--- title: Leadership description: This topic covers the theories, styles, and practices of effective organizational leadership. Learners will understand how to motivate teams, guide organizational change, resolve conflicts, and cultivate a positive workplace culture. category: business-entrepreneurship subcategory: business-fundamentals difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced url: /subject/leadership --- # Leadership This topic covers the theories, styles, and practices of effective organizational leadership. Learners will understand how to motivate teams, guide organizational change, resolve conflicts, and cultivate a positive workplace culture. ## Available Resources 2 Videos • 4 Books • 5 Courses • 3 Websites ## Websites ### 1. Harvard Business Review - Leadership Harvard Business Review's leadership topic page, collecting articles, essays and podcasts by researchers and executives on managing teams, influence, decision-making and organizational change. Readers can follow current management research and apply it to their own practice; many articles sit behind a metered paywall. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://hbr.org/topic/leadership **Tags:** leadership, management, organizational-behavior, business-research ### 2. hbr.org Harvard Business Review (hbr.org) offers research-based articles, case studies, and practical guidance on leadership, strategy, and organizational performance for managers and executives. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://hbr.org **Tags:** websites, business-entrepreneurship, business-fundamentals ### 3. mindtools.com Mind Tools offers practical business and management resources—articles, templates, checklists, and self-assessments—covering business communication, leadership, teamwork, meetings, and professional writing. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://mindtools.com **Tags:** websites, business-entrepreneurship, business-fundamentals ## Videos ### 1. How Great Leaders Inspire Action Simon Sinek's TEDx Puget Sound talk introducing the Golden Circle: why, how, what. Uses examples such as Apple and Martin Luther King Jr. to explain why communicating purpose first inspires people to follow, buy or commit more than listing features. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ZoJKF_VuA **Tags:** leadership, golden-circle, purpose, inspiration, communication ### 2. The Power of Vulnerability **Author:** Brené Brown Researcher Brene Brown reports on six years of qualitative work on shame and connection, arguing that people who feel worthy of belonging are those willing to be vulnerable. Viewers get a research account, not a set of techniques. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCvmsMzlF7o **Tags:** vulnerability, shame-resilience, empathy, ted-talk, connection ## Courses ### 1. Introduction to Lean Six Sigma Methods (MIT 16.660J) **Author:** Earll Murman, Hugh McManus, Annalisa Weigel et al. Principles, practices and tools behind modern productivity improvement in aerospace, automotive and health care organizations. Offers 17 lecture videos with industry practitioner talks and instructor insights, giving learners a working grasp of lean waste reduction and Six Sigma process improvement. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/16-660j-introduction-to-lean-six-sigma-methods-january-iap-2012/ **Tags:** lean-six-sigma, lean-manufacturing, process-improvement, quality-management ### 2. Exercising Leadership: Foundational Principles (HarvardX LEAD1x) **Author:** Ronald Heifetz Ronald Heifetz's adaptive leadership course, free to audit, distinguishing technical problems that experts can solve from adaptive challenges requiring people to change values and habits. Covers authority, stakeholder analysis, conflict, trust, and pacing the losses change imposes. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://pll.harvard.edu/course/exercising-leadership-foundational-principles **Tags:** adaptive-leadership, leadership, change-management, organizational-behavior, authority ### 3. Foundations of Leadership **Author:** Alton Harris, Barton Michelson Johns Hopkins course on leadership theory for senior technical roles: trait and skills approaches, situational leadership, ethical decision-making, path-goal and leader-member exchange theories, and transformational, servant, and adaptive leadership. Learners apply these models to assess their own leadership. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.coursera.org/learn/foundations-of-leadership **Tags:** leadership-theory, transformational-leadership, servant-leadership, ethical-leadership, situational-leadership ### 4. Leadership and Influence The only thing you get to change is yourself, and in the prerequisites to this course we’ve given you real tools to do that. Now, use those tools to influence the course of your future, your team's future, and your organization's future. Make a plan for yourself that will help you help others, and learn skills to make it happen. Listening and being sure of your values underpins everything that comes with professional influencer and leadership soft skills. We’ll go on to look at self-assessment and leadership planning, negotiation, addressing and resolving conflict, and successfully identifying and promoting circumstances you want. After this course, you will be able to: - state your own mission and plan with confidence - negotiate and persuade - deal with difficult people - contribute to crafting a working environment you want to work in The prerequisites for this course are Courses One and Two of the Specialization "Professional IQ: Preventing and Solving Problems at Work". **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.coursera.org/learn/leadership-influence **Tags:** courses, business-entrepreneurship, business-fundamentals ### 5. Advanced Leadership Georgia Tech's edX course on innovation leadership, taught by former Medtronic chair and CEO Bill George. Three modules of video, readings from Discover Your True North, exercises and reflection essays examine purpose, self-knowledge and cases including Merck, Ford, Xerox and Unilever. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.edx.org/learn/leadership/the-georgia-institute-of-technology-innovation-leadership **Tags:** courses, business-entrepreneurship, business-fundamentals ## Podcasts ### 1. HBR IdeaCast **Author:** Harvard Business Review Weekly Harvard Business Review interview show with management researchers and executives, roughly twenty-five minutes an episode. Gives listeners a running feel for current organizational research on leadership, teams, hiring, and workplace change, and how practitioners apply it. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** en | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://hbr.org/podcasts/ideacast **Tags:** management, leadership, organizational-behavior, business-research, teams ### 2. The Empathy Edge **Author:** Maria Ross Interview podcast hosted by Maria Ross on empathy as a business skill, with guests from leadership, branding and research discussing culture, customer experience and performance. Episodes translate the idea into concrete practices for managers and teams. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** en-us | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://the-empathy-edge.simplecast.com **Tags:** empathy, empathetic-leadership, workplace-culture, customer-experience ## Books ### 1. Leading Change **Author:** John P. Kotter Kotter's eight-step framework for organizational transformation, drawn from a decade studying more than 100 companies. Readers can diagnose why efforts stall — weak urgency, no guiding coalition, undercommunicated vision — and sequence interventions in the right order. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1422186431?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** change-management, organizational-transformation, leadership, eight-step-model ### 2. Leaders Eat Last **Author:** Simon Sinek Argues that leaders build trust by putting the people they lead ahead of themselves, drawing on Marine Corps culture and corporate case studies. Readers gain a framework for creating teams where members feel protected. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/9124063452?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, business-entrepreneurship, business-fundamentals ### 3. Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us **Author:** Seth Godin Seth Godin's short book argues that the internet lets anyone gather people around a shared idea and lead them. It explains what holds a tribe together, why leadership now matters more than management, and how to start a movement instead of following one. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0749939753?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** leadership, movements, community-building, tribes, marketing ### 4. Leadership: Theory and Practice **Author:** Peter G. Northouse A university textbook surveying major leadership approaches, including trait, skills, style, situational, contingency, path-goal, and transformational, with the empirical research behind each plus cases and self-assessment questionnaires. Readers can compare theories and weigh their evidence. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/141294161X?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, business-entrepreneurship, business-fundamentals --- *This content is part of Dantes.io - Your Treasure Map to Knowledge* *Curated by humans at Dantes.io. Personal study use welcome; republishing this curation requires permission (team@dantes.io).* View this page online: https://dantes.io/subject/leadership