• Power and Influence
• Leading Change
• Climate and Culture
• Developing Ethical Organizations
• Organizational Stress
• Building Organizational Teams
• Learning Organizations
• Organizational Vision
• Negotiations
• Decision Making
• Leader Development
• Communications
• Moral Courage
• Emotional Intelligence

Disclaimer: Works appearing in this list are recommended by individual faculty members for individual leader development. This list is not a syllabus.

Power and Influence

This seminal work examines the relationship between six fundamental concepts foundational to the study of leadership: power, influence, commitment/compliance, influence tactics, emotional intelligence, and leadership styles.

Chapter 6 contains an extensive treatise on the topics of power and influence that is foundational to an understanding of organizational-level leadership.

Leading Change

This leadership classic by Harvard's John Kotter is a "must read" for all organizational leaders. It discusses the dynamics of change, the challenges of recognizing when change is necessary, and an eight-stage process for implement lasting organizational change.

The authors present a change process that focuses on overcoming four hurdles: cognitive, resource, motivational, and political. They describe how Police Commissioner Bill Bratton successfully employed these concepts during his 20 years as a police reformer and turnaround specialist.

Implementing change requires adaptive thinking within an organization. Leaders tend to default to technical solutions that are easy to implement but do little to create lasting change. This article explains the difference between technical problems and adaptive challenges, and provides a framework for changing attitudes and beliefs within an organization.

Organizational Culture and Climate

Schein teaches us that climate is a component of culture and leaders must first understand organizational culture to influence climate and bring about change within an organization.

Hofstede's work provides important insights on leading others in a multicultural environment. He examines the relationship between personality, culture, and human nature as well as specific dimensions of national culture that allow one to identify unique characteristics of competing societies.

This classic article examines destructive leadership styles in the military, focusing on the symptoms of what the author describes as "toxic leader syndrome."

Developing Ethical Organizations

Presents the philosophical and conceptual foundations of military ethics as applied during times of conflict and of peace, offering an excellent basis for exploration and discussion.

Using the paradigm of Homer's Iliad, Shay relates that the roots of combat stress and PTSD can lie in the betrayal of duty by senior officers who failed to do "what's right," creating moral injury in their Soldiers. Shay proposes several excellent ways to develop moral leadership.

A comprehensive book regarding the moral foundations for combat, Just War Theory, it deals comprehensively with and reviews the challenges of the conflict with terrorism. It concludes with a critical engagement with the major alternatives to just war thinking: pacifism and realism.

Organizational Stress

This important article describes how effective leaders can increase hardy, resilient responses to stressful circumstances within their organizations by focusing on meaning making — empowering followers with commitment, control, and challenges.

Based on analysis of multiple resilience theories, the author posits that resilient people possess three common characteristics: a staunch acceptance of reality, a values-based belief that life has meaning, and an ability to improvise or make do with whatever is at hand.

Building Organizational Teams

The author draws a clear distinction between working groups and teams, highlighting the importance of determining which one is actually required for a given situation. He then discusses four elements associated with all successful teams: common commitment and purpose, performance goals, complementary skills, and mutual accountability.

This popular business book describes five pitfalls that teams face: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results.

Learning Organizations

According to Garvin, a learning organization is skilled at creating, acquiring, interpreting, transferring, and retaining knowledge to change the way work is done. It does this by creating a supportive learning environment, concrete learning processes and practices, and leadership that reinforces learning.

This article is based on Senge's book, The Fifth Discipline. It summarizes the importance of learning organizations and the new roles, skills, and tools leaders require to succeed in these organizations.

This business classic by Jim Collins seeks to explain why a very small group of select companies was able to turn their organizations around and sustain long-term growth for a period of 15 or more years. He argues that a key ingredient is having a Level 5 leader—an executive in whom genuine personal humility blends with intense professional will.

Organizational Vision

Most leaders intuitively understand the importance of having a shared vision within an organization but have little insight into how to develop one. This authoritative chapter from Peter Senge’s book is one of the best resources available on how to build and share a vision.

Negotiations

A foundational work on negotiations. It is an easy read and covers all the fundamentals.

This book builds on Getting to Yes by focusing on the role of emotions in negotiations.

Operating within a bureaucratic framework is common to military organizations. Colosi explains how to negotiate within such a framework both within the organization (the internal dimension) and in subsequent negotiations with an outside party (the horizontal dimension).

Decision Making

Cognitive biases influence our ability to think critically and make decisions. The authors identify the most common psychological traps we face and provide techniques for overcoming them.

The authors argue that leaders must adjust their approach to problem solving based on the nature of the causal relationships that frame a problem. They categorize five domains or categories of problems based on the cause and effect relationships that exist within the operational environment: simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disordered. This is an important article because it builds on the concepts from FM 5-0 and provides insight into identifying and addressing causal relationships, a prerequisite for exercising the operations process.

Using a populist writing style, Lehrer examines the role of emotions in decision making and the relationship between analytical (reasoning) and intuitive (emotional) thought processes.

Klein's book is the authoritative work on recognition-primed decision making, a term better known as intuition. He explains how intuition works, its pitfalls, and its relationship to analytical decision making.

Leader Development

Bennis leads the reader through a self-discovery process of what it means to be a leader. Beginning with basic leadership principles, he moves from knowing oneself and one's environment to self-development, influencing others, and developing organizations.

The authors use a story/parable format of a man struggling with problems at work and home to illustrate the challenges of understanding oneself and overcoming self-serving behavior to achieve a greater, more meaningful, purpose in one's life.

Communicating

The authors examine superior-subordinate relationships and the role each must play to work effectively together. They highlight the critical point that the responsibility for fixing a rocky relationship begins with the subordinate, not the boss.

This popular best-seller is a hands-on guide for mastering crucial conversations, which the authors describe as discussions between two or more people where stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong.

The authors found that executives typically have a default style of decision making that falls into one of five distinct categories: charismatics, thinkers, skeptics, followers, and controllers. They provide recommendations on how to tailor presentations and discussions to persuade bosses for each decision making style.

Moral Courage

Miller discusses the relationship of moral courage to physical courage, the challenges of overcoming shame and humiliation, and the risks in demonstrating moral courage.

The author provides excellent background on the study of physical and moral courage. He contends that the military's emphasis on social cohesion encourages physical courage but detracts from moral courage because it requires one to go against group norms and behaviors.

Emotional Intelligence

Psychologist and author Daniel Goleman is well known for his work on emotional intelligence - the ability to manage oneself and one's relationships with others effectively. He brought the term to a wide audience with his 1995 book of the same name. These three articles summarize his most significant work. The first outlines the major components of emotional intelligence. The second article describes how these skills drive one's emotions and the emotions of others. In the third, he explains how leaders use six different leadership styles based on the components of emotional intelligence.