The Best Articles in Leadership
The most useful articles and videos in Leadership from around the web, curated by thought leaders and our community.
Refind focuses on timeless pieces and updates the list whenever new, must-read articles or videos are discovered.
Top 5 Leadership Articles
At a glance: these are the articles that have been most read, shared, and saved in Leadership by Refind users in 2024 so far.
Videos
Watch a video to get a quick overview.
Leadership Expert: Stop Doing This One Thing if You're Miserable
Shared by 1000, including Ines Bieler
Lessons in leadership
Jack Altman is the co-founder and CEO of Lattice, a people success platform for building engaged, high-performing teams. Lattice has raised over $330M, and w...
Overcome the Fear of Change
Do your people fear change, or do they fear SUDDEN change? Leading with empathy and patience are key components in helping others bridge that gap. + + +Simon...
The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford)
Christina Wodtke is an author, Stanford University professor, and speaker who teaches strategies for building high-performing teams. She’s also the author of...
Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action
Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership -- starting with a golden circle and the question "Why?" His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers ...
What is ...?
New to Leadership? These articles make an excellent introduction.
What is the Best Piece of Advice You Received?
The words that transformed the lives of women leaders
What Is Conscious Leadership? A Quick Guide to Conscious Leadership Concepts — Sunderland Coaching
The concept of "above the line" vs. "below the line," the 15 commitments, alignment, and other conscious leadership concepts explained in this introductory guide to conscious leadership.
What Is Decision Fatigue And How To Combat It
Are you struggling to make good decisions? Adopt these strategies to overcome decision fatigue and start making the right choices.
«block scheduling is the practice of allocating large chunks of time to related tasks. For example, you might designate Mondays for meetings and Tuesdays for strategy.»
What is mindful leadership?
Mindful leadership requires consciously cultivating your ability to be present, open-minded, and compassionate when interacting with team members.
«When a new team member starts, Taylor sets up a meeting to get to know the person as an individual and a professional.»
How to ...?
How to Be a Mentor: 4 Ways to Change Someone’s Life
Discover what a mentor does, why different types of mentors exist, why mentoring is important, and four ways to be a transformative mentor yourself.
«mentors have three things in common. They motivate, inspire, and support.»
How to Become a Better Listener
Sharpen these seven skills.
«REPEAT PEOPLE’S LAST FEW WORDS BACK TO THEM. If you remember nothing else, remember this simple practice that does so much. It makes the other person feel listened to, keeps you on track during the conversation, and provides a pause for both of you to gather thoughts or recover from an emotional reaction»
How to Avoid Making Bad Decisions
Avoiding bad decisions is just as important as making good ones. Knowing the warning signs and having a set of rules for your decision-making process limits the amount of luck you need to get good…
«They don’t have twenty years of experience—they have one year of experience repeated twenty times. If you can’t learn, you can’t get better.»
How to train your brain to be more present
This temptation to multitask has only gotten worse in the work-from-home era. But there are ways to fight it.
Trending
These links are currently making the rounds in Leadership on Refind.
A Technology Leader’s Non-Technical Reading List
My personal favorite reading materials that have helped me think about leadership, management, and technology.
Parkinson's Law: It's Real, So Use It
Yes, just set that deadline.
What if everybody did everything right?
In the wake of an incident, we want to answer the questions “What happened?” and, afterwards, “What should we do differently going forward?” Invariably, this leads to people…
«Looking at the incident from this perspective will yield will very different kinds of insights, because it will generate different types of questions, such as:»
"Help, I see a problem and no one is prioritizing it!"
Monday, February 26, 2024A mentee recently mentioned a really frustrating problem that her manager seems to be ignoring. The specific problem doesn't matter, so don't focus on the technical details…
Productive Compliments: Giving, Receiving, Connecting
First published July 25, 2018 An early reviewer pointed out that what follows depends substantially on acting from a position of privilege. Absolutely. What appear to be compliments can be assertions…
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles in Leadership—all under 10 minutes.
