No one’s born with exceptional management abilities—it’s an acquired skill. It takes years of hard work, continuous self-improvement initiatives, and an unquenchable thirst for gaining knowledge to become a reasonably good leader.
Honing one’s management skills doesn’t have to be a dull process filled with trial and error, though. You can always equip yourself to face the challenges of the business world by adopting the successful habits of celebrated leaders, all well-documented in management books.
These titles cover proven strategies to become better leaders, build emotional intelligence, and apply new techniques to achieve professional or business success. Plus, they allow you to draw from the experiences of some of the world’s greatest managers and follow their path to wins—or at least avoid repeating the mistakes they’ve shared.
So, let’s check out the top 10 books on management that offer the best practical advice! We picked these options based on their overall popularity and the quality of the core values covered.
Let’s jump in! 🌻
10 Best Management Books to Embrace Effective Leadership Skills
- 1. Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan
- 2. The One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson
- 3. Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry I Porras
- 4. Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. by Brené Brown
- 5. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni
- 6. Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman
- 7. Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes—But Some Do by Matthew Syed
- 8. The First-Time Manager by Loren B. Belker, Jim McCormick, and Gary S. Topchik
- 9. The Ordinary Leader: 10 Key Insights for Building and Leading a Thriving Organization by Randy Grieser
- 10. First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman
- Unleash Great Management Skills with ClickUp
Summarize this article for me please1. Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan
If you think tackling organizational bureaucracy is one of the biggest challenges of a leader, this is the management book for you! The author of this book, Aaron Dignan, is an angel investor and business consultant with high-profile clients like Microsoft and Citibank.
In Brave New Work, Dignan recognized that many companies worldwide, regardless of their size and line of work, face the same leadership challenges, such as:
- Decision-making bottlenecks
- Ineffective communication
- Poor conflict resolution
- Short-term thinking
- Siloed functions
Dignan breaks apart these challenges and introduces a unique approach to solving them. The book is based on the premise that organizations aren’t machines that managers can control but complex systems. An effective leader has to learn how to navigate them with tact and personal vision.
In the book, Dignan introduces you to various examples of organizations that have embarked on unconventional journeys to reinvent their approach to work and build transparency and trust.
For instance, you’ll learn about a bank that discarded traditional budgeting, a manufacturing company that divided its employee base into 2,000 autonomous teams, and a team that saved millions of dollars by canceling meetings.
These unique perspectives are a breath of fresh air and empower you not to be afraid to go down unconventional roads to overcome challenges and lead the entire company with confidence. 💪
We are addicted to the idea that the world can be predicted and controlled—that our stoplights are the only way to keep things in check. But when you view the world that way, today’s uncertainty and volatility become triggers for retreating to what has worked in the past. We just need to hire more capable leaders. We just need to squeeze out a little more efficiency and growth. We just need to reorganize… But we know better. The real barrier to progress in the twenty-first century is us. – Aaron Dignan
Summarize this article for me please2. The One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson
Displaying exemplary leadership doesn’t require magic or superpowers—all it takes is one minute. Confused? Well, this easy-to-read piece isn’t the typical motivational book, but it helps bring about personal change and cultivate self-control.
This leadership fable tells the story of a man who’s eager to find an effective leader and learn more about the secrets of the trade. Unfortunately, his search proves unsuccessful—he meets various managers, but they always lack something.
One day, he hears about a manager who achieves excellent results and is loved by his team. The man visits this manager in hopes he could pick his brain and understand what makes him tick. The manager calls himself One Minute Manager and reveals the three secrets to true leadership:
- One-minute goal-setting
- One-minute praising
- One-minute reprimands
It all comes down to saving time and boosting productivity in an environment that values simplicity and effective communication. ⌛
Effective managers manage themselves and the people they work with so that both the organization and the people profit from their presence. – Kenneth Blanchard
Summarize this article for me please3. Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry I Porras
Achieving success is one thing, but maintaining it is all about embracing ongoing improvement techniques. What is the X factor that keeps companies alive throughout years and decades?
Authors Collins and Porras try to answer this question in this book. They present their research involving 18 companies and outline what makes each different from the competition.
