Top 10 leadership books for fall reading

Fall is more than just pumpkin spice latte season here at the Chocolate Soup office. To be fair, we have a lot of pumpkin spice gifts — candles, cookies, gummies, and even popcorn. Our team loves the fall because it’s the perfect weather to curl up with a blanket, a pumpkin spice latte (we’re creatures of habit), and a great book.

We’re passionate about leadership — and learning how to be better leaders — so we’ve put together this list of books full of advice on leadership, culture, and creating healthy workplaces.

Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.

When we asked our customers, the most mentioned author was Brene Brown. The New York Times #1 bestselling author and leadership coach breaks down her extensive research into a guide for new and experienced leaders. Brown said to be a leader means you don’t have to have all the answers — instead, being a leader means being curious, asking questions, and making yourself vulnerable to connect with your team. 

The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal

Authors Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz flip our ideas on work-life balance in their best-selling leadership book. We’ve all tried to-do lists and apps, shared calendars online or on the fridge — but none of these seem to solve the problem. In The Power of Full Engagement, Loehr and Schwartz show how managing your time isn’t what you should focus on. Instead, focusing on managing the finite energy you have in a day will help you find success (and happiness) in what you do at work and home.

Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

In Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, author and former Netflix executive Patty McCord advocates that radical honesty is the key to creating a great culture. Instead of performance reviews and perks, be honest with employees about how they’re doing — and part ways with them when it’s not working out instead of wasting their time and yours.

High Output Management

If you’ve ever worked at a company that used OKRs (objectives and key results), then you have business leader and author Andrew S. Grove to thank. Called the inventor of OKRs by fellow executive John Doerr, Grove’s High Output Management shares his insights on building and running a company. Grove’s promotion of OKRs changed the way companies are managed by replacing the top-down model with one where every employees’ contributions and insights in goal setting are valued.

This Is Day One: A Practical Guide to Leadership That Matters

Author Drew Dudely uses his inspirational TEDx talk “Everyday Leadership (the Lollipop Moment)” to create a guide for leaders not just to succeed but to help everyone around them succeed. Dudley’s “day one” is when you make time to discover, define, and consistently deliver on your leadership values. The book provides you with a step-by-step guide to find your values and put them into play every day.

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?

Sometimes work can feel like the spinning wheel on your laptop screen — no forward motion, and you’re unsure who to call for help. In Brave New Work, author Aaron Dignan breaks down the issues that affect companies from startups to large enterprises — lack of trust, siloed teams, short-term thinking, too many meetings, and more — and gives you a guide for how to break through and get your team moving forward together. 

Leading with Gratitude: Eight Leadership Practices for Extraordinary Business Results

In this New York Times bestselling book, authors Chester Elton and Adrian Gostick guide leaders on adding gratitude into everyday interactions. It’s gratitude that helps build up morale, speed up efficiencies in the office — and helps to make companies more profitable (and happy). 

Unmanageable: Leadership Lessons from an Impossible Year

Everything about work changed in 2020. In this collection of essays from their popular management newsletter, authors and management coaches Johnathan Nightingale and Melissa Nightingale deep dive into issues from employee-management power structures, why people quit good jobs, and dig into the new workplace rules in our post-pandemic world.

The Burnout Epidemic: The Rise of Chronic Stress and How We Can Fix It

We always love it when we can share a book from one of our friends. In her new book, The Burnout Epidemic, workplace happiness expert and author Jennifer Moss helps leaders and individuals prevent burnout and create healthier, happier, and more productive workplaces. Moss explores the causes of burnout — both from before and during the pandemic — and gives leaders a guide on how to help their teams find balance again.

Leadership Is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say--And What You Don’t

In this Wall Street Journal bestseller, author and former US Navy Captain David Marquet gives leaders a guide on how to help their teams make better divisions. Marquet argues that great leaders — especially today with the amount of data available — need to take time and ask questions to effectively make choices and give their team more ownership of success.