This is the first post in a series of recommended reading lists. From books to blog posts, articles and podcasts, we’ll share our tops picks for mentors, mentees and managers.
For January, we’re covering our top five books for new managers. Becoming a boss often requires a different skill set than the one you’ve been mastering in the day-to-day of your field, and in many offices, you aren’t shown the ropes of management. FullCircle can provide hands-on mentorship for new managers, but if you’re in a hurry to get started, check out the books below.
5 Best Books for New Managers
Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott
While an exec at Apple, author Kim Scott helped develop a course on becoming a new boss. In this book, she shares her best tips for being a great boss, including the approach she calls radical candor—offering feedback with caring and directness. She shows how being authentic helps build a culture of feedback, solid teams and results you and your team can all be proud of.
Why we love it: Candid conversation practices like sharing hard truths help organizations gain common context rapidly, making growth and scale more successful.
The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha
Being successful at work requires constant change. Businesses no longer retain employees for decades—but treating them as disposable or fearing that they’ll move on doesn’t guarantee success, either. Instead, employers must acknowledge that even great employees leave, and employees need to be honest about their career goals. When you build a culture where teammates are allies and trust one another, you can recruit and retain flexible, creative individuals who innovate and achieve.
Why we love it: While this tactic requires trust from both manager and report, once achieved, it unlocks an incredibly fruitful and effective working relationship.
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace
If you’re a Pixar fan, you’ll love this book. And if you want to build a creative culture, you’ll love this book, too. In Creativity, Inc., the authors contend that Pixar’s success comes in large part from the creative culture they’ve built, and the sometimes-surprising leadership strategies they advocate for. By breaking convention, their team has reached success by letting go of control, accepting risk, clearing paths for colleagues, and paying attention to the things that create fear.
Why we love it: This book is about implementing organization design and change management without killing the creative spirit, something all companies can use!
The Martha Rules: 10 Essentials for Achieving Success as You Start, Build, or Manage a Business by Martha Stewart
Yes, that Martha. Stewart, a consummate entrepreneur, shares her business knowledge and years of experience to offer advice for others who want to build their own businesses. And that’s a very good thing.
Why we love it: Martha’s advice comes from decades of trial and error, and is immediately relatable. Plus, she starts the book off directly addressing her prison sentence, like a boss.
Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization by Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright
In every workplace, there are tribes that develop over time. As a manager, you benefit from understanding those tribes and what makes them tick—and how they influence the quality of work that gets done. The authors of Tribal Leadership show you how to identify the tribes at your company, leverage each tribe’s unique characteristics, and develop metrics for success.
Why we love it: People are weird. It’s what we love about them, but it is also why they can be hard to understand. This book helps managers understand the complexities of the ecosystem they live in, and helps them understand people in general.