Bibliography

Annotated bibliography: Leadership books

Leadership styles and practices

Clampitt, P.G. (2004). Communicating for Managerial Effectiveness. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.

Clampitt suggests that effective communication is like dance, with partners passing messages back and forth, learning about each other and co-creating meaning. It is an ongoing process, rather than definitive episodes of message transmission and receiving. If a leader understands communication in this way, performance feedback becomes something that is mutually constructed. Culture grows organically and can be influenced by what managers allow and disallow by word or deed. Leaders foster value systems that guide members’ actions.

Clampitt provides engaging case studies and analyzes them in light of scholarly research. He covers fundamental organizational communication situations and problems, including change management, culture, and knowledge management. He sets out his basic framework in the first few chapters. Subsequent chapters may be selected as needed to address topics of particular interest.

Dreher, D. (1996). The Tao of Personal Leadership. New York: HarperBusiness.
Dreher, an educator, aikido practitioner, and student of the Tao organizes passages from the Tao Te Ching to guide leaders to awareness, centeredness, honor, and humility. The first section of the book addresses inner processes that help leaders achieve personal confidence in their role. The second section discusses ways a leader puts the Tao into action.

The book may be read front-to-back or its well-marked passages scanned for specific purposes. I randomly choose a passage to ponder at the start of each day.

Katzenback, J.R. & Smith, D.K. (1993, Rev.). The Wisdom of Teams. New York: HarperBusines. Available on Kindle.
Team building in organizations too often attends to the interrelationships of individuals and neglects performance. Organizations that create a culture that monitors and values group achievement are more flexible, innovative and efficient, Katzenbach and Smith say. They lay out the fundamentals of high-performing teams, discovered through comparisons of several groups that have achieved much more than the individuals alone could have achieved.

These teams bucked corporate culture, overcame insurmountable odds, introduced new products, or fashioned new niches in old industries. The common elements they discovered were that high-performing teams were small in number of members, skill sets were complementary, teams were committed to a common purpose and performance goals, they were committed to a common approach, and team members held each other mutually accountable.

This book is most useful for a leader who has a good team that is ready to go to the next level. Leaders of dysfunctional teams would be too distant from this roadmap to find it useful. But even a leader in that situation may apply the principles to any special task force or work group they participate in. Most of the successful teams profiled in this book were cross-disciplinary groups put together to tackle a specific problem or informally convened to circumvent organizational roadblocks. This book has been so popular that it has been revised several times. A new revision is in order, as the 2002 version still has a glowing account of a high-performing team at Enron.

Senge, P.M. (2006, Rev.). The Fifth Discipline. New York: Currency Doubleday.
Senge started a movement with this book, which outlines the first five disciplines (there may be more, he says) that are required to create a “learning organization.” Members of a learning organization understand how they create their reality and how they can influence it. Such an organization is more likely to have generative, creative thinking that advances the organization, its community, and the world.

Four of the disciplines are separate practices: getting a grasp of your personal vision, building a shared vision, fostering team learning, and understanding the effect of our own mental models. These disciplines would be business-book gimmicks if they were not integrated by the fifth discipline: systems thinking. With systems thinking, the leader seeks to find the patterns that underlie an organization’s results. Senge describes several patterns that usually are not detected unless the leader stands back from strict cause-effect thinking and perceives the influences and delays that are at play on the entire system. This perception will help the leader identify behaviors that contribute to dysfunction and to identify interventions that have greater influence on the system. Senge’s framework is applicable to the workplace and to society in general. Indeed, he and his fans have created an international group dedicated to fostering systems thinking in all aspects of society (Society of Organizational Learning, solevolution.ning.com).

Stone Zander, R., & Zander, B. (2000) The Art of Possibility. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
The authors urge leaders to shed “scarcity thinking” and embrace possibility. It is the difference between plugging away within confines and exploring boundless possibilities. Stone Zander, a family therapist, and Zander, the music director of the Boston Philharmonic, argue that we place limits on ourselves, constrained by custom, convention, and insecurities. They suggest that we first determine the limits we have constructed in our minds, to question those, and to imagine how our situation might look if we let go of the self-imposed limits.

