5 Books to Turn Your Team Around

One of the greatest privileges we as people get to have is to lead other people. The task of leading people can sometimes feel complicated and overwhelming. Often we inherit a team with a negative attitude or find ourselves realizing that we have not lead our team well. This can be a really tricky spot to get out of and get your team headed in the right direction.

My name is Evan Knox, and I am the founder of Caffeine Marketing and a partner in the Tactos group. While certainly not a perfect leader, my experience with Tactos directly links to this article’s topic. Sometimes with businesses that we require, I will step in as an interim CEO, and I’m deeply familiar with reinstating a new culture. Below, I will share my five favorite books for crafting a healthy, hungry, and humble culture.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Table Of Contents

1. Leadership Strategy and Tactics
2. Free to Focus
3. What the Heck is EOS
4. Extreme Ownership
5. Building a StoryBrand

Leadership Strategy and Tactics: Field Manual by Jocko Willink

Leadership Strategy and Tactics (LST) is my favorite book on leading people. It teaches you how to lead others and how to be led and be a better follower. I think of this book as the initial culture book. It gives the entire team language around how we should function.

It is almost like an operating system for individuals within a team.

Jocko Willink is a retired Navy seal who owns a leadership consultancy company. He uses his military experience plus his experiences with clients as examples throughout the book on various leadership lessons. Much of the beginning of the book is talking about the foundations.

Whenever we have a company read this book, I ask someone to teach a lesson from the book weekly during a staff meeting for a year. We use each section as a topic and rotate through the entire staff to get a chance to learn the material better and be reminded of the lessons. If there is any book on this list that will help you turn your team around, it is this book. There are occasionally bad apples within each team, but a great leader can revitalize a team more often than not.

Some of my favorite principles from the book are the laws of combat and the principles of leadership.

Laws of combat:

• Cover and move
• Simple
• Prioritize and execute
• Decentralized command

The idea of Cover and Move is about working together as a team. In a tactical scenario, you are either advancing on the target or laying down cover fire for one another. In the workplace, this is about having each other’s back and thinking strategically.

The idea is simple is that you were supposed to keep things simple. Don’t over complicate when communicating or creating plans. I would also add to keep it simple and your marketing.

The principle of prioritize and execute is all about identifying what is most important and then acting upon it. More often than not, we get overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that needs to be done, and we should prioritize what’s most important and then execute.

The last principle of the laws of combat is — decentralized command. Our teams should be able to understand what the mission is and make decisions at a tactical level every day. If we have to be the center of all decision-making as a leader, we are failing to do our job well.

While this book can be open and closed in any chapter, I suggest reading it all the way through and then referring back to it as a manual.

Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less by Michael Hyatt

If we consider Leadership Strategy and Tactics about developing a healthy culture, think of Free To Focus as a personal productivity system. An important ingredient inside of any high-performing team is that the members of the team are personally productive.

This book is not about squeezing every ounce out of your employees but instead helping them function in their desire zone. When an employee is working in their desire zone, they are more likely to work harder and love their job. When they love their job, they’re more likely to give it their best and not drag their feet.

This book also helps in empowering employees to make the most of the time at work while also setting boundaries were not at work. When team members have healthy boundaries outside of work, they are actually more likely to be more productive during work hours. As their team leader, when you give your team members this book, they will feel that you care for them as a person, not just what they produce.

I personally love the productivity system inside of this book and use the full focus planner every day.

What the Heck is EOS? by Gino Wickman, Tom Bouwer

EOS stands for entrepreneurs operating system. We use the entrepreneur’s operating system in all of our businesses. At Tactos and Caffeine Marketing, using this system enables us as owners to have a great view of your business and where we’re headed. As an employee, it gives clarity on objectives and clear wins.

If the book Free to Focus was about personal productivity, What the Heck is EOS is about organizational efficiency. Not only do we want our team members to be productive, but we also want our teams to be effective.

This is the easiest of all of the books describing EOS to read. It is a really short read that can be done in one sitting. The book covers all the major terms related to EOS and helps employees feel empowered to run with EOS.

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

Taking extreme ownership of the problems within our teams is the greatest way for us to lead. While Leadership Strategy and Tactics covers extreme ownership in passing, everyone on our team must understand the principle for us to be successful in the long term.

In short, it’s about taking ownership of every situation and assuming it might be my fault first.

Some of the ways extreme ownership might be displayed:

• Taking the blame for mistakes
• Not blaming people who work for you
• Not being a victim
• Simplifying and communicating clearly to avoid confusion
• Allowing our team members to receive praise for positive outcomes
• Being disciplined in following plans BUT being flexible enough to adapt.

The book includes real life combat stories that translate into lessons for business and life. After reading LST, this should be your next read.

Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message, So Customers Will Listen by Donald A. Miller

You might be wondering why a marketing book might make it onto the list. It’s possible that a reason why your team might be struggling is that they do not understand what it is that they do.

Building a StoryBrand is about learning to communicate using the seven parts of a story framework.

The first part of the story is the hero. Typically in a company, this is your customer. You need to define what it is your customer wants. Sometimes it’s helpful to start by describing what sort of character transformation customers go on before and after buying your product or service.

The second part is the problem. No story gets started until a problem is introduced or some sort of conflict is started. In order to align your team, everybody needs to understand what problem your product or service solves.

After defining the problem, you must establish yourself as a guide. Most businesses make themselves the hero when, in reality, they need to play the role of a guide. Positioning your business as the guide will empower your team members to know their role in a bigger story.

Next in the StoryBrand framework is the plan. Your team must be aligned around what steps are in place for the customer to buy your product or service. If there is no standard operating procedure, then you will not be able to scale.

Once you’ve laid out the plan for customers to work with you, they need to be called to action. Some teams struggle because they do not know what the goal is or ever how their customers should engage with them.

Finally, we have the stakes. If each person on the team understood how customers’ lives were better and what was at risk if they didn’t buy your products and services, you would have more clarity and buy-in.

In conclusion

Ultimately you can read all the books in the world, but if you do not actually execute on the material inside of the books, your team will not grow. My suggestion to you as the leader is to actually follow the principles in the book and set an example.

All the best,

Evan Knox
StoryBrand Certified Guide
Founder of Caffeine Marketing