Could they uncover the surprising truth behind the long-term success of good companies? Yes! The book focuses on two concepts—envisioned future and core ideology—that help businesses last in a market constantly shaped by seen and unseen forces.
This is one of the business books that isn’t just about theory—it offers fresh insights into how some great companies tucked into the proposed framework sustain business success and longevity. The authors directly pit these visionary companies against top competitors and identify why the first group has thrived in the past few decades.
Visionary companies make some of their best moves by experimentation, trial and error, opportunism, and—quite literally—accident. What looks in retrospect like brilliant foresight and preplanning was often the result of “Let’s just try a lot of stuff and keep what works.” – Jim Collins
Summarize this article for me please4. Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. by Brené Brown
What is a leader? Is it someone who’s invulnerable at all times or a wizard who knows everything and has a title and status? 🧙
No! According to public speaker and author Brené Brown, good leaders are those who aren’t afraid to show their vulnerable side and ask questions that matter. They display heightened emotional intelligence, run productive projects, and are willing to leave their comfort zone to make others feel valued.
This book focuses on the concept of effective leadership and debunks traditional myths related to wielding power. Brown talks about daring, transformative leadership and explores the various aspects behind it, including empathy and the willingness to have tough conversations.
The book particularly focuses on the vulnerability of a good leader. Traditional leaders would see vulnerability as a weakness, but Brown emphasizes how it can be an asset to spark innovation and creativity, influence people, and form meaningful connections.
You’ll find a treasury of valuable tips on navigating tough conversations, recognizing your imperfections, taking actionable steps to achieve personal vision, and building trust.
The courage to be vulnerable is not about winning or losing; it’s about the courage to show up when you can’t predict or control the outcome. – Brené Brown
Summarize this article for me please5. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni
A manager’s job is to create a great team that embodies functional collaboration and communication. But what happens when you’re thrown into an environment that’s anything but functional?
This book discusses the challenges of working in dysfunctional teams and outlines how to overcome them.
This isn’t another dry manual on dealing with dysfunctional teams—it’s a fictional but relatable story about Kathryn Petersen, a woman who just landed the position of CEO at DecisionTech. She finds herself helming a highly dysfunctional team and tries to establish a healthy work environment to get out of messy entanglements.
The five dysfunctions Kathryn pinpoints are:
- Absence of trust
- Fear of conflict
- Lack of commitment
- Avoidance of accountability
- Inattention to results
The book also contains a theoretical part that analyzes these dysfunctions in-depth and provides suggestions for overcoming them, emphasizing the role of great leaders in diffusing tense situations.
Remember, teamwork begins by building trust. And the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability. – Patrick Lencioni
Summarize this article for me please6. Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman
As a manager, you face numerous challenges like personnel conflicts, poor bridging channels, and slow decision-making. Traction provides insight into these challenges and offers concrete tips on overcoming them and boosting your business management skills at the same time.
This fascinating book unveils the secret to achieving business success and establishing yourself as a better manager: the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS).
The EOS is based on strengthening six key components of your business:
- People
- Vision
- Data
- Process
- Traction
- Issues
The author—entrepreneur Gino Wickman—discusses how a clear vision, problem-solving skills, process systemization, accountability, and discipline can skyrocket your success as a self-aware leader and help your company thrive.
The book has a realistic, non-theoretical approach, which makes it equally useful for startups, small business owners, and enterprises. If you want your business to cross the mediocrity barrier, this is a must-read.
Most people are sitting on their own diamond mines. The surest ways to lose your diamond mine are to get bored, become overambitious, or start thinking that the grass is greener on the other side. Find your core focus, stick to it, and devote your time and resources to excelling at it. – Gino Wickman
Summarize this article for me please7. Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes—But Some Do by Matthew Syed
You’ve probably heard of black boxes used in the aviation industry—they’re installed in aircrafts to record flight data. Whenever there’s a safety issue, the black box is opened, and the data is analyzed to see what happened and how to prevent it in the future. ✈️
This book is based on the premise that you should adopt a similar approach to business and personal failures to combat self-deception patterns. The author, British journalist Matthew Syed, proposes that instead of shaming failure and letting it limit your progress, you should acknowledge and leverage it to set you up for business success in any field.
