10 Must-Read Teamwork Books for Better Collaboration
- Productivity
Zach- 20 minutes read
Become a better leader and build a more creative team with these teamwork and collaboration books from leading creative minds and companies.
We’ve all heard the phrase, “Teamwork makes the dream work,” but studies show teamwork is not inherently good for creativity and can lead to negative group-think and mediocre ideas. So how do companies and creative teams overcome this challenge and work together in a way that boosts creativity and productivity?
There are many ways teamwork can be positive in the creative process. Even meditation can help teams with brainstorming and building empathy through mindfulness.
A great place to get started is to read these teamwork books to learn how to become a better leader, improve creative collaboration, find inspiration from leading creative teams, support remote work, improve emotional intelligence, strengthen communication, and more.
Bringing Out the Best in People: How to Enjoy Helping Others Excel by Alan Loy McGinnis has been an essential book about teamwork and collaboration since 1985. With over 1 million copies in print, this creative productivity book remains relevant today.
Alan Loy McGinnis studied great leaders and organizations throughout history to culminate a wealth of motivational tips and ideas. In this book are 12 practical principles to help anyone motivate, inspire, influence, and build enthusiasm in their teams and relationships.
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni offers a leadership fable about teamwork that is as enthralling as it is instructive. Kathryn Petersen, Decision Tech’s CEO, faces the ultimate leadership crisis: Uniting a team in such disarray that it threatens to bring down the entire company. Will she succeed? Will she be fired? Will the company fail? Lencioni’s utterly gripping tale serves as a timeless reminder that leadership requires as much courage as it does insight.
Throughout the story, Lencioni reveals five dysfunctions of why teams, even the best ones, often struggle. He outlines a powerful model and actionable steps that can be used to overcome these common hurdles and build a cohesive, effective team.
Who Not How: The Formula to Achieve Bigger Goals Through Accelerating Teamwork by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy teaches how to make an essential paradigm shift that opens the door to explosive growth and limitless possibility in your business and life.
Have you ever had a new idea or a goal that excites you but not enough time to execute it? What about a goal you want to accomplish but can’t because instead of taking action, you procrastinate? What if you had a team of people around you that helped you accomplish your goals (while you helped them accomplish theirs)?
Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy are two of the foremost entrepreneurial coach and have created this teamwork book to help people retrain their brains to stop limiting their potential based on what they solely can do and instead focus on the nearly infinite and endless connections between themselves and other people as well as the limitless transformation possible through those connections.
The Power of a Positive Team: Proven Principles and Practices that Make Great Teams Great by Jon Gordon is a well-researched teamwork book about what unites and builds strong teams. Learn proven principles and practices that build great teams and tools to help teams overcome negativity and enhance their culture, communication, connection, commitment, and performance.
The Power of a Positive Team also provides a blueprint for addressing common pitfalls that cause teams to fail—including complaining, selfishness, inconsistency, complacency, and unaccountability—while offering solutions to enhance a team’s creativity, grit, innovation, and growth.
Herding Tigers: Be the Leader That Creative People Need by Todd Henry is a practical handbook for every leader charged with leading teams to creative brilliance.
Leading talented, creative people requires a different skill set than other types of management. As a consultant to creative companies, Todd Henry knows firsthand what prevents creative leaders from guiding their teams to success, and in Herding Tigers, he provides a bold new blueprint to help you be the leader your team needs.
Learn to lead by influence instead of control. Discover how to create a stable culture that empowers your team to take bold creative risks. And learn how to fight to protect the time, energy, and resources they need to do their best work.
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace is one of the most essential teamwork books about creativity in business and leadership from a co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios responsible for Coco, Inside Out, Toy Story, and more.
Creativity, Inc. is a manual for anyone who strives for originality and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation—into the meetings, postmortems, and “Braintrust” sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made. It is, at heart, a book about creativity—but it is also, as Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull writes, “an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible.”
Remote: Office Not Required by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson is a classic guide to working from home and why we should embrace a virtual office.
With this paradigm shift to more remote work, we’re needing to learn new ways to support collaboration and teamwork. From the bestselling authors of Rework comes new insight into the hotly debated argument. Jason and David point out that remote work means working at the best job (not just one that is nearby) and achieving a harmonious work-life balance while increasing productivity.
Whether you’re a manager fretting over how to manage workers who “want out” or a worker who wants to achieve a lifestyle upgrade while still being a top performer professionally, this book is your indispensable guide.
Primal Leadership: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman is the book that established “emotional intelligence” in the business lexicon and made it a necessary skill for leaders.
This refreshed edition, with a new preface by the authors, vividly illustrates the power—and the necessity—of leadership that is self-aware, empathic, motivating, and collaborative in a world that is ever more economically volatile and technologically complex. It is even timelier now than when it was originally published.
The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate The Three Essential Virtues by Patrick M. Lencioni tells the story of Jeff Shanley, a leader desperate to save his uncle’s company by restoring its cultural commitment to teamwork.
In his classic book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni laid out a groundbreaking approach for tackling the perilous group behaviors that destroy teamwork. In this book, he focuses on the individual, revealing the three indispensable virtues of an ideal team player.
4 Essential Keys to Effective Communication in Love, Life, Work-Anywhere! by Bento C. Leal III is an award-winning book and a 12-day challenge to improve communication.
What if a few simple skills could radically improve your life, marriage, and ALL your relationships? 4 Essential Keys to Effective Communication in Love, Life, Work-Anywhere! is a helpful guide for teaching key skills that will help you identify and overcome communication barriers and achieve relationship success with the important people in your life.
Zach is an international writer, photographer, filmmaker, martial artist, and creator of Creative Enso, the Zen art of creative living. His goal is to empower and inspire creatives to live healthier, happier, and more creative lifestyles.
