Results
Winner
Hard to Handle: A High Performer Paradox
Diana Lowe, Lowe
Michael Ashley
Hard to Handle: A High Performer Paradox is changing the conversation about difficult high performers by asking a more human—and more challenging—question: What if the person everyone is ready to give up on is capable of change? Grounded in evidence-based leadership and coaching, the book helps leaders and HR professionals confront a hard truth: when we label someone “difficult,” we can stop being curious about what is driving the behavior—and miss the opportunity for transformation. Through a relatable workplace story and practical tools, readers learn to look beneath behavior, have courageous conversations, build self-awareness and emotional intelligence, and take responsibility for their own impact. At its heart is a powerful idea: people are more than their worst behaviors. When we stop asking “What’s wrong with them?” and start asking “What’s possible here?”, we create the conditions for meaningful change.
Winner
Fearless Feedback: Everything Managers Have Never Been Taught About Feedback
Katie O'Brien Ceccarini
Fearless Feedback is changing the relationship people have with feedback, making feedback less daunting and more effective. Managers who read Fearless Feedback are better equipped to broach, address, and navigate feedback conversations, giving them a new sense of confidence, making them more capable managers. Most managers are never taught how to have great feedback conversations. Until now. Fearless Feedback is the practical, no-nonsense guide managers have been waiting for. This is not a book on why feedback is important—managers already know it is. This is a book laser-focused on the how: how to have meaningful feedback conversations while preserving the relationships they've worked hard to build.
Built on two decades of real management experience and grounded in repeatable frameworks with real-world scenarios, this book gives the language and tools to navigate even the most difficult conversations, making it a book managers can come back to again and again.
Winner
Psychological Safety in Practice: An Evidence-based Guide for HR Professionals
Helen Sanderson
Psychological Safety in Practice is a practical, evidence-based guide for senior HR leaders and people executives who want to improve performance, wellbeing and retention by creating workplaces where people feel safe to contribute, challenge and grow. Written by Helen Sanderson, an expert in wellbeing and health at work, this book moves psychological safety from theory into execution. It translates research into five clear foundations: mattering, voice, clarity, connection, and learning, giving leaders a tangible framework they can apply across teams and functions.
The book then shows how to embed psychological safety across the full employee journey, from recruitment and induction to feedback, development and progression. It addresses the structural, cultural, and leadership decisions that determine whether psychological safety becomes embedded or undermined at scale.
Finalist
The Emotional Side of Organizational Change: How To Survive and Thrive
Jennifer Bryan
The Emotional Side of Organizational Change helps leaders transform the way they lead change and, ultimately, the experience and outcomes of transformation for the people affected by it. The book tackles a critical but often overlooked reason transformation fails: the emotional response to change. It helps leaders understand what sits beneath resistance, uncertainty and disengagement, so they can respond with greater empathy, clarity and intention rather than treating people as obstacles.
Through practical tools, communication strategies, foresight techniques and the ABChange Model, readers learn to anticipate emotional responses, build trust and involve people meaningfully. The result is a shift from doing change to people to creating change with them, helping organisations build resilience, accelerate adoption and sustain new ways of working. It helps leaders put people first without compromising performance, making transformation more human, successful and more likely to last.
Finalist
Thriving Talent: How Great Leaders Drive Performance, Engagement and Retention
Aoife O'Brien
Thriving Talent helps leaders understand what prevents employees doing their best work, and what they can do about it, challenging the idea that underperformance is always an individual problem. Instead, it asks leaders and HR to consider the conditions they’ve created for people to perform. The stories woven throughout help people reflect on their own experiences. Readers say they see themselves in the book: workplace situations, managers they’ve had, and their own leadership styles, both positive and negative.
People dip back into the book when challenges arise, using the frameworks and prompts to work out what to do.
Employees also say it’s helped them better understand their values, needs and strengths, as well as their work environment, and put into words what isn’t working for them. The book works at two levels: helping leaders create the conditions for employees to perform sustainably, and helping individuals understand what they need to thrive.
Finalist
Meaning Over Purpose: The CEO’s strategic blueprint for growth and lasting engagement
Angela Rixon
Meaning Over Purpose offers a fresh and timely leadership model for tackling one of today’s biggest workplace challenges: employee disengagement. It introduces the “Purpose-to-Meaning Gap”, the disconnect between what organisations say and what people actually experience, and shows leaders how to close it. Rather than treating purpose as the answer on its own, the book provides a practical framework for embedding meaning into leadership, culture, and everyday work.
Drawing on Angela Rixon’s senior HR experience, alongside research and psychology, the book is delivered through an accessible, story-led format centred on a fictional CEO, Sarah. It equips leaders to respond to burnout, AI, generational change, and hybrid work while strengthening engagement, retention, productivity, and organisational performance.