership lessons in this book about innovation, reputation, motivation, and compassion that a young professional should learn from the greatly admired business leader, Jrd Tata. The book’s anecdotes are always useful to young professionals seeking success.
This product was recommended by Ariel Sheen from THAT Agency
It’s understandable why firms will promote someone who excels in their role to a position of management, but this does not mean they are skilled in leadership. Successfully leading others, as Peter Drucker makes clear in this book, is worlds apart from merely following orders well. Young professionals who want to rise in their company’s organization would be well served to learn how to be an effective decision-maker, how to efficiently communicate, how to effectively delegate, and more all while remaining humble. Leadership, for Drucker, is about make the I into a We that represents the team with whom one works. Written by one of the most influential writers for MBA programs, this book is a master class on leadership.
This product was recommended by John Ricco from Atlantic Group
The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney was really inspiring for me to read as someone who had only recently adopted a leadership role with my company. However, the book taught me more than just how to be a good leader, it also showed me the value of creating plans and processes for everything I needed to do. Instead of focusing on being a powerful leader over a large group of people, sometimes it’s more beneficial to look at smaller aspects of a larger whole and improve those. Eventually, you’ll be left with a large group that functions much better, all thanks to your leadership.
This product was recommended by Morgan Lilker from Watches of Today
A book that I love and one that really helps us to understand leadership is Managing Up by Rosanne Badowski, while most management books focus on leadership when you’re in a managerial position, this book explores the leadership effects you can have when you aren’t a manager. Which is crucial to understand if you are ever to get to a managerial position.
When starting out your career in a professional industry, everybody is looking for pretty much the same thing. They want to work their way up the ladder to have their boss’ job one day. However, most people don’t realize how much adaptation and learning have to take place along every step of that journey to the top. This book by Marshall Goldsmith is a fantastic eye-opener for what kind of personal development needs to happen from the bottom of the ladder, all the way to the top. He taught me that bad habits we pick up from one level of progression can harm us for the next level and leave us stuck on that same rung of the ladder forever. Even as the owner of my company, there was plenty that I learned from this book that I wish I’d known when I was a young professional, just starting out my career.
This product was recommended by Michael East from Griddle King
Carroll developed his leadership principles in the high stakes, high-pressure world of professional kitchens, and his philosophy and ideas are designed to bring out the best in everybody. It’s a guide forged in fire by the best of the best and an essential guide to leading by example in the culinary world.
This product was recommended by Colin Palfrey from Crediful
In this book, the author explains why effectively leading a team is about so much more than what you say, much of the mystery rests in how you say it. In his eyes, collaboration is king, and by following the exercises in his book you will soon master the art of pulling the team together under your leadership. There is nothing complicated about his methods, much of it is common sense, and used effectively you will let your team grow into the perfectly functioning unit you are aiming for. It is a relatively short book written in a style that is easy to understand and follow. Keep a copy of this on the shelf and use it as a reference when you hit that brick wall.
This product was recommended by Chris Kowalski from Autopadre
If you want to lead people, you need to understand how they think and what motivates them and no one understands the latter better than Punk does. And in ‘Drive’ he explains the motivational drive in detail, enabling the reader to fully understand it and use it to fashion their individual approach to leadership and become the guiding voice and force that they know they can, and should be.
This product was recommended by Erin Mastopietro from Dope Dog
You can complete the five-step communication of leadership process by using the 451 tested, little-known, step-by-step tactics explained in this new version, which includes: – How to quickly motivate high performance using psychological coalitions’ established power. – How to quickly captivate attention with the tried-and-true language strategy of high expectations. – How to successfully avoid imposter syndrome by applying the underappreciated leader-mirroring principle.
This book is widely regarded as one of the best self-help books of all time, especially for building character and effectiveness as a leader. The 7 habits cover all bases for building independence, interdependence and improvement as a person, all of which can be applied to professional development, for building direction, managing urgency, and achieving goals- it’ll be hard to find many better than this book.
Written by Machiavelli as a gift to the Medici as a guide for maximising the prudency and effectiveness of a civilisation’s leader. It explores the extent to which a prince’s success/failure is caused by his environment and his own free will, and teaches the reader to be tactile, cunning, but in some ways unscrupulous to maintain power – giving birth to ‘Machiavellian’ as an adjective.
Be Unstoppable is the perfect leadership book for young people who will soon be entering the adult world. It touches on 8 essential actions needed to succeed that every new adult should know about. These actions are most beneficial to young people who learn about and incorporate them early.
This product was recommended by Alice Huang from N/A
This book helps us in becoming more effective leaders by highlighting our team’s assets and dealing with leaders who drag everyone down. Multipliers urge us to evaluate the two leadership styles and decide which one we wish to be.
This book is essential for all young professionals because while many of us build our specific knowledge and skills in the area we desire, we can sometimes forget that pitching is a massively important part of professional life. More than just knowing what you know, you have to be able to sell your skills, and more importantly, yourself to really get ahead professionally, and ‘Lifes a pitch: How to sell yourself and your brilliant ideas’ helps with just that problem. If we are honest, many of us aren’t naturally great at selling ourselves, and this is no more true than in a professional setting, so reading this book is a must so you can learn how to become one of those people, even if it isn’t natural to you, and really push your career forward.
This product was recommended by Luke Lee from PalaLeather
This book Atomic Habits, provides a tried-and-true paradigm for daily transformation. The compound interest of self-improvement is habits. The influence of your behaviors expands as you repeat them; much as money you save, it multiplies through compound interest. One of the world’s foremost experts on habit formation, James Clear, shares practical tactics that will show you exactly how to create good habits, break bad ones, and master the minor actions that lead to amazing outcomes in this inspiring book.
This product was recommended by Eric Jones from Couture Candy
Life is an adventure, and it is nicely stated in the book The Alchemist. It suggests that one should aim to live up to our particular legends (that is, what you have always wanted to accomplish). The story of Santiago, a shepherd boy, reveals what occurs when we chase our legends: the cosmos conspires in enabling you to attain it.
This product was recommended by Ismail Kuden from Kuden Rugs
This book is about self-compassion and how to embrace our imperfections. It’s an excellent way to start; once individuals acknowledge this sense, they can engage others at that same level.
