Personal effectiveness is a big topic – and vital for your Project Management career. And there is a vast library of books to choose from. So, where should you start?
Don’t worry. Here at OnlinePMCourses, I have a big library and have read many personal effectiveness books. I have trawled through my shelves and will talk you through my top recommendations for each of the personal effectiveness skills.
What are the Personal Effectiveness Skills to Learn about?
When you are a Project Manager, people look to you. They look for leadership, inspiration, and guidance. They also expect you to be a highly effective professional; capable in all circumstances. But many of these skills aren’t taught as a part of your project management learning.
These skills come with practice. But where do you learn what techniques to try out and practice? That’s where our list of personal effectiveness books comes in. They offer some of the best advice, most clearly given, of all the books on my shelves.
I have divided my recommendations into five sections:
Personal Impact This includes things like: – Body language – Connection and Trust – Gravitas and Charisma
I have purposely not included Management and Leadership, and related topics like delegation, giving feedback, and motivation. This is a huge area in itself and I may do another article to cover them, in the near future.
What are my Criteria for Selection?
This is a personal selection. But, that said, you’ll find many of them on other people’s lists, because a number of them are truly classics of the genre. I’ll point them out to you. What I am looking for in personal effectiveness books is one or more of:
Easy to read. There’s plenty of choice in the bookshops and libraries. So, why read something that drags?
Practical ideas, tools, and suggestions I can try out straight away
Depth of thinking. I want to get the sense that the author is expanding my understanding and making me think.
One or more ‘Wow!’ moments, that make me sit up, make notes, and want to remember them
My selection will give you all of this. Indeed, many of the individual books will give you all this. Oh, and one other thing… The book needs to be available at a reasonable price. I was surprised to find several of the personal effectiveness books I wanted to recommend to you are out of print or at a shocking price.
Declarations of Interest
In the interests of openness and transparency, I need to be clear on three points:
I am not being paid to recommend any of these books over their competitors Whilst I haven’t read every book in the genre, I have read all of these books. And they are on this list because they are excellent. I have enjoyed them, and have learned a lot from them.
However, seven of the books are mine I wrote them. They are all best-selling books that are firmly in the genre. I am also incredibly proud of each of them. They are all among the best of their kind. But… I have not included them in my Top 20. And neither, for the sake of full propriety, have I included my wife’s book. So, there are really 28 books listed here!
I have offered links to these books on Amazon for your convenience. These are affiliate links. You won’t pay more, but Amazon will share a small portion of their revenue with me. That helps pay for the cost of maintaining this site with all its free content (around $800 per year) and my time in writing these articles (around 6 hours a week).
I should also note that the images of the book jackets are taken from various editions.
Personal Impact
Emotional Intelligence
by Daniel Goleman
🏆 This is a classic of the genre
It’s not all about how clever you are. This is the book that brought Emotional Intelligence to the public’s attention, comparing IQ with EQ. It introduces five dimensions of emotional intelligence that deliver success to anyone: self-awareness, self-management, motivation, empathy, and social skills. It sets up the ideas with research and anecdote and spells out clearly what you need to achieve. I could as easily have recommended its follow-up, ‘Working with Emotional Intelligence‘. This places emotional intelligence in the work context, but I recommend you read them both, in sequence. If you like them both, graduate onto ‘The New Leaders‘.
Goleman is a psychologist turned journalist, so this is a compelling read. It also has rightly become a classic. In introducing us to emotional intelligence in 1995, it then looked like a bit of a fad. Twenty years later, the ideas are as strong as ever and still feature in many management and leadership development programs, at all levels. You can see the impact of emotional intelligence around you every day, in the people who do and don’t seem to connect well with others around them.
by David H Maister, Charles H Green, and Robert M Galford
🏆 This is a classic of the genre
This is the book to read if you are a business professional who wants to build a reputation as a reliable source of advice to your employers and clients. Written from the point of view of lawyers and accountants, this applies equally well to project professionals like us. It introduced us all to the Trust Equation and has much more besides.
I’ll declare an interest up front – the author, Felicity Dwyer, is my wife.
But, this means I have read this book more than once and I can tell you with confidence that it is excellent. It’s about building connections with the people around you – both in your personal and professional life. It is full of fabulous insights and practical tools that will help you communicate and connect far more effectively than ever before. This will improve your networking, team leadership, and stakeholder relationships.
