To help you get started on your 2024 HR reading list, we’ve compiled a list of top books for people professionals. We looked at a wide array of topics and trends that cover everything from thriving in a hybrid workplace and public speaking to workplace culture and best practices in diversity recruiting. Happy reading!
12 HR books you should read in 2024
1. Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to Speak Successfully When You're Put on the Spot
By Matt Abrahams
In Think Faster, Talk Smarter, Stanford lecturer, podcast host, and communication expert Matt Abrahams provides tangible, actionable skills to help even the most anxious of speakers succeed when speaking spontaneously. Drawing on stories from his clients and students, he offers best practices for navigating Q&A sessions, shining in job interviews, providing effective feedback, making small talk, fixing faux pas, persuading others, and handling other impromptu speaking tasks.
2. Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things
By Adam Grant
Hidden Potential offers a new framework for raising aspirations and exceeding expectations. Adam Grant weaves together groundbreaking evidence, surprising insights, and vivid storytelling that takes us from the classroom to the boardroom, the playground to the Olympics, and underground to outer space. Grant explores how to build the character skills and motivational structures to realize our own potential, and how to design systems that create opportunities for those who have been underrated and overlooked.
3. Remote Not Distant: Design a Company Culture That Will Help You Thrive in a Hybrid Workplace
By Gustavo Razzetti
Hybrid and remote work is here to stay. While most companies have struggled to keep their culture alive remotely since the pandemic, some are successfully riding the waves of the future. Building a workplace culture strong enough to thrive at a distance doesn't happen by chance, but by design. Remote, Not Distant provides actionable tools for senior leaders, managers, and team members. It addresses the multiple areas of culture, from keeping your team engaged and improving remote communication to managing conflict, facilitating courageous conversations, and unleashing innovation.
4. Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems
By Frances Frei & Anne Morriss
Leadership experts Frances Frei and Anne Morriss argue that the belief that we can either make progress or take care of people (one or the other) is deeply flawed—and that it keeps you from building a great company. Helping executives and entrepreneurs solve their toughest problems over the past decade, Frei and Morriss learned that the trade-off between speed and excellence is false. The best change leaders solve hard problems with fierce urgency while making their organizations—employees, customers, and shareholders—even stronger. They move fast and fix things.
5. Built for People: Transform Your Employee Experience Using Product Management Principles
By Jessica Zwaan
Written for all HR professionals and business leaders, Built for People explains how to improve workforce and business performance by developing people-centred ways of working, evidence-based decision making and a culture of continuous feedback and iteration. Full of tools, case studies, exercises and advice from those who are already seeing the benefits of a product-management approach, this is essential reading for all business leaders needing to develop an agile, innovative and evidence-based approach to their people operations.
6. Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead
By Laszlo Bock
Drawing on the latest research in behavioural economics and a profound grasp of human psychology, Work Rules! provides teaching examples from a range of industries-including lauded companies that happen to be hideous places to work and little-known companies that achieve spectacular results by valuing and listening to their employees. Bock shows how to strike a balance between creativity and structure, leading to success you can measure in quality of life as well as market share. Read it to build a better company from within rather than from above; read it to reawaken your joy in what you do.
7. Mind Shift: It Doesn't Take a Genius to Think Like One
By Erwin Raphael McManus
Throughout his thirty years of work as a mindset expert and leadership coach, Erwin Raphael McManus has been obsessed with these questions: Why do some people succeed despite having all the odds stacked against them? How do others achieve the unthinkable, only to watch their lives slip away? Are there mental structures for failure and success? In Mind Shift, McManus brings together twelve mental frameworks that have helped some of the most accomplished people on earth create internal structures of success. Sharing experiences from entrepreneurs, artists, professional athletes, and his own career, McManus shows us how to transform our thinking—and, in turn, transform our lives.
8. The Pomegranate Principle: Best Practices in Diversity Recruiting
By Rory E. Verrett
In The Pomegranate Principle: Best Practices in Diversity Recruiting, veteran executive search consultant and DEI expert Rory Verrett writes with clarity and expertise about the best practices in recruiting and retaining diverse talent for your organization. He offers proven, tangible solutions and accessible strategies for making the recruitment and retention of diverse talent the centrepiece of your diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) vision.
9. People and Data: Uniting to Transform Your Business
By Thomas C. Redman
People and Data is an innovative exploration of the relationship between non-data professionals and data in an organization's success, and why it is only when they work together that a business can unlock its full potential. Full of practical tips and advice, People and Data includes eight tools that will help companies to leverage their data to meet their business goals and upskill their employees so that everyone can benefit from the power of data.
10. The Brain-Friendly Workplace: Why Talented People Quit and How to Get Them to Stay
By Friederike Fabritius
In The Brain-Friendly Workplace, Friederike Fabritius offers a science-based and field-tested blueprint for tomorrow’s workplace. Leaders capable of enacting change or individuals searching for ways to work smarter will discover that even small and inexpensive changes can lead to advantages like better employee performance, higher job satisfaction, and stronger talent retention. If you have been longing for a better way of working where you and your people are both happy and productive, The Brain-Friendly Workplace can make that vision a reality.
11. It Pays to PLAY: How Play Improves Business Culture
By Kristi Herold
Intentional play at work creates a culture that benefits all employees' physical and mental health and the company's bottom line. It Pays to PLAY is a rich resource filled with ideas for play at work-whether in-person, hybrid, or remote-and illustrates how the ROI from play is multi-faceted and exponential. Learn the ways play can be easily and affordably implemented-regardless of your industry-benefiting everyone from the most junior employee to the C-suite right through to the end customer. It truly does pay to play.
12. Lead It Like Lasso
By Marnie Stockman & Nick Coniglio
Much like Ted Lasso the show, Lead it Like Lasso takes a fresh approach to leadership. The foreword alone will shock you. This book feels like having your own personal Ted Lasso - breaking down leadership lessons in a way that will make you smile, inspiring action you can take right away. Stockman and Coniglio offer leadership lessons from their own successful startup, the lives of the team at AFC Richmond, and top leaders of industry. Level up and lead your life like Lasso. Believe.
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