Best 11 Leadership Books For New Leaders To Read in 2025

1. The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter

Best Leadership Books

By Michael D. Watkins

The First 90 Days is a book for overcoming the learning curve which comes with changes, especially advancements in leadership positions. It teaches how to bridge the knowledge gap and position yourself for success in your first few months in a new and higher role. Michael Watkins identifies frequent leadership blunders, offers techniques for avoiding them. It examines a number of scenarios that cover the whole range of possible transitions. The First 90 Days demonstrates how to create a solid first impression as a new leader.

Notable Quote– ‘’ Leadership ultimately is about influence and leverage. You are, after all, only one person. To be successful, you need to mobilize the energy of many others in your organization.”

2. Bringing Up the Boss: Practical Lessons for New Managers

Great Leadership Book

By Rachel Pacheco

Bringing Up the Boss, is the finest book of counsel for new leaders. The book delves into the fundamentals of being a successful boss, including performance management, assisting employees in finding purpose in their job, recruiting and dismissing, inspiring teammates, and controlling team dynamics.

Rachel Pacheco, a leadership blogger, offers practical management advice, replete with charts and diagrams, for bringing out the best in yourself and your team. The tone is light-hearted and sympathetic, and the content is jam-packed with amusing tales. An appendix with templates and resources, such as a growth plan template, psychological safety team evaluation, and coaching questions, is also included in the book. Beyond theory and best practices, Bringing Up the Boss provides rising leaders with a toolset to make supervising more effortless.

Notable quote– ‘’To be a great boss, you have to set clear, well-defined, and explicit expectations for your team members’’.

3. From Bud to Boss: Secrets to a Successful Transition to Remarkable Leadership

Top Leadership Book

By Kevin Eikenberry & Guy Harris

While this book is appropriate for any manager, supervisor, or leader, it draws on the greatest leadership and management ideas to focus on the challenges that emerging leaders face. “From Bud to Boss,” one of the best leadership books, may assist young leaders in overcoming their fears and worries so they can focus on being the most successful leaders they can be right now.

Notable quote– ‘’Focusing on others will give you more influence and power than focusing on yourself’’.

4. “Bossypants”

Best Leadership Book you must know

By Tina Fey

Tina Fey, comedian and writer, has written a fast and amusing read for our last book. Her rise from SNL comedian to head writer to showrunner of 30 Rock is chronicled in “Bossypants,” which is often considered one of the best leadership books. She describes the difficult push and pull she felt as she married and established a family while her career took off in the book. While you’re laughing the entire time, you’re also witnessing the tragic and crucial moments that many families and working women experience.

If you’re a woman, particularly a mother, you’ll enjoy the laughter while also realizing you’re not alone in your sentiments. For the rest of us, this is a light-hearted, brief read that will help you sympathize more with the ladies you manage and deal with on a daily basis.

Notable quote– “Don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions; go over, under, though, and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing, and don’t care if they like it.”

5. Friday Forward: Inspiration & Motivation to End Your Week Stronger Than It Started

Top-rated Leadership Book

By Robert Glazer

Your capacity to connect with and inspire others is critical to your leadership. Entrepreneur and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Robert Glazer has written a book that will help you achieve just that.

Friday Forward compiles the 52 most powerful tales from Glazer’s weekly newsletter of the same name, which reaches over 100,000 subscribers in over 60 countries. Glazer’s new book might give you the push you need to make an effect in your own network, with accounts of failing businesses that turned things around and new recruits who rose to the occasion.

Notable quote– “The moral values, ethical codes, and laws that guide our choices in normal times are, if anything, even more important to help us navigate the confusing and disorienting time of a disaster.’’

6. Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

Famous Leadership Book

By Simon Sinek

Simon Sinek revealed that the world’s most influential leaders all think, behave, and communicate in the same way—and it’s the polar opposite of what everyone else does. “Start with Why,” often regarded as one of the best leadership books, therefore, pulls together a clear image of what it genuinely takes to lead and inspire. Additionally, it is based on a wide range of real-life tales, providing compelling examples and insights.

Notable quote– ‘’The role of a leader is not to come up with all the great ideas. The role of a leader is to create an environment in which great ideas can happen.”

7. Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

Best Leadership Book for new readers

By Dale Carnegie

One of the most difficult aspects of leadership is that many of our fundamental impulses are incorrect. Bossing others about, thinking the worst, and believing that everyone thinks the same way we do are some of the most common beginner blunders. Fortunately, Dale Carnegie is on hand to assist you.

The book How to Win Friends and Influence People is a leadership classic. Many of the most beneficial techniques to comprehend people, as well as how to do all a leader needs to efficiently work with their team, are broken down in simple words by Carnegie.

Even the most adamant engineer may learn valuable lessons about effective leadership from Carnegie.

Notable quote– ‘’Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.”

8. “Thinking, Quick and Slow”

Must read Leadership Book

By Daniel Kahneman

“Thinking, Fast and Slow” delves into the human mind and the two systems that run it—one fast and one slow. According to Daniel Kahneman’s book, these two systems are to blame for everything from workplace overconfidence to cognitive bias and how we make judgments. Considered one of the best leadership books, it helps readers learn when to trust their instincts, when not to, and how to avoid common mistakes while making decisions in our personal and professional lives.

Notable quote– “Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.”

9. The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership

Best Leadership Book of all time

By Bill Walsh

Today’s leaders must be more than simply leaders; they must also be coaches who can bring out the best in each member of their team. Bill Walsh not only turned around a failed organization in the San Francisco 49ers to become a dynasty but also aided in the development of scores of future NFL head coaches.

Walsh opens his toolbox and offers his most critical leadership skills in “The Score Takes Care of Itself,” which are applicable whether or not you’re a football fan.

Notable quote– ‘’Few things offer greater return on less investment than praise’’.

10. On Becoming a Leader

Great Leadership Book of all

By Warren G. Bennis

In the book On Becoming a Leader, Warren Bennis believes that leaders are made, not born. And, in these times of global unrest, encouraging people to take up leadership roles is more important than ever. On Becoming a Leader is a well-known classic in the field, offering essential insights into what it takes to be a leader.

Notable quote– ‘’If knowing yourself and being yourself were as easy to do as to talk about, there wouldn’t be nearly so many people walking around in borrowed postures, spouting second-hand ideas, trying desperately to fit in rather than to stand out.”

11. Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

Leadership Book for new readers

By Kim Scott

Great leaders have great bonds with their subordinates. Author Kim Scott proposes three basic rules for improving connections with employees in her book Radical Candor: make it personal, and understand why it matters. Furthermore, to create better results and help employees accomplish more, the Radical Candor technique involves delivering direction with a combination of praise and criticism. Consequently, learn why it’s mandatory reading for the majority of the world’s most successful businesses.

Notable quote– ‘’Make sure that you are seeing each person on your team with fresh eyes every day. People evolve, and so your relationships must evolve with them. Care personally; don’t put people in boxes and leave them there.”