10 Books Every Leader Should Read for Better Wellbeing

Leadership books don’t always have to be about becoming more productive, building bigger businesses or squeezing another hour out of the working day. Sometimes the best thing you can do for your performance as a leader is learn how to protect the person doing the performing.

Leadership can be rewarding, exciting and hugely fulfilling, but it can also be relentless. There are decisions to make, people relying on you, problems that follow you home and a to-do list that somehow seems longer at the end of the day than it did at the beginning. Add constant emails, messages and the expectation to always have an answer, and looking after your own wellbeing can very quickly slip to the bottom of the priority list.

So, for this reading list, we’re moving away from books promising to help you wake up at 4am, optimise every minute or become a productivity machine. Instead, we’ve selected ten books that explore time, stress, rest, attention, boundaries, happiness and our relationship with work. They aren’t all traditional leadership books, and that’s rather the point. They’re books that might help you lead well without forgetting to live well too.

1. Four Thousand Weeks — Oliver Burkeman

The title comes from a fairly sobering calculation: if you live to around 80, you’ll have approximately 4,000 weeks. Yet Four Thousand Weeks isn’t nearly as depressing as that sounds. In fact, its central argument can be remarkably freeing. Burkeman challenges our obsession with trying to get everything done and the belief that, if we could just find the perfect productivity system, we might eventually bring our lives completely under control.

For leaders with permanently overflowing diaries and competing priorities, it’s an important perspective. There will always be another email, another opportunity, another problem and another task that could occupy your time. You simply cannot do all of it. Once you accept that, the question becomes less about how you can fit everything in and more about deciding what genuinely deserves your limited time. For leaders who constantly feel as though they’re falling behind, this is one to read.

2. The Good Enough Job — Simone Stolzoff

When somebody asks who you are, how quickly do you start talking about what you do? The Good Enough Job examines what happens when our careers become too closely connected to our identities and challenges the idea that work needs to provide everything from purpose and community to status and personal fulfilment.

It’s particularly relevant for leaders, founders and senior professionals, for whom the boundary between work and life can become incredibly blurred. When you’ve invested years building a career or organisation, switching off can feel almost impossible because work isn’t simply something you do anymore; it can start to feel like part of who you are. Stolzoff makes the case for allowing work to be important without allowing it to become everything, making this a particularly worthwhile read for anyone who suspects their job has started taking up a little too much space in their life.

3. Burnout — Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski

Most leaders know what stress feels like, but understanding what happens inside us as a result of that stress is another matter. In Burnout, sisters Emily and Amelia Nagoski explore stress, emotional exhaustion and the difference between dealing with the thing causing stress and dealing with the body’s stress response.

That distinction makes this an interesting book for anyone working under sustained pressure. A difficult meeting might finish, a deadline might pass or a crisis might finally be resolved, but that doesn’t necessarily mean your body instantly returns to normal. The book explores ways of understanding and responding to that cycle. For leaders, there is an additional reason to read it: the way senior people approach stress and workload can influence the culture experienced by everyone around them.

4. Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? — Dr Julie Smith

Sometimes you don’t need another grand theory about how to live your life. You need something practical that you can actually use. Clinical psychologist Dr Julie Smith’s Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? brings together accessible psychological insights covering subjects including motivation, difficult emotions, confidence and low mood.

Its structure is particularly useful for busy people because it isn’t necessarily a book you need to sit down and read from beginning to end. You can return to different sections depending on what you’re dealing with at the time. Leadership inevitably involves difficult days, uncertainty and periods when motivation disappears, so having practical ways of thinking about those experiences can be far more valuable than another book telling you how successful people structure their mornings.

5. The Comfort Book — Matt Haig

The Comfort Book isn’t a leadership book at all, which is exactly why we’ve included it. Matt Haig’s collection of short reflections explores hope, perspective and navigating difficult periods, and its format means you can pick it up, read a few pages and put it down again without feeling as though you’ve started another task that needs completing.

There is something useful in that for leaders. Wellbeing doesn’t always need to become another project to optimise, measure and improve. Sometimes what you need isn’t a framework or a seven-step plan but a few minutes away from everything demanding your attention. This is the sort of book to keep nearby for the weeks when work feels particularly heavy.

