6 Books to Inspire Innovative Leadership That Boost Productivity

As a leader, you know that getting more from your team is more complicated than it sounds. It’s not just about setting a compelling vision or enforcing policies and protocols to the letter. Ruling with a heavy hand often causes more problems than it solves.

Amid all the noise, finding quality leadership advice can feel like a monumental challenge. But it’s out there if you know where to look — and can tune out the more questionable bits of so-called wisdom.

So, where can you turn for innovative, actionable ideas that actually work in the real world? You could do worse than to read these six books to inspire innovative leadership. Each is the product of years of hard-won leadership experience. Each offers a different perspective on managing teams, holding individuals accountable, influencing others outside your direct sphere of control, and bridging divides beyond your organization to maximize efficiency, turbocharge productivity, and unlock the results you’ve always known you and your team were capable of achieving.

1. Survive and Advance: Lessons on Living a Life without Compromise by Derek Lewis

Derek Lewis rose from the working-class streets of Washington, D.C., to a position of real power with one of America’s best-known corporations. Survive and Advance is part memoir, part management treatise, and 100% a testament to his achievements.

Lewis acted as a de facto parent for his brothers. He had a hardworking single parent on one side of his family. On the other, he had mental health and addiction issues. Lewis had to do what he could to keep them safe under challenging circumstances. Though Lewis grew up in the 1970s, his circumstances are familiar to a growing number of children (and their parents) today, making Survive and Advance a poignant road map for anyone who wishes a better life for their kids.

Lewis’s book is also a guide for managers eager, but perhaps not quite sure how, to develop more efficient, productive teams. Later in his career, Lewis consistently achieved standout financial results. He did this through a combination of innovative business strategy, tough-but-fair management, and an uncommonly astute vision for the future. Eventually, Lewis rose to lead PepsiCo’s groundbreaking efforts to build equity inside and outside the organization. He details his experiences in a warm, approachable, and actionable way for anyone looking to follow in his footsteps.

2. The Communicative Leader: Mastering Impactful Leadership Through Effective Communication by Nicole Banks

Nicole Banks’s The Communicative Leader is the definitive book on effective communication in the service of organizational transformation.

Banks is a longtime leadership consultant with deep experience in reorienting and re-empowering leaders at every level of seniority. She uses examples from her own experience to show how simple changes in our approach to workplace communication can lead to lasting improvements in team performance — and ultimately develop a happier, healthier workforce that gets more done.

The Communicative Leader isn’t the only for the leader responsible for steering entire organizations. It’s also for ambitious professionals who hope to be in that position one day. Professionals for whom effective communication could unlock a much-deserved promotion. Additionally, this could enable a long-delayed external move to a position with more responsibility and growth potential.

3. Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers by Steve Pratt

Steve Pratt’s Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers is an indispensable guide for serious marketers who want to help their clients break through the noise and drive results that simply can’t be argued with.

Pratt’s central insight is that attention is an increasingly valuable — and scarce — commodity in our information-saturated environment. The tactics that worked for years to gain audience attention are no longer operative, necessitating unconventional alternatives to deliver the same results. Pratt reveals these alternatives in great detail and shows readers how to implement them consistently and sustainably.

Pratt writes for an audience of marketers, but his insights and formula for success also apply outside the advertising world. If you’re a leader hoping to draw more attention to what you’re doing or selling, they’re there for the taking.

4. Beyond the Hammer: A Fresh Approach to Leadership, Culture, and Building High Performance Teams by Brian Gottlieb

For years, Brian Gottlieb worked with individuals and teams that didn’t live up to their potential. This was due to friction between departments and employees. These groups failed to take ownership of their work, and generally, inconsistent work products were born of unclear or unreasonable expectations.

Along the way, Gottlieb got pretty good at helping them improve their performance. He eventually wrote Beyond the Hammer to empower those he couldn’t touch directly.

In this easy-to-read, engaging book, he tells the story of a fictional manager. This manager is beset by the problems Gottlieb saw repeatedly in his real work. His manager — and through the manager, his readers — discover the “five pillars” of leadership. These are proven tactics that any leader can implement at virtually any scale; Gottlieb shows how it can be done, no matter where you’re starting from.

5. Do Something That Matters Journal by Michael Bungay Stanier

Michael Bungay Stanier’s Do Something That Matters Journal is the most interactive on this list of books to inspire innovative leadership. No, this isn’t a blank book of lined paper awaiting your daily devotion. It’s much more than that and more potent if you use it to its full potential.

This book is part journal, part guide — and designed to encourage action. It was penned to help you accomplish your goals while fostering personal growth and improvement.

Bungay Stanier is recognized as the world’s top coach and author of the century’s bestselling coaching book. In it, he shares his most impactful questions and proven processes for achieving success. This book can help you stay focused on what matters, make progress daily or weekly toward your longer-term goals, boost your confidence, nurture your expertise, and do something that matters to you and those around you.

6. Leading from the Middle: A Playbook for Managers to Influence Up, Down, and Across the Organization by Scott Mautz

Scott Mautz wrote Leading from the Middle for the middle managers among us — those the former P&G executive describes as living in “the messy middle.”

Part motivational volume, part guide for more effective personnel management, Leading from the Middle acknowledges the competing priorities and pressures middle managers face. Mautz lays out actionable steps his audience can take to exert influence up the chain of command, laterally to other middle managers across the organization, and downward to the direct reports and lower-ranking employees who actually get the work done.

He shows how to do all this through a simple yet strikingly effective “Middle Action Plan,” or MAP, that, above all else, is designed to protect its users’ time and expand their influence to parts of the organization over which they have no direct control. It’s as close as it gets to a skeleton key for cross-functional productivity and a must-try for any middle manager tired of feeling like they’re running up against a wall.

Final Thoughts

You have a full plate. Most high-performing leaders do. So it’s fair for you to ask whether you have any time to read this list of books to inspire innovative leadership — let alone whether doing so is worth your time when you have so much else going on.

But here’s the thing. You don’t have to commit to reading all six books by tomorrow or even in the next six months. As you ask your team to do on any big project, why not break down the assignment into more manageable tasks?

Start with one and pick up the next when you’re done. Or, pick up a few of these books to inspire innovative leadership and read a chapter from one tomorrow, then a chapter from another the following day, and so on, the better to keep things interesting.

Before you know it, you’ll have put hundreds of pages behind you. Additionally, you will have created a fresh reserve of inspiration to help you and your team level up your productivity.

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