Results
Winner
Thoughtload: Manage the Madness and Free Your Team to Do Great Work
Liane Davey
Backed by science and written with the time- and energy-strapped manager in mind, Thoughtload is Liane Davey’s potent handbook for a better way to lead. Apply the strategies in this book to create calm within the chaos—so you and your team can perform, produce, and prosper.
Winner
Bombs, Bacon, and Bankruptcy: The Art of Crisis Leadership
Henry J Evans
Bombs, Bacon, and Bankruptcy helps leaders make better decisions when the stakes are highest. Rather than offering theoretical leadership advice, the book provides practical frameworks for navigating uncertainty, communicating effectively under pressure, and creating cultures where people speak up before small problems become major crises. Drawing on lessons from national security, executive coaching, and personal experience, Henry shows readers how to recognize the hidden effects of fear on decision-making, build Emotional Safety®, and develop the resilience needed to lead with clarity and confidence through change. Ultimately, the book helps leaders strengthen trust, improve organizational performance, and turn adversity into an opportunity for growth rather than paralysis.
Winner
Contagious Confidence: A leader's guide to building belief and powering performance
Julie Smith
Contagious Confidence helps leaders deliver an ambitious agenda without burning out their team. One 5-star reviewer says: "If you want to do more with less (which it feels like all leaders are being asked to do), this shows you the most human way of doing it." The book supports leaders to unlock the ultimate performance variable: confidence. When people’s self-belief matches their capability, they feel able to stretch themselves, take on new challenges, extend their impact. Collective confidence enables teams to stride towards their goals, holding each other to high standards. Packed with real-world stories and 50 practical tools, Contagious Confidence equips leaders to build confidence that fuels results. It tackles hidden leadership habits that drain belief. For example, being overly helpful sends the message 'I don't think you can do this on your own.’ Another reviewer says: "all the power of a coach but all in your own hands."
Winner
Lift: 10 Mentorship Touchpoints to Empower Your Team and Accelerate Your Career
Amy Summers
Drawing from real stories, practical strategies, and insights from her popular podcast and award-winning seminars, Summers shows you how mentorship doesn’t have to be a heavy lift. Whether you’re currently managing a team, preparing to take on more responsibility, or starting your own entrepreneurial endeavor, Lift offers the guidance you’ve been looking for to become a leader who inspires, connects, and creates lasting impact that accelerates not only their careers, but also your own.
Finalist
Minimum Viable Manager: Three Essential Skills for Leading Technical Teams That Solve Big Problems
Matt Gjertsen
How often have you heard that engineers don’t make good managers? Many engineers, their teams, and even the HR professionals who support them believe technical people aren’t wired for leadership. That assumption is wrong. In Minimum Viable Manager, Matt Gjertsen reveals how technically minded people can move past solving problems and take the first steps towards being exceptional leaders." In this practical guide for leaders at any stage, you’ll gain tools for building trust, setting clear expectations, and giving effective feedback—the deceptively simple skills that determine success and are rarely taught. Matt explains the psychology behind each skill, illustrates them with real-world examples, and includes self-reflection questions in every chapter so you can immediately apply what you learn.
Finalist
The Confluence Method™: How Courageous Leaders Transform Conflict Into Trust, Better Decisions, and Stronger Teams
Hollie Rottman
Jim Rottman
The Confluence Method helps people stay human when pressure makes that hardest. When the stakes rise, we can narrow, protect, rush towards consensus or silence the voice that most needs to be heard. Yet that dissenting voice might change a patient's outcome, catch a critical design flaw or reveal something a team has missed. We believe conflict is not something to avoid, but a uniquely human capacity we need to strengthen. Through embodied practice, leaders learn to regulate their own nervous system, stay present with discomfort, invite challenge, repair trust and help others find their voice. The impact reaches beyond better decisions. It means people carrying enormous responsibility don't have to carry it alone. They can think together, challenge one another and stay connected through difference. As technology increasingly thinks alongside us, our ability to remain deeply human, courageous and connected may matter more than ever.
Finalist
Future-Fit Innovation: Empowering individuals, teams and organizations for sustainable growth
Barbara Salopek
Future-Fit Innovation helps leaders turn innovation from a vague buzzword into a practical capability. Instead of offering another quick-fix framework, it shows readers how to overcome the real barriers that block innovation—rigid thinking, weak psychological safety, poor collaboration, resistance to technology, and shallow approaches to sustainability—and how to build the conditions for innovation across the individual, team, and organizational levels. Grounded in both academic insight and hands-on business experience, the book gives readers clear models, checklists, reflective questions, real cases, and immediately usable tools. It helps leaders make better decisions, build stronger cultures, reduce costly innovation mistakes, and create organizations that are more adaptive, resilient, and future-ready. In short, this book helps people lead change more effectively and turn good ideas into meaningful, lasting results.