Zander uses poignant anecdotes from his years conducting musicians of all skill levels around the world. His departure from the traditional hierarchical orchestra structure elicits new energy and insight from musicians and opens new avenues for Zander as a leader. Each idea the authors present is accompanied by a “practice” to help readers apply the concept. The book is an excellent antidote to burnout and is sure to appeal to your inner optimist.

Leadership communication

Bohm, D. & Nichol, L. (Ed). (1996). On Dialogue. New York: Routledge. Available on Kindle.
During his career as a theoretical physicist, David Bohm’s writings and lectures took side trips into dialogue and collective thought. In this book, editor Lee Nichol compiles Bohm’s ideas to suggest a coherent theory of co-creation of meaning. There is a flavor of quantum physics in Bohm’s take on dialogue. He sees dialogue as the antithesis of debate and discussion in that it is organic, chaotic, and evolving. The process of dialogue is itself the whole meaning, while debate and discussion breaks topics down to constituent parts that in themselves have no meaning. Dialogue is the ticking clock and all that it portends; discussion and debate is the clock smashed to pieces.

The ideas in this book invite a leader to view the rituals of organizational communication in light of co-creation of meaning. He or she will notice the vast amount of energy spent talking without achieving a shared meaning. He or she also will notice that dialogue often happens in spite of the organizational rituals. A leader who witnesses such flashes also will notice the leaps in understanding that accompany them. The leader may discover ways to encourage more dialogue, and also may notice that the organizational culture and the path it takes is itself a process of dialogue that encompasses individuals, work groups, group interactions, and the organization’s interface with its environment.

Denning, S. (2005). The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Available on Kindle.
As a knowledge management leader at the World Bank, Denning gained influence by gathering and using the organization’s success stories. He went on to study the historical and anthropological roots of storytelling and he joined a storyteller group. The result is a scholarly analysis of the use of storytelling in organizational communication, leading to a practical guide for selecting and performing stories and using them in specific strategic instances. Of course, he uses anecdotes to illustrate his points.

Denning deconstructs the elements of well-told story. One detailed chapter is devoted to the elements of practicing and performing the story. The second half of the book describes several instances in which stories can be used strategically: to build trust, to convey values, to impart knowledge, and to encourage collaboration, for example.

Lencioni, P. (2004). Death by Meeting. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
When you stop to think of the resources an organization invests in meetings, you realize what a tremendous return is needed to justify them. Unfortunately, very little attention is paid to the conduct of a meeting and this valuable tool is largely wasted. Lencioni’s fictional leadership team wrestles with meetings that run too long and fail to address important matters. A new team member watches for awhile and offers observations that put the team on track for more efficient use of meeting time.

The solutions achieved by this fictional team provide excellent tactics from which a leader may pick and choose. There should be different kinds of meetings for different purposes, Lencioni argues. There are meetings in which short-term, tactical issues are handled, and there are meetings in which quality time is devoted to strategic issues. Participants are more engaged and the follow-through is more likely when meetings follow a routine familiar to the group.

Applied storytelling

Hansen, Katharine (2009). Tell me about yourself.

In her new book Tell Me About Yourself, Katharine Hansen provides actionable advice for incorporating storytelling in cover letters, resumes, job interviews, and conversations with the boss. As someone who is on the hiring end of the equation, I can vouch for the effectiveness of strategic storytelling (see my posts, What I look for in resumes and What I look for in cover letters).

Katharine, who writes my favorite blog on applied storytelling, interviewed job seekers and studied reams of resumes while earning her doctorate. She supplies step-by-step story construction tips and illustrates her points with actual resumes and cover letters gathered in her research.

She clearly did an exhaustive literature search to gather a wide range of expert opinion on the subject. My only criticism is that Katharine could have synthesized the academic literature a bit more and taken a few risks by providing her own opinion.

Katherine puts the issue well for all of us, whether we are in the job market or are building our careers where we are: We should carefully nurture our own personal brand. And we know the best brands are those that evoke intrigue and emotion through the story that they tell.