Charlie Munger was a legend. Not only one of the shrewdest investors of the twentieth century (he was Warren Buffett’s long-term business partner in Berkshire Hathaway), but he was also an inspired thinker who deeply understood the way to learn, understand, and use knowledge. His thinking extended well beyond rationality and mental models into every domain of operating with wisdom and intelligence in our world. This book contains a large number of his talks. For a long time, it was hard to get hold of, due to a limited print run. Now, you can get it easily in this beautiful edition. And you absolutely should.
What’s going on in the room? What is not being said, and what do the nuances of spoken and body language mean? This book is not for everyone. It is a big read targeted at coaches, facilitators, and leaders. But, if you aspire to one of these roles, this is the best book I have ever read about group dynamics and how to create positive results from a group of people.
This is my contribution to understanding what we mean by ‘wisdom’ in the workplace and, more important, how to go about moving from being seen as smart (as bright new Project Professionals often are) to being considered ‘wise’ and therefore being sought out for advice, opinions, and guidance. This is my favorite of all my books, and it contains so much content in such a small package, that I challenge anyone to not find something new and helpful to their career.
Covey offers you seven life habits that really will make a difference to you – professionally and personally. They go beyond personal productivity, which many of this books competitors focus on. Seven Habits also has a lot to say about being effective in working with other people.
This is one of the great personal effectiveness books. I have chosen not to include some of the grandparents of the genre, like Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People‘. So that leaves seven habits as the venerable classic. Read it because it will do no good on your shelf. Too many people buy it but don’t read it. It’s easy to read and the ideas repay frequent re-visiting.
Projects start out fun and exciting. Then they get harder. Just when you think you’re making progress, sometimes you seem to find yourself going backwards. You’ve hit the Dip. This simple book focuses on why mastering a new subject is difficult. It puts the trivial idea of ‘the learning curve’ on steroids, and makes real sense of it.It will tell you that you should focus your efforts on what really matters to you – and why.
I’m a Seth Godin fan, but much of his writing focuses on marketing and entrepreneurship. These may not be directly relevant to you as a project manager. But The Dip is. It’s a little gem. Just 76 pages in my edition, with one big, simple, and important idea. There aren’t many books that changed the way I think. This one did.
How to Manage Your Time (formerly Brilliant Time Management)
✍🏼 by Mike Clayton
This is a practical guide to getting more done in your day. It is filled with practical tools and techniques. This book does not push one system, but offers you plenty of choice. Whatever your time management challenge, there’s something here. At its heart is the highly adaptable OATS principle for time management.
If you need to get more done in the time available, this book will give the answers. You won’t need to follow a system. Instead, you can find the right solutions for the time management challenges that face you.
How to Manage Stress (formerly Brilliant Stress Management)
✍🏼 by Mike Clayton
Project management is stressful. This book offers all the tools you need to recognize stress in yourself and others, and to deal with it effectively. It offers a simple understanding of what causes stress and multiple solutions. It also has chapters on stress at work, stress caused by change, and stress caused by conflict. I wrote it with project managers very much in mind, after dealing with these issues myself. It remains my best-selling book, by far.
Did I mention project management is stressful? Read it because you will encounter stress. And, while a certain amount is a good thing, too much can break you and trash your project. I learnt about this after I had a stress-induced breakdown. Don’t wait for that. Understand the signs and avert the problem today, for yourself, and for your team.
A big decision you face every day is whether to say yes or no. This is the quintessential example of personal effectiveness books. It helps you decide when to say yes, and when to say no. And it spells out how to do each respectfully and gracefully. When you are great at time management and still need to achieve more, ‘no’ is the only tool you have left. And here you will discover how to turn your negative ‘no’ into a positive ‘NO’.
Because too many project managers have the ‘gopher mentality’. You feel compelled to ‘go for this’ and ‘go for that’. Getting things done means saying no. Maintaining relationships means saying no properly.
This book is about how to talk to anyone. Leil Lowndes writes books with commendably clear titles. And like her other books, this consists of a lot of short chapters – in this case 92, averaging at just over 3 pages each. Each one is a gem of advice.
