5 Leadership Books To Learn Skills To Manage Change In 2024
Change management is one of the most essential skills leaders need to adopt in 2024. Organizations are facing numerous challenges spurred on by post-pandemic adaptations and inflation. These include workplace communication rifts, navigating the implementation of the hybrid work model, finding innovative approaches to strengthening employee engagement, and adjusting to the new norm of AI (artificial intelligence).
With all these concurrent changes, how can you adapt as a leader and confidently lead your organization through these challenges, to face and overcome them?
Below are five leadership books you might want to consider adding to your professional development library this year, which provide guidance and practical advice on change management and leading through disruption.
1. Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change
Penned by William and Susan Bridges, this book teaches you that the best way to prepare for organizational change is when you involve your employees in the process. Give them a purpose, a well-defined vision takes place when employees have a clear purpose, a plan for, and a part to play in their changing surroundings. Managing Transitions is effective for you whether you’re a first time manager or supervisor, or you work at the highest levels in the corporate hierarchy.
2. Leadershift: The 11 Essential Changes Every Leader Must Embrace
Leadershift teaches that leadership is about embracing a shift in one’s own mindset and attitudes. The author, John Maxwell, shares from his own experience the 11 essential shifts leaders need to make in their own lives so they can be ready for, and be nimble to, change. This book is a useful read, not only for professional growth to learn how to lead change in your organization, but for your personal growth as well.
3. Coaching People through Organizational Change: Practical Tools to Support Employees through Business Transformation
This rather recent 2022 release, written by Sue Noble and Amy Tarrant, helps you support your employees through a coaching and transformational style of leadership, during organizational change. It teaches 20 coaching tools, frameworks, and techniques that you can apply to your role as a manager or even as an organizational performance coach. When these practices are implemented, your employees’ wellbeing and resilience through times of change will improve.
4. Doing Agile Right: Transformation Without Chaos
Authored by Bain & Company’s partners and senior leaders Sarah Elk, Darrell Rigby, and Steve Berez, Doing Agile Right is a book that teaches you how to catapult your organization from sluggishness, stagnated growth, and silos, to boosted productivity using the agile methodology. But most importantly, it teaches you how to apply agile in the right settings and for the right teams, ensuring it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.
5. The Effective Change Manager’s Handbook: Essential Guidance to the Change Management Body of Knowledge
This handbook, which is part of CMI’s (Change Management Institute) Body of Knowledge, is an ultimate one-stop shop for understanding the fundamentals of change management. It covers the entire process from planning to implementation, including stakeholder strategy and project management, and shares practical change management models and tools so you can roll out change initiatives within your organization.
These books are certainly worth the perusal, because without being adaptable and understanding how to lead through and manage change, your organization is more at risk and you will fail to innovate, be relevant, or retain employees. Your career, and the success of your business, depends on it.