If you’re managing an entire organization, add this to your reading list. The powerful lessons in this book help you understand team processes, identify departmental bottlenecks, and make changes that fuel improvement.
We are often so worried about failure that we create vague goals, so that nobody can point the finger when we don’t achieve them. We come up with face-saving excuses, even before we have attempted anything.
We cover up mistakes, not only to protect ourselves from others, but to protect us from ourselves. Experiments have demonstrated that we all have a sophisticated ability to delete failures from memory, like editors cutting gaffes from a film reel—as we’ll see. Far from learning from mistakes, we edit them out of the official autobiographies we all keep in our own heads. – Matthew Syed
Summarize this article for me please8. The First-Time Manager by Loren B. Belker, Jim McCormick, and Gary S. Topchik
You’ve been promoted to a manager position. But the initial happiness of landing the role can get shadowed by insecurity around whether you can actually handle the demanding responsibilities that come with it. If this sounds like you, this is the book to grab!
Think of this as a how-to guide on management—it helps you prepare and embrace new duties with utmost confidence and minimal stress. You’ll learn about running meetings, managing teams, active listening, overcoming pressure, and dozens of other skills you’ll need to excel at your new job and avoid common mistakes.
As the book doesn’t cover any specific industry, it’s the perfect read for new managers in any niche. 😍
When you create a setting where your people see that their efforts are contributing to a positive outcome well beyond what they could achieve individually, they will be more motivated and find greater meaning in what they do. – Jim McCormick
Summarize this article for me please9. The Ordinary Leader: 10 Key Insights for Building and Leading a Thriving Organization by Randy Grieser
Are you tired of reading leadership books focusing on large-scale, Fortune 500 companies? If so, you need to add this book to your list. It offers practical advice to leaders of smaller companies and teams that face unique challenges in their daily operations.
Ordinary leaders are not mentioned enough in motivational circles as their lives are not quite glamorized by the media. Randy Grieser changes this in his book—he discusses how leaders of smaller organizations can build a thriving business, outlining 10 instrumental principles to get there:
- Motivation and employee engagement
- Passion
- Vision
- Self-awareness
- Talent and team selection
- Organizational health
- Productivity
- Creativity and innovation
- Delegation
- Self-improvement
This book demonstrates how embracing these principles can improve your management skills and inner well-being and help avoid workplace pitfalls like egomania and favoritism. It also includes:
- The perspectives of 10 thoughtful managers from various industries
- Survey feedback from 1,700+ employees and leaders
- A resource section with valuable tips on moving from great ideas to winning actions
Some people are very quick to name extraordinary leaders based on accomplishments and notoriety. In their eyes, recognizable politicians, athletes, and entrepreneurs are shining examples of leadership.
Yet when you look closely, behind most people the world identifies as extraordinary due to their fame or fortune, you will find an ordinary person whose circumstances are extraordinary. – Randy Grieser
Bonus: Learn to manage employees with skip-level meetings!
Summarize this article for me please10. First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman
What makes good managers great? Is it a unique management style, persistence, and talent? According to this book, the one mantra that lets great managers win is: break all the rules!
The book is the result of an in-depth study involving over 80,000 managers with different backgrounds. The study showed that the best managers hire employees not for their experience or skills but for their talent. Instead of nagging about weaknesses, great managers identify each person’s strengths and find ways to build on them and create high-performing employees.
The book also emphasizes the role of a front-line manager in attracting and nurturing a skilled and reliable workforce.
The talented employee may join a company because of its charismatic leaders, its generous benefits, and its world-class training programs, but how long that employee stays and how productive he is while he is there is determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor. – Marcus Buckingham
Summarize this article for me pleaseUnleash Great Management Skills with ClickUp
Management books are fantastic for soaking in new information, expanding your views, and learning new techniques that can enhance your success. But merely reading books won’t help you if you fail to put this knowledge to practical use.