I have carried many of the 92 tips from this book with me ever since reading it. I just wish I’d read it earlier in my career. If you in any way want to be better at starting or maintaining a conversation, read this. Lowndes is something of a doyen of personal effectiveness books. Two others of her books escalate the impact you can have:
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (also published as Influence: Science and Practice)
by Robert Cialdini
🏆 This is a classic of the genre
Robert Cialdini is a psychology professor who studies people he calls ‘compliance professionals’. These are people whose job is to get other people to comply with their wishes: sales people, marketers, and advertisers, politicians, and even religious leaders. Having observed what they do, he hypothesises the psychological mechanism, and then tests it experimentally. This book contains the ‘six weapons of influence’ that he has uncovered.
‘Influence’ is a modern classic and the starting place for all books on the subject of influence and persuasion, including my own, ‘How to Influence in Any Situation‘. This stuff is invaluable for stakeholder engagement that needs to influence and persuade. Cialdini recently released his long-awaited second book, in which he identifies a seventh mechanism. So, I also highly recommend ‘Pre-suasion‘.
by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler
For everything that Influence by Cialdini has to offer, it is primarily pitched at professional influencers like marketers, advertisers, and salespeople. The Vital Smarts team has taken many ideas from Cialdini (and plenty of others) and has applied them to influencing change. This makes Influencer a particularly valuable book for project professionals.
It’s a matter of record that I love their books and have recommended two others below. But I confirm that I have no connection with noncommercial interest in the authors or their business.
How to Influence in Any Situation (formerly Brilliant Influence)
✍🏼 by Mike Clayton
I wrote this book to distil everything I had learned about the science and practice of influence over the years – from mentors, courses, and numerous books (many others than are listed here – I have nearly 30 books on the topic and a new one on order!)
This book makes the subject easy to digest and will give you an armful of practical tools and techniques to use at work (and outside of work).
This book will help you with all aspects of spoken communication, from conversations, to meetings, to difficult conversations, to presentations and public speaking. It sets out four clear steps to get something to say, get attention, get your message across, and then get results. It centers around the formula for compelling, persuasive, and powerful communication.
If you read one book on spoken communication, then this should be it. It covers everything and is filled with handy speaker’s checklists and toolkit items.
This is the book on negotiation. Two leading experts spell out four vital principles that inform all the most successful negotiations from choosing a movie, to buying a car, to international trade deals, and border disputes. If you don’t know Fisher and Ury’s four principles, it’s time you did.
There are plenty of basic books about negotiation. I like ‘Negotiate Wisely’ and ‘The New Negotiating Edge‘. But Getting to Yes has been around a long time and never been bettered. It is a classic that won’t teach you the basics. But negotiation is a skillset more than personal effectiveness. But this fits with our personal effectiveness books, because it will take whatever you know about the basic process (Prepare-Open-Bargain-Close) and give you the understanding of how to get great results. And not just in formal negotiations. This is powerful stuff for day-to-day conversations with your project stakeholders.
If you enjoy it, do also ty the follow-up book, ‘Getting Past No‘.
There are no difficult people: there are just difficult behaviors. And Roberta Cava will show you how to handle them. This is one of the best personal effectiveness books aimed at tricky workplace situations. It includes strong chapters on communication skills, and chapters dealing with a range of specific situations. As a project manager, many of these will be familiar. If they aren’t yet, just you wait…
A lot of the situations Cava deals with are stressful. And they can also have a big impact on your relationships and therefore the success of your project. If you feel the need to learn more about handling them, this should be your go-to book.
by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler
A lot of the conversations we have, as project professionals, have high stakes. And that is what the Vital Smarts team address in this fabulous book. My second edition has dozens of sticky notes stuck into it. I love the framework the authors offer. This book will empower you to tackle challenging conversations about just about anything.
by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler
When things get really tough, and Crucial Conversations (above) is not enough, I turn to Crucial Confrontations. This book’s advice will help you with bad behavior, mismatched expectations, and relationship breakdowns. Here is another book from the Vital Smarts team that will equip you to excel in challenging communication environments.
