Winner
Deliberate Creative Teams
Amy Climer
Deliberate Creative Teams is positively impacting leaders by providing a clear, actionable framework to cultivate creativity and innovation within their teams. It equips readers with practical tools, exercises, and strategies to foster a culture where collective creativity thrives. By teaching a structured, repeatable approach to generating innovative solutions, Dr. Amy Climer empowers leaders to unlock their team’s potential, drive breakthrough ideas, and achieve consistent, high-impact results.
Winner
Quick Leadership: Build Trust, Navigate Change, and Cultivate Unstoppable Teams
Selena Rezvani
Quick Leadership helps people lead with clarity, confidence, and humanity—without needing a fancy title or decades of experience. In a world where leadership has long been defined by gatekeeping and control, this book offers a different path: one where leaders trade ego for empathy, and power for service.
It gives readers fast, actionable tools to speak up, set boundaries, build trust, and handle high-stakes moments without losing themselves. Whether someone is leading a team or leading by influence, they learn how to be a resource—not a bottleneck.
By focusing on real human connection and authentic communication, Quick Leadership helps people drive results and retention. It equips emerging and established leaders alike to create inclusive, resilient workplaces where people feel seen, heard, and empowered.
In short: this book helps people lead smarter, faster, and more meaningfully, while staying true to themselves.
Finalist
Headamentals: How Leaders Can Crack Negative Self-Talk
Suzy Burke, PhD
Ryan Berman, Rhett Power
Headamentals is an actionable guide that helps leaders silence negative self-talk before it spirals into toxic team-talk. Doubt and mental spirals don’t just affect the individual; they ripple into miscommunication, stalled progress, and reduced confidence across the team. By tackling the root of the problem—the destructive internal “Monster”—leaders create space for clarity, focus, and more productive conversations.
Grounded in decades of research and coaching, Headamentals delivers practical tools through the 3-C Maverick Method: Catch, Confront, and Change negative dialogue. This concise framework empowers leaders to strengthen resilience, make decisions faster, and lead with confidence.
Filled with real-life stories, insights, and exercises, the book is designed for busy professionals who need immediate impact. The result is stronger leaders who model courage and create healthier, more effective teams capable of thriving.
Finalist
The Outer Game of Leadership: How to Unite and Inspire Teams in Times of Challenge and Crisis
Paul O'Neill
The Outer Game of Leadership: How to Unite and Inspire Teams in Times of Challenge and Crisis helps leaders move beyond strategy into action that truly unites people. It shows how to steady your own presence so that others can find clarity in uncertainty, and how to use language, non-verbal signals, and shared rituals to restore trust when it is most fragile. With practical frameworks and vivid stories, the book equips leaders to turn pressure into alignment, confusion into direction, and fear into collective courage. Whether facing disruption, conflict, or crisis, it gives you the tools to inspire calm, mobilise energy, and lead teams through adversity with resilience and purpose.