Best Books on
Leaving People Better

The best books about leaving people better than you found them are Give and Take by Adam Grant, The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann, Multipliers by Liz Wiseman, You Are Capable of More by Chris Sund, Legacy by James Kerr, and Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek.

They range from hard research to a business fable, and the thread running through all of them is that the effect you have on other people compounds in ways that are very hard to see while you are having it.

Success and significance are not the same measure

Most people spend the first stretch of a career measuring themselves by what they are accumulating, which is reasonable, because that is what is visible and that is what gets rewarded. And then at some point, usually later than they expected, a different question shows up, which is what anyone is able to do that they would not have been able to do without you.

Those are two different measures, and only one of them keeps running after you leave the room. The books here are mostly circling that distinction from different directions.

One

Give and Take by Adam Grant

Grant divides people into givers, takers, and matchers, and then reports the finding that made the book famous, which is that givers show up at both the very bottom and the very top of most measures of success. The bottom ones cannot say no and end up doing everyone else’s work. The top ones are generous deliberately and with limits.

It is the only book here with serious research behind it, and it is the one that keeps generosity from being naive. Read this first.

Two

The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann

A short business fable built around five laws, of which the first, that your value is determined by how much more you give than you take in payment, is the one people remember. The story is thin on purpose and the whole thing takes an hour.

If parables put you off, skip it. If they do not, it is the most quotable and most giftable book on this list, and a lot of people have had it handed to them at exactly the right moment.

Three

Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

Wiseman’s research is on why some leaders make everyone around them smarter and others, often without meaning to, make everyone around them smaller. Her category of the accidental diminisher is the most useful idea in the book, because it describes well-intentioned people who jump in to help and quietly take the thinking away from the person who needed to do it.

Most people reading it recognize themselves somewhere in the diminisher list, which is uncomfortable and worth sitting with.

Five

Legacy by James Kerr

Kerr spent time inside the All Blacks and came out with fifteen lessons about a culture that has outlasted every individual who passed through it. The most famous is the sweeping of the sheds, where the most senior players clean the locker room after a match, on the principle that nobody is too important to do the ordinary work.

It is a sports book that is not really about sport. If you are trying to build something that continues without you, this is the one.

Six

Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek

Sinek’s argument is that the leader’s actual job is to create enough safety that people can do their best work without spending energy protecting themselves, and the title comes from the military practice of officers eating after their people rather than before.

The biology sections are looser than the reporting sections, and some readers find them stretched. The central point about safety holds up regardless.

Seven

The Second Mountain by David Brooks

Brooks writes about what happens when the first mountain, the one built out of career and achievement, turns out not to be enough, and about the second one that gets climbed for other people rather than for yourself. It is the most personal and least practical book here.

Read it if the question underneath this whole list is one you have started asking about your own life rather than about your team.

Which one to start with

Read Give and Take first. It is the one that keeps the whole idea from turning into something soft, because Grant is honest that generosity without limits is how people end up at the bottom rather than the top.

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