There are so many books on how to give a business presentation, but I wanted to offer you one that offers simple, reliable advice, for ‘non-professional’ presenters. That is, the sort of presenter that most project professionals are. A person who needs to present often and effectively, but does not seek to make a profession of it – and nor do you need to head towards the flashy advanced end of the scale (yet). This book has it all. It’s a quick and easy read, filled with loads of good advice to skill you up for great professional presentations.
As a negotiator, a project professional is not structuring global peace deals or leading on the procurement of millions of dollars of stuff. Day-to-day negotiations happen throughout the working week. And sometimes they become more complex and consequential, during contractor or supplier negotiations. This was my life, as a professional project and program manager, so this is the type of negotiation I have written about in my latest book. This one is spot on for 95% of the world’s project professionals (and all other business professionals!)
This book offers a simple and powerful tool for solving problems and making decisions. You can use it alone or with a team. Over the years, de Bono has had a huge impact on our thinking about creativity and problem solving. Of nearly 50 books, this remains his best-known and, I’d say, best. The metaphor represents six ways to approach a problem or a decision.
The six thinking hats approach is taught on many courses, and is an essential personal effectiveness tool for anyone. It is a short, non-technical book, that you can assimilate in a sitting. It’s ideas will support you for life. It’s something of a classic.
Like all the Heaths’ books (I’ve not yet seen the most-recent one), Decisive follows a simple formula. A small number of clear steps to help with a specific personal or professional effectiveness outcome. And they like a nice mnemonic to make them memorable too. In this case, we get the WRAP Process for making better choices.
Decision theory is a side interest of mine and I’ve read a lot about it, from some of the wooliest personal effectiveness books to some heavy-weight academic tones. This sits beautifully in the middle. Easy to read, solid content, valuable personally and professionally. If Thinking, Fast and Slow (above) warns you of the traps of quick judgements, and The Power of Intuition (above) tells you when to trust them, this is the book that will show you how to make reliable deliberate decisions.
By the way, all of the Heaths’ books are worth reading for any project manager:
Made to Stick – will help with your project communication and stakeholder engagement
Switch – will help you with managing and leading change
The Power of Moments – will help you with motivating your team and your stakeholders
People don’t always do what is logical and rational. Yet it took two social psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky to start a detailed exploration of this phenomenon. This book is Kahneman’s summary of a life’s work, which won him a Nobel Prize in economics. He explores the mental biases that drive our decisions and looks at the damage they do.
If these ideas are new to you, this book will rock your world. It offers a welter of insight, but don’t expect easy prescriptions. This is a book that will boost your personal effectiveness by making you more aware of your (and everybody’s) weaknesses. I would say no self-respecting professional can afford to be unaware of the ideas in this book.
If you want to make wise decisions and avoid the standard biases and traps of careless (dare I say ‘standard’) thinking, this book provides a highly accessible guide. It’s written by technical social psychology experts for a solidly practical professional audience. It takes the glowing ideas of Kahneman and brings them done to ground.
If Kahneman (above) warns us about over-relinace on our faulty intuition, Klein resets the balance. He describes when your intuition is likely to be sound. Be warned, it isn’t often. One of the tools it introduces is a favorite of mine: the pre-mortem.
This book is lighter, and easier to read than Klein’s earlier and more academic ‘Sources of Power‘. It is also the book that inspired a lot of the thinking in Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling ‘Blink‘. But, while Blink is a ripping read for armchair intellectuals, The Power of Intuition is a serious book for business professionals.
Sometimes we just need a creative solution to a fiendish problem. And while I may earlier in my career have recommended a whole list of de Bono’s books (to supplement Six Thinking Hats, above) or, perhaps his encyclopedic ‘Serious Creativity’, not now. The Art of Creative Thinking is full of fabulous ideas and techniques, written in a highly accessible format. Dip in, take a lucky dip, or learn a technique a day from 100 short 3-4 page chapters. And mine is a lovely miniature hardback. Add this to your file today.
Dr Mike Clayton is one of the most successful and in-demand project management trainers in the UK. He is author of 14 best-selling books, including four about project management. He is also a prolific blogger and contributor to ProjectManager.com and Project, the journal of the Association for Project Management. Between 1990 and 2002, Mike was a successful project manager, leading large project teams and delivering complex projects. In 2016, Mike launched OnlinePMCourses.
