Career, Uncategorized

Top Leadership Books For Young Professionals


Readers are leaders and over here at The Savvy Young Professional, we want you to step your book game up. We curated a list of the top 20 leadership books and a brief description of each book.

The challenge? Pick at least two books from this list and read or listen to them (we love audible). Up your

water cooler talk and snag that next promotion.



  1. Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

Journalist John Carreyrou uncovers the scam of a century in his riveting investigative book, Bad Blood. In it, he unravels the lies told by billionaire sweetheart Elizabeth Holmes, who found her success by selling a technology that never existed–for more than 10 years.


  1. Dare to Lead by Brené Brown

In Dare To Lead, best-selling author Brené Brown shines a light on these opposite behaviors. Her goal is to help you step into leadership and take charge, not despite, but because of all these misguided notions.


  1. Maid by Stephanie Land

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive. Evicted meets Nickel and Dimed in Stephanie Land’s memoir about working as a maid, a beautiful and gritty exploration of poverty in America. Includes a foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich. “My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter.”


  1. Atomic Habits by James Clear

Small habits can compound over time. In fact, according to Atomic Habits, habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effect of your habits multiplies as you repeat them. They seem to make little or even no difference on any given day but the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous.


  1. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth



  1. From the Ground Up by Howard Schultz and Joanne Gordon

A Conversation Between Two Iconic American Entrepreneurs—Howard Schultz and Barnes & Noble founder Len Riggio—about First Jobs, the Third Place, and the Making of America. From the longtime CEO and chairman of Starbucks, a bold, dramatic work about the new responsibilities that leaders, businesses, and citizens share in American society today—as viewed through the intimate lens of one man’s life and work.


  1. Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

Extreme Ownership is written by two former Navy SEALs, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, who now head a leadership training company. Both men are pretty hardcore, I must admit. The experiences they share in this book are intense and eye-opening–not to mention unique. There aren’t many books out there that give such detailed glimpses into the lives of SEALs in action.


  1. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight



  1. Leadership: In Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin



  1. Zucked by Roger McNamee

ZUCKED is McNamee’s intimate reckoning with the catastrophic failure of the head of one of the world’s most powerful companies to face up to the damage he is doing. It’s a story that begins with a series of rude awakenings. First there is the author’s dawning realization that the platform is being manipulated by some very bad actors. Then there is the even more unsettling realization that Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are unable or unwilling to share his concerns, polite as they may be to his face.


  1. Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t by Simon Sinek






  1. Growing Weeders Into Leaders: Leadership Lessons from the Ground Up by Jeff McManus



  1. The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy



  1. Find Your Why: A Practical Guide for Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team by Simon Sinek and David Mead



  1. Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More by Morten Hansen



  1. Unlocking Potential: 7 Coaching Skills That Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations by Michael K. Simpson and Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

To get the best from your employees, you need to be more than a manager. You need to be a coach. You’re a leader because you possess expertise in your field. You have the training and experience. You understand your business…but can you fully motivate and engage your team? Michael K. Simpson, a senior consultant to FranklinCovey, has spent more than twenty-five years training executives to become effective coaches, mentoring and guiding leaders and managers to encourage and develop the talent of their people—the most important asset in any organization. In this guide, you will acquire the skills to coach your personnel from the ground up, maximizing their potential on a personal level, as members of the team, and as contributors to the organization as a whole. Transform your business relationships (and your business) with this comprehensive tool for optimizing productivity, profitability, loyalty, and customer focus. Don’t just manage. Energize. Galvanize. Inspire. Be a coach.

  1. The Top 5 Leadership Habits of 2018: And How They Are Wired Inside Your Brain by Dr. Roman Velasquez

Most people are unaware that a tremendous amount of data processing occurs in the brain. Within this processing many habitual patterns that are designed by billions of neural connections exist inside your brain; they’re unconscious and automatic. Leadership comes from within, however, the brain develops from the outside – in. Every relationship, business partnership, mentor, coach, supervisor, relative, friend, work associate, and experience, shape your brain. These experiences and relationships form billions of intricate neural networks and they compete for leadership expression. You are wired to others inside your brain. I will give you my top five leadership habits for 2018 based on my extensive personal research. These include; basic brain science behind human performance of Shared Leadership, developing Interpersonal Relationships with Empathy, Leadership Dimensions towards Knowledge Sharing, being Adaptive and Ethical, and creating personal disruption for Self-Preneurship. I will also briefly tell you how your brain makes decisions, how to regulate emotions, collaborate with others, and drive positive change.


  1. Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude by Raymond M. Kethledge and Michael S. Erwin

Throughout history, leaders have used solitude as a matter of course. Martin Luther King found moral courage while sitting alone at his kitchen table one night during the Montgomery bus boycott. Jane Goodall used her intuition in the jungles of central Africa while learning how to approach chimps. Solitude is a state of mind, a space where you can focus on your own thoughts without distraction, with a power to bring mind and soul together in clear-eyed conviction. But these days, handheld devices and other media leave us awash with the thoughts of others. We are losing solitude without even realizing it.

To find solitude today, a leader must make a conscious effort. This book explains why the effort is worthwhile and how to make it. Through gripping historical accounts and firsthand interviews with a wide range of contemporary leaders, Raymond Kethledge (a federal court of appeals judge) and Michael Erwin (a West Pointer and three-tour combat veteran) show how solitude can enhance clarity, spur creativity, sustain emotional balance, and generate the moral courage necessary to overcome adversity and criticism. Anyone who leads anyone–including oneself–can benefit from solitude. With a foreword by Jim Collins (author of the bestseller Good to Great), Lead Yourself First is a rallying cry to reclaim solitude–and all the benefits, both practical and sublime, that come with it.


  1. A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey




Tanida Mullen


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