We’re all looking for a leadership edge, now more than ever, in an age of unprecedented disruption.
Yet for all the economic, social, and technological change unfolding around us, the basics still matter. Timeless leadership strategies continue to prevail.
Take communication. Seasoned executives know that one of the secrets to being a better business leader is first becoming a better communicator.
So do these six authors. Each has written an indispensable guide for present and future leaders to sharpen their communication skills and elevate their leadership abilities in the process.
For those who believe effective leadership also requires maintaining a sensible work-life balance and overall well-being, these books outline complementary strategies that can improve readers’ performance outside the boardroom as well.
1. L. David Marquet — Leadership Is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say and What You Don’t
You might expect former Navy Captain L. David Marquet to be a champion of quick, decisive action. Call it “shoot from the hip” leadership.
In Leadership Is Language, Marquet recommends anything but. In fact, he actively cautions against what he describes as an outdated approach to leading teams—one wildly out of step with the people whose work you depend on.
Marquet argues that modern leaders must learn to say less, in turn endowing each of their words with more power and value. He also advises leaders to listen as much as they speak. This is a critical soft skill that self-important leaders often overlook—or never learn in the first place.
Marquet devotes much of Leadership Is Language to six easy-to-remember “plays” that leaders should run within their teams, like “Collaborate, don’t coerce” and “Improve, don’t prove.” To collaborate effectively, Marquet tells leaders to be the last to weigh in on a course of action after other team members have had a chance to share their views.
2. Tamsen Webster — Say What They Can’t Unhear: The 9 Principles of Lasting Change
In Say What They Can’t Unhear, strategist Tamsen Webster guides readers through nine “persuasion proverbs” at the heart of lasting organizational change.
Rooted in the latest behavioral science, these are principles that virtually everyone can understand, remember, and come to believe in. The intent is nothing less than to bridge the divide between what leaders mean to say and what their audiences hear and absorb—to cut through abstraction, get everyone on the same page, and create a unified and motivated organization from top to bottom.
Webster’s work is valuable for any leader who feels as if they’re running into a wall, day after day, or pushing on an outward-swinging door. It’s about breaking through the noise and achieving positive, measurable, and lasting change.
3. Maryanne O’Brien — The Elevated Communicator: How to Master Your Style and Strengthen Well-Being at Work
Maryanne O’Brien’s The Elevated Communicator is a guide for leaders to leverage effective communication to achieve what Forbes contributor Jeanne Meister says is nothing less than “the future of work”: genuine workforce well-being.
That well-being begins with leaders themselves, the core audience for O’Brien’s book. To truly understand what motivates and impacts those they lead, O’Brien argues, leaders must ground themselves in a healthier, more sustainable approach to work. That done, it’s easier to close the so-called communication gap within teams and help everyone—leaders included—progress toward more satisfying roles and careers.
O’Brien devoted more than a decade to researching communication styles, and it shows. The Elevated Communicator identifies four main types: Expressive, Reserved, Direct, and Harmonious. Using self-assessment tools and in-depth “style profiles,” O’Brien helps readers identify which of the four most closely resembles their own. Detailed roadmaps provide readers with tips to grow within their own styles or adopt others when the situation calls for it.
4. Sara Ross — Dear Work
In Dear Work, leadership expert Sara Ross calls out what’s on the minds of high-performing professionals—from the C-suite on down: burnout.
Drawing from personal experience and extensive research, Ross reveals that burnout isn’t just the result of long hours—it’s a symptom of outdated beliefs about success, stress, and energy. The solution? Redefining your relationship with work by strengthening what she calls your Work Vitality Quotient.
Ross guides you through this shift by identifying four energy-depleting “success traps” and showing how to escape them, making sustainable excellence a reality. She then introduces a “Yes, And” mindset to help you work with stress in ways that enrich meaning, connection, and fulfillment. Finally, Ross helps boost your energy intelligence to decipher when rest requires slowing down and when it’s achieved by accelerating in a new, reinvigorating direction.
What sets Dear Work apart is that Ross doesn’t ask people to pull back or dial down ambition. Instead, she offers science-backed shifts to break the burnout cycle, boost happiness, and bring your most vitality-fueled self forward—at work and beyond.
5. Daniel Goleman — The Emotionally Intelligent Leader
Daniel Goleman helped popularize the concept of emotional intelligence, now recognized as one of the essential components of effective leadership.
First described in a series of long-form Harvard Business Review articles, Goleman’s thesis is simple but powerful: Emotional intelligence drives measurable results, so working toward it is a high-ROI activity.
In The Emotionally Intelligent Leader, Goleman draws on cutting-edge neuroscientific research to explain why emotional intelligence is so important for modern leaders and how to build capacity for it in your own leadership practice. Unsurprisingly, thoughtful and transparent communication lies at the core of this endeavor.
6. Sue Ludwig — Tiny Humans, Big Lessons
Unlike most business book writers, Sue Ludwig is not a longtime corporate leader, economist, or management theorist. As the title implies, she worked with babies—as a neonatal therapist, specifically—and eventually founded a national organization that aims to improve the lives of babies all over the world.
Tiny Humans, Big Lessons is a simple yet powerful text on the universality of the human experience and what it means for people who aspire to lead. Ludwig identifies four essential strategies that work as well in the neonatal intensive care unit as in the corporate business unit: refining communication by listening first and speaking second, cultivating communication by acknowledging others as human, aligning work and personal lives rather than building walls between them, and staying grounded by remembering what really matters.
For Ludwig, “what really matters” are the tiny babies and families she serves. That’s why her team sometimes begins meetings by placing a tiny diaper on the conference table as a reminder that the decisions they make resonate far beyond the room.
Communicating Through the Chaos
Leaders have always faced competing and, at times, overwhelming demands on their attention. Yet, few disagree that the pressure on leaders has increased recently. Distractions are more numerous, more compelling, and more toxic.
In a chaotic and confusing world, effective communication is vital. These books might not transform your life overnight, but each of them can set you on course to become a more capable leader, led by a newfound capacity to convince and inspire others.
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