Leadership is difficult, I think. Part of the problem is that those who believe they are good at it aren’t, and those who are reluctant to be involved are the very ones you want leading.

There are a number of teaching-specific leadership books, but I tend to prefer a broader palette. The below are books I have read that have helped me frame my own views on things and given me a way, I feel, to think about school leadership matters through different lenses.

Rather than post reviews of them all, I thought it’d be more useful to give a link and a quote I thought might pique interest

From Armed Forces

Team of Teams, General Stanley McChrystal

Trust and purpose are inefficient: getting to know your colleagues intimately and acquiring a whole-system overview are big time sinks; the sharing of responsibilities generates redundancy. But this overlap and redundancy—these inefficiencies—are precisely what imbues teams with high-level adaptability and efficacy. Great teams are less like “awesome machines” than awesome organisms.

Turn The Ship Around, L. David Marquet

In a broader sense, this mechanism highlights the point that we didn’t give speeches or discuss a philosophical justification for the changes we were going to make. Rather, we searched for the organizational practices and procedures that would need to be changed in order to bring the change to life with the greatest impact. My goal, professionally and personally, was to implement enduring mechanisms that would embed the goodness of the organization in the submarine’s people and practices and wouldn’t rely on my personality to make it happen.

From Industry

The Toyota Way, Jeffrey Liker

Toyota’s strength, I think, is that the upper management realizes what the andon system is all about …. They’ve lived through it and they support it. So in all the years I’ve been with Toyota, I’ve never really had any criticism over lost production and putting a priority on safety and quality over hitting production targets. All they want to know is how are you problem solving to get to the root cause? And can we help you? I tell our team members there are two ways you can get in trouble here: one is you don’t come to work, and two is you don’t pull the cord if you’ve got a problem. The sense of accountability to ensure quality at each station is really critical.

The Ride of a Lifetime, Robert Iger

“You’re going to need some strategic priorities.” I’d given this considerable thought, and I immediately started ticking off a list. I was five or six in when he shook his head and said, “Stop talking. Once you have that many of them, they’re no longer priorities.” Priorities are the few things that you’re going to spend a lot of time and a lot of capital on. Not only do you undermine their significance by having too many, but nobody is going to remember them all. “You’re going to seem unfocused,” he said. “You only get three. I can’t tell you what those three should be. We don’t have to figure that out today. You never have to tell me what they are if you don’t want to. But you only get three.” He was right. In my eagerness to demonstrate that I had a strategy for solving all of Disney’s problems and addressing all of the issues we were confronting, I hadn’t prioritized any of them. There was no signaling as to what was most important, no easily digested, comprehensive vision. My overall vision lacked clarity and inspiration. A company’s culture is shaped by a lot of things, but this is one of the most important—you have to convey your priorities clearly and repeatedly. In my experience, it’s what separates great managers from the rest. If leaders don’t articulate their priorities clearly, then the people around them don’t know what their own priorities should be. Time and energy and capital get wasted. People in your organization suffer unnecessary anxiety because they don’t know what they should be focused on. Inefficiency sets in, frustration builds up, morale sinks.

Radical Candor, Kim Scott

There’s nothing wrong with working hard to earn a paycheck that supports the life you want to lead. That has plenty of meaning. A wise man once told me, “Only about five percent of people have a real vocation in life, and they confuse the hell out of the rest of us.”

Measure What Matters, John Doerr

A rulebook can tell me what I can or can’t do. I need culture to tell me what I should do.

The Culture Code,Daniel Coyte

“What are groups really for?” Polzer asks. “The idea is that we can combine our strengths and use our skills in a complementary way. Being vulnerable gets the static out of the way and lets us do the job together, without worrying or hesitating. It lets us work as one unit.”

The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande

the real lesson is that under conditions of true complexity—where the knowledge required exceeds that of any individual and unpredictability reigns—efforts to dictate every step from the center will fail. People need room to act and adapt. Yet they cannot succeed as isolated individuals, either—that is anarchy. Instead, they require a seemingly contradictory mix of freedom and expectation—expectation to coordinate, for example, and also to measure progress toward common goals.

Creativity Inc, Ed Caatmull

Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.

Multipliers, Liz Wiseman

K.R. understands the distinction between pressure and stress. He cites the famous image of William Tell shooting an apple off his son’s head: “In this scenario, William Tell feels pressure. His son feels stress.” K.R. keeps the pressure on his team to act, but doesn’t create stress by holding them accountable for outcomes beyond their control.

About Style & Wellbeing

Rest, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

The supreme quality of great men is the power of resting. Anxiety, restlessness, fretting are marks of weakness

You Talkin’ To Me, Sam Leith

A man is in the dock, accused of murdering his wife. Although the body was never recovered, all the evidence points to the defendant: his car boot was filled with baling twine, bloodstained hammers, torn items of his wife’s clothing and suchlike. He had abundant motive – as the cashing in of a huge insurance policy taken out on the eve of his wife’s death demonstrates. And no sooner was his wife reported missing than he was holidaying in the Maldives with his pneumatically enhanced twenty-three-year-old mistress, his Facebook page filled with photographs of him in a pair of Speedos and a snorkel, grinning his murderous head off. Nevertheless, his lawyer at trial pulls off a remarkable coup de théâtre. ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,’ he says. ‘The prosecution has presented you with a mountain of evidence that tends to show that my client is guilty of the crime with which he has been charged. But that evidence means nothing. For not only is my client not guilty of his wife’s murder, but no murder has in fact taken place. My client’s wife is alive and well. And I can prove it. It is now five minutes to midday. At precisely midday, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, those doors over there will open –’ he indicates the main doors into the courtroom with a flourishing sweep of the arm – ‘and my client’s wife will walk through them into the court.’ Gasps, naturally, go all round. For the next five minutes, the eyes of the presiding judge, the jury and every functionary of the court are glued to the main doors. Eventually, the heavy hands of the courtroom clock tick round to midday and a solemn bong is heard. The doors remain tight shut. ‘Well?’ says the judge. ‘Your promised miracle has not materialised.’ ‘Indeed not,’ replies the defending barrister. ‘But every single one of you was watching those doors in the expectation that it would. In the absence of a body, that is surely an object demonstration that there remains a reasonable doubt over my client’s responsibility for his wife’s disappearance.’ ‘Very good,’ says the judge. ‘However, I ask the jury to note that the only person in the courtroom not watching the doors was your client.’

From Education

An Intelligent Person’s Guide To Education, Tony Little

Education is about the joy of learning, of discovery, of achievement, your own and other people’s; and about love of fellow man. Everything else is just a means to an end.

The Learning Game, Jonathan Smith

Real discipline, I would argue, is not always a matter of driving yourself on; real discipline is also knowing when to stop. This goes for all people in all jobs. Certainly, as a teacher you need to pace yourself, to sense when you’re losing your perspective, to recover as you go along, to have some fun and relaxation in the term-time, to think of other things, to enjoy yourself and not to fall into a puritanically self-obsessed rut. And for their part, the holidays are much more rewarding and memorable if there is some intellectual challenge and creative reflection. Wordsworth called this ‘a wise passiveness’. For a teacher and for a parent finding that delicate balance – or getting a life – is a tricky business.