Transformation Mastery
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
Maverick by Ricardo Semler
The Leadership Circle Profile – a comprehensive 360 assessment that helps you get a clear view into your leadership effectiveness. Michael Spayd is a certified facilitator of this profile and has the ability to administer it and help individuals and groups understand the results.
Leadership in a Wiki World, Rod Collins
Bill Schneider: The Reengineering Alternative: A Plan for Making your Current Culture Work.
This book describes the 4 corporate cultures and gives a simple diagnostic tool to see which culture your corporation might be. More comprehensive diagnostics for corporate culture and for your leadership-culturelink are also available from certified facilitators such as Michael Spayd.
Dan Pink: Drive: The Surprising Truth about what Motivates Us
What motivates people, really? (hint: it’s not raises or public embarrassment). For a short burst of this book in 15 minutes, see the TED talk on The Surprising Science of Motivation.
The Arbinger Institute: The Anatomy of Peace
For helping you turn the ratio around so that you are spending much more time helping things go right rather than dealing with things that are going wrong. Plus, great ways to get to the heart of conflict on your teams (and within yourself).
The Arbinger Institute: Leadership and Self-Deception
Essential reading for any manager, but especially for Agile Coaches.
Lee Devin & Rob Austin: Artful Making
This is an excellent book that explores how methods used in creative fields such as theatre can be applied to managing knowledge-based projects.
Steven Johnson: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software
Why agile teams are more like ecosystems than machines is explained with lots of examples in this book.
Tom DeMarco: Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency
This book is inspiring and surprising; it is like a whack to the side of the head.
Margaret Wheatley: Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
Great material on why the mechanistic view of the workforce no longer works. What worked for me: start with Chapter 8 then go back to the heavier science at the beginning.
Change model theorists who have written many books: Darryl Conner, John Kotter
Peter Block: The Answer to How is Yes
A great book for helping your managers (and you) get past the “how do we do it” and into the “why should we do it.”
Tom Peters: Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age
This book is visually stunning and its content is powerful. It should get you re-imagining in no time.
Peter Senge and others: Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society
This one is a little academic, but if you like that (or can wade through it) the payoff is big. Amazing insights.
Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs: Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery for Anticipating and Initiating Change
The leaders we need now are not heroes, they are synergists who bring the best out in everyone (including themselves). This book gives you a clear model of the levels of leadership in play now and where we are going with the new breeds of leadership (and why we must).
Jon Katzenbach, Douglas Smith: Wisdom of Teams Much foundational information about teams is in this classic, including the difference between a working group, pseudo team and team. It helps you know which of these you currently have.
Umair Haque : The Builder’s Manifesto
It’s Buildership, not Leadership that’s needed today.
Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders, Jurgen Appelo
Daniel Goleman: Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence
J. Richard Hackman: Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances
While not an agile book per-se, all of the ideas in this book are applicable to coaching agile teams. For example, if you need help convincing a product owner to create a compelling vision, this book helps you explain why that’s so important.
Losada and Heaphy: The Role of Positivity and Connectivity in the Performance of Business Teams: A Nonlinear Dynamics Model
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