An excellent way to move from theory to practice is to start using a manager-friendly platform like ClickUp. This all-in-one productivity tool is packed with features that help you see the big picture and the small details with the same clarity, regardless of the scale of your operations.
ClickUp lets you juggle multiple projects, communicate with conviction, maintain team dynamics, and monitor progress and deadlines with ease. Let’s dive into some of its best features designed to facilitate great management within teams!
ClickUp views for workflow visualization
A change of perspective can often help you identify bottlenecks and improve your operations, processes, or projects. ClickUp offers you 15+ views to look at all the workflows you’re in charge of and be the leader your team needs. 🤠
You have the classics like the List view and Board view, which help define, prioritize, and manage tasks, but you also have views that serve a specific purpose.
For example, the Form view is perfect for collecting employee feedback and using the info to improve your managerial decisions. Another fantastic option is the Workload view—it gives you a crystal-clear picture of your team’s capacity, allowing you to maximize their productivity and prevent burnout situations.
If you’re looking for an effective way to connect with teams, choose the Chat view—it streamlines real-time collaboration and can be used for company-wide updates or communication with specific teams or members.
Team leads love to jump on the Everything view within ClickUp to keep track of all projects and tasks, ensuring timely delivery.
ClickUp tasks to lead from a place of care
Depending on your line of work and specific role, your to-do list can contain all sorts of tasks, from managing resources to filling out team schedules, processing payroll, and ordering supplies.
If you want to manage your responsibilities efficiently, address challenges authentically, and build collaborative team relationships, you’ll love ClickUp’s suite of task management tools.
Strengthen the goodwill between you and your team by creating comprehensive task lists that help everyone strive toward common goals. Use Custom Fields to set deadlines and priorities, add assignees, estimate budgets, and monitor progress, gently establishing accountability for the entire team’s workloads.
ClickUp also lets you create task relationships and dependencies to define a clear order of operations and prevent missed tasks. In ClickUp 3.0, you can set up task types, recurring tasks, and checklists specific to your Workspace. Use the platform’s native time tracker to collect timesheet data and make balanced decisions about workload planning and compensation.
If you’re a project manager, use ClickUp Automations to reduce manual tracking and admin work and free up time for high-value tasks.
ClickUp Docs to bring transparency to teams
Managers are always creating, reviewing, and managing all sorts of reports, contracts, agreements, training materials, budget proposals, and project plans. These documents are super important for improving communication and operational transparency. Wouldn’t it be awesome to keep them organized in one location?
You can do just that with ClickUp Docs, an integrated document management solution. Think of it as a central repository for your docs—create, edit, share, store, and manage them effortlessly.
Thinking of implementing a new policy? You can share relevant documents with those not involved in the decision-making process. Customize permissions to allow them to comment or contribute in real time. This will help you gain new perspectives and grow into a more empathetic and inclusive leader.
Managerial work often encompasses heavy-duty writing tasks which can steal a chunk of your day. We recommend using ClickUp AI, a writing and brainstorming assistant, to fast-track time-consuming tasks like writing emails and standard operating procedures (SOPs).
ClickUp AI is a must-have for busy managers as it comes with capabilities to summarize text and generate action items—you don’t have to spend hours reading documents to know what’s going on! 😏
ClickUp templates for multiple use cases
Using templates is another fantastic way to save time on everyday management work. ClickUp offers an impressive template library with over 1,000 options.
You may want to explore operations templates to create quick reports, schedules, measurable Goals, and calendars. You’ll also find project management templates to create tailored annual plans, manage teams, and plan budgets extensively. 💸
Summarize this article for me pleaseManagement Books and ClickUp: The Winning Combo
As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others. This quote by Bill Gates forms the very crux of what many management books preach—a wise manager isn’t just result-driven; they value their workforce and dedicate a lot of energy toward maintaining team synergy.
ClickUp makes an excellent solution for managers who see the value in building well-connected and winning teams, even in a remote or hybrid setting. Its features help you develop positive work habits that set an example for the entire organization, keeping everyone goal-oriented and supportive.
Sign up for ClickUp and explore how it can usher stress-free productivity for your managerial workflows. ✌️
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