12 Short Anecdotes That Entertain and Enlighten
A collection of short anecdotes, simple entertaining or enlightening narratives to add to your storytelling repertoire.
«among the most important stories we know are stories about ourselves.»
The "Zebra Effect": Why collaboration matters
Zebras are, on first impression, ridiculous. They are herbivorous pack animals, and their natural habitat is usually some kind of treeless grassland or savanna — green, yellow, and brown. You’d think…
«The power of the consortium. Just because another company (or even a person) is competing with you in one key area doesn’t mean that you need to compete in all areas.»
250. The Most Extraordinary Version of Yourself
Being the most extraordinary version of yourself is easy. You just have to ignore the force of gravity. Sure it'll be difficult but nobody said it'd be easy.
Humility: Why modern leaders need to resurrect this ancient virtue
Subscribe for counterintuitive, surprising, and impactful stories delivered to your inbox every Thursday Many ancient thinkers have written about the dangers of arrogance. The Roman emperor Marcus…
«I think about humility in two ways. One way is being the right size in a given situation — not too big, not too small.»
The Beginner's Mind, How to Fail, & More
The Curiosity Chronicle has quickly become one of the most popular newsletters for growth-minded individuals in the world. Each week, subscribers receive a deep dive that covers topics ranging from…
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles in Leadership.
24 Leadership Principles From The Greatest Business, Military, Political and Sports Leaders
People think that leadership is something that just happens. One is anointed a leader. One is promoted to leadership. One is born into leadership. And of course, this is not the case. “Leadership,”…
«Accept the fact that nothing is certain and no law is fixed,” Robert writes. “The best way to protect yourself is to be as fluid and formless as water.»
What makes a strategy great
Most so-called "strategies" are vague, wishful thinking, written once and never seen again. Don't do that. These are the characteristics of great strategy.
«Average players want to be left alone. Good players want to be coached. Great players want the coach to tell them the truth.»
How to Build Trust
What are the major management behaviors that can help build trust? Management books often cover the importance of trust, but abstractly. There’s precious little writing about the nuts and bolts, the…
«Do summarize and distill important context for your team; don’t just be a firehose.Do answer questions and go into more detail if team members ask»
35 Interview Questions for Manager Candidates
We asked top hiring managers and startup leaders to share their favorite questions for interviewing management candidates.
«You’re not looking for a mediocre manager to lead a team — you’re looking for someone exceptional. So ditch the rudimentary questions and dig deeper. »
12 Ways to Rethink Your Next Performance Review Conversation
Stop dreading performance reviews. We assembled a list of 12 tips from expert leaders like Lenny Rachitsky, Molly Graham, Russ Laraway, Brie Wolfson, Julie Zhuo and more to make these conversations…
Thought Leaders
We monitor hundreds of thought leaders, influencers, and newsletters in Leadership, including:
What is Refind?
Every day Refind picks the most relevant links from around the web for you. Picking only a handful of links means focusing on what’s relevant and useful.
How does Refind curate?
It’s a mix of human and algorithmic curation, following a number of steps:
- We monitor 10k+ sources and 1k+ thought leaders on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
- In addition, our users save links from around the web using our Save buttons and our extensions.
- Our algorithm processes 100k+ new links every day and uses external signals to find the most relevant ones, focusing on timeless pieces.
- Our community of active users gets the most relevant links every day, tailored to their interests. They provide feedback via implicit and explicit signals: open, read, listen, share, mark as read, read later, «More/less like this», etc.
- Our algorithm uses these internal signals to refine the selection.
- In addition, we have expert curators who manually curate niche topics.
The result: lists of the best and most useful articles on hundreds of topics.
How does Refind detect «timeless» pieces?
We focus on pieces with long shelf-lives—not news. We determine «timelessness» via a number of metrics, for example, the consumption pattern of links over time.
How many sources does Refind monitor?
We monitor 10k+ content sources on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
Who are the thought leaders in Leadership?
We follow dozens of thought leaders in Leadership, including Jason Fried, Sheryl Sandberg, Caterina Fake, Michael Hyatt, World Economic Forum.
Missing a thought leader? Submit them here
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