6. Essentialism — Greg McKeown

If everything is important, nothing is. That idea sits at the heart of Essentialism, which explores how to focus on what genuinely matters rather than attempting to do everything. It’s an obvious lesson, but one that becomes increasingly difficult to practise as your responsibilities grow.

Leadership tends to bring more opportunities, more requests, more decisions and more people wanting a piece of your time. Saying yes can become the default, particularly when you’re capable of handling the additional responsibility. McKeown’s argument for doing less, but better, therefore isn’t simply a productivity strategy; it can also be a wellbeing strategy. Being selective about where you put your energy may ultimately make you a more effective leader than attempting to give a little bit of yourself to absolutely everything.

7. Slow Productivity — Cal Newport

Modern working culture often treats visible busyness as evidence of productivity. Full calendars, immediate responses and constantly moving from one task to another can create the impression that somebody is incredibly productive, even when very little meaningful work is actually being accomplished.

In Slow Productivity, Cal Newport explores a more sustainable approach to producing valuable work without maintaining a frantic pace indefinitely. It’s particularly interesting from a leadership perspective because leaders don’t just manage their own workloads; they help determine what productivity looks like throughout an organisation. If employees feel they must always be available, respond instantly and fill every hour with visible activity, it’s worth asking whether you’ve created a genuinely productive workplace or simply a very busy one.

8. Rest — Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Rest and productivity are often treated as opposites. Work more and you’ll achieve more; stop working and productivity stops with you. Rest challenges that assumption by exploring the relationship between deliberate rest, creativity and productive work.

It’s a useful read for leaders who struggle to switch off or feel guilty when they aren’t doing something ‘useful’. Rest doesn’t necessarily have to be the reward you finally earn once everything on your list is finished — particularly because that moment may never arrive. Pang’s work provides a different way of thinking about downtime: not as time stolen from productive work, but as something that can support our ability to do good work in the first place.

9. The Happiness Trap — Russ Harris

We spend an enormous amount of energy trying to avoid uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, and the pressure to remain positive can sometimes make difficult periods even harder. The Happiness Trap draws on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, commonly known as ACT, and explores a different approach to dealing with difficult thoughts and emotions.

Rather than suggesting that the goal should be to feel happy all the time, the book focuses on changing our relationship with uncomfortable experiences while continuing to act in ways that align with what matters to us. That’s particularly relevant to leadership, where uncertainty, criticism, difficult decisions, setbacks and occasional failure are unavoidable. Wellbeing isn’t about feeling brilliant every day, and learning to function alongside uncomfortable emotions can be an important skill in itself.

10. How to Do Nothing — Jenny Odell

Despite its title, How to Do Nothing isn’t really a guide to sitting around doing absolutely nothing. It’s largely a book about attention and the forces competing to capture it. Jenny Odell questions a culture in which almost every moment needs to be productive, measurable or monetised and asks us to think differently about where we direct our attention.

For modern leaders, that’s particularly interesting. Between emails, instant messages, meetings, social media, notifications and the smartphone sitting permanently within reach, our attention is constantly being fragmented. We tend to talk about managing time, but perhaps we should be talking just as much about managing attention. Time isn’t particularly valuable if you’re never mentally present for any of it.

A different kind of leadership reading list

There is a common thread running through almost every book on this list: more isn’t always better. More hours don’t automatically create better leadership, more productivity doesn’t necessarily create greater fulfilment and having more responsibility doesn’t mean you should personally carry everything.

Good leadership requires energy, judgement, patience, creativity and perspective, and those things become considerably harder to maintain when you’re permanently exhausted or mentally somewhere else. Looking after your wellbeing isn’t therefore something separate from becoming a better leader. In many ways, it is part of becoming one.

So perhaps the next leadership book you pick up shouldn’t be about how to achieve more. Perhaps it should help you think about how you want to spend your time, protect your energy and enjoy the life you’re achieving it in.

Keep looking after you

Wellbeing looks different for everyone, and sometimes the most useful thing is simply finding the right information at the right time. Explore more from Daily Round with our dedicated Women’s Health, Men’s Wellbeing and Wellbeing for Leaders sections, or head to the Leaders Library for our latest book recommendations, ideas and inspiration for life in and outside work.

Or, if you’re ready to get back to what’s happening across the sector, catch up with today’s Daily News for the latest health and social care stories.