What We Read in 2025: Leadership Books Shaping Our Work
Our company book club is part of our leadership practice. Each title we read expands how we understand human behavior, belonging, systems change, and the evolving workplace. These books opened new conversations and deepened the way we show up for the leaders with whom we work.
Below are the books that shaped us this year and the ways they’re influencing how we design and facilitate meaningful leadership development.
The Books We Read:
Emergent Strategy — adrienne maree brown
brown explores how change unfolds through relationships, responsiveness, and the small patterns that ripple outward into transformation. Leadership, she reminds us, is emergent, relational, and adaptive.
How it’s shaping our work: This book is inspiring us to weave more reflection and iteration (learning → reflection → adaptation) into our coaching and team engagements. It strengthens the way we support leaders navigating complexity with steadiness instead of urgency; responsiveness instead of reactivity. We continue to use her principles stated in the book in our everyday agreements, work, and interactions:
Small is good, small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small.)
Change is constant. (Be like water.)
There is always enough time for the right work.
There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. (Find it.)
Never a failure, always a lesson.
Trust the people. (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy.)
Move at the speed of trust.
Holding Change — adrienne maree brown
A grounded guide to facilitating groups through conflict, tension, and transformation. brown offers practical frameworks for holding space with clarity and care, and questions that help leaders identify underlying needs and surface unspoken dynamics.
How it’s shaping our work: It’s influencing how we design containers for conversations and deepen trust within teams. We’re applying its tools to strengthen connection and shared understanding during high-stakes moments.
The Purpose of Power — Alicia Garza
Garza traces the anatomy of movements and reframes leadership as collective, purposeful action. She invites us to see power as something built together rather than held alone.
How it’s shaping our work: This book is reinforcing how we help leaders and teams anchor in shared purpose. We’re integrating more purpose-alignment practices into coaching and team development as a foundation for sustainable culture change, while continuing to root much of our work in our Power of Collaboration model, which holds a Shared Vision and Compelling Why at the center of the work.
Disability Visibility — Edited by Alice Wong
This anthology centers disabled voices and invites a fuller understanding of access, identity, and inclusion. The stories challenge assumptions and expand what equitable leadership truly requires.
How it’s shaping our work: It’s broadening our lens around psychological safety and access needs. We’re bringing more questions about invisible barriers, communication styles, and inclusive design into our programs.
Personality and Wholeness in Therapy: Integrating 9 Patterns of Developmental Pathways in Clinical Practice — Daniel J. Siegel, M.D.
Using interpersonal neurobiology, Siegel explores the wisdom of the Enneagram and provides detailed descriptions of the nine core patterns of personality as well as integrative practices specific to each of these patterns that can help people work towards states of well-being and wholeness. His work deepens the connection between inner coherence (self-awareness, presence, and emotional flexibility) and outer leadership.
How it’s shaping our work: It reinforces our inside-out approach. We’re helping leaders understand their stress patterns, emotional regulation, and internal systems so they can lead with grounded clarity. It also continues to deepen our understanding of the Enneagram, a tool with seemingly limitless wisdom.
Radical Belonging — Lindo Bacon
Bacon offers a powerful exploration of identity, safety, and what it takes to create spaces where people feel truly seen. The book bridges lived experience with the research behind belonging.
How it’s shaping our work: It’s inspiring us to deepen belonging practices in coaching and facilitation. We’re integrating more identity-aware reflection, connection prompts, belonging-centered team norms, and environment design that support authenticity.
Divergent Mind — Jenara Nerenberg
Nerenberg illuminates the experience of neurodivergent thinkers, particularly women, whose differences have typically gone unseen or misunderstood. It expands how we understand brains, attention, and communication.
How it’s shaping our work: It’s strengthening how we support leaders in honoring cognitive diversity. This book is informing our work around communication norms, stress responses, and collaboration across different thinking styles.
Empire of AI — Karen Hao
A timely, deeply reported look inside OpenAI, the early frontrunner in the highly competitive field of large language models, and the ethical questions shaping artificial intelligence, as well as the human stakes behind rapid technological advancement. Author Karen Hao, who has spent years covering AI for MIT Technology Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, offers a nuanced, insider view of the technology and the leadership behind it.
How it’s shaping our work: It’s prompting richer conversations about ethical leadership in an AI-shaped workplace. We are moving intentionally as we assess where and how we are using AI as a company, and we are helping leaders stay grounded, transparent, and values-driven as they navigate the future of work, keeping humans at the center of everything.
Leadership Grows When Leaders Grow
These books challenged us, expanded us, and sharpened the way we support leaders across industries. They’re part of how we stay connected to the conversations that matter most: belonging, systems change, purpose, and, ultimately, the human side of leadership.
Do you have a book we should add to our list for 2026? Let us know!
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