My three must-reads

This book provides witty and practical thought leadership on how to show up as your best self every day. The information is super digestible and easy to apply,  which is why we have recently featured it in our work with clients. Every leader who attended our leadership academies with one of our banking clients earlier this year, was gifted a copy of the book as a tool to aid with the embedding of the programme.

This powerful book is doing good both in, and beyond, the business world as the authors are now working with primary schools to train teachers on how to show up as their best selves and instil that thinking in the children they teach.

Gillian Tett: The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers

I’m in still in the midst of this book but, in it, award-winning journalist Gillian Tett examines why so many organisations still suffer from a failure to communicate. A reporter during the financial crisis in 2008, Tett explains how our tendency to work in silos hinders us individually and organisationally. It’s all about understanding what silos are, why they happen, the purpose they serve and how they can hold organisations (and even whole sectors) back. A fascinating, and highly relevant, read.

Brene Brown: Rising Strong

In this challenging and empowering book, research professor, Brene Brown, (famed for her work on courage, vulnerability and shame) zeros in on what it takes to live with courage and compassion – especially in the wake of disappointment and failure. In the book, Brown encourages us to ask ourselves “what is the most generous assumption I can make to explain someone’s actions?”. We jump to negative assumptions so regularly; this question is a way of maintaining empathy and connection with others. We recently took this mentality into an organisation with a siloed blame culture and used it as a basis for injecting more compassion, empathy and humanity.