Guide · Best books · 4 min read
The best books on communication at work
Six books cover what a person who is not understood the first time needs. Made to Stick handles the core message and writing that gets read; How to Win Friends and Influence People, listening and feedback; Crucial Conversations, keeping hard conversations safe; Nonviolent Communication, saying difficult things so they can be heard; Difficult Conversations, the layers underneath and entering to learn rather than to judge; and Talk Like TED, the presentation. Start with Crucial Conversations if you are avoiding a conversation, and with Made to Stick if your problem is being read.
1.Made to Stick — Chip Heath & Dan Heath
The book about why some messages survive and most do not. Its starting point, the curse of knowledge, explains why experts so often explain their own field badly, and its principles (simple, concrete and stories among them) explain why a status update gets read or ignored. For work, the usable core is one sentence at the top and a concrete first line.
Read it for messages and presentations, and start with the chapters on simplicity and concreteness.
2.How to Win Friends and Influence People — Dale Carnegie
Published in 1936 and still one of the most practical texts on the two halves of communication people skip: listening, and correcting someone without making an enemy. Its advice: be genuinely interested, let the other person talk, begin a correction with honest appreciation, and let them save face.
Read the chapters on listening and on changing people without giving offence; the rest of the book is about persuasion.
3.Crucial Conversations — Patterson, Grenny, McMillan & Switzler
A standard text on the conversations people dread. Its diagnosis is that under stress people go silent or go on the attack, and that nothing useful is said until the conversation feels safe. Its tools (finding a mutual purpose, contrasting what you mean with what you do not, facts before story, tentative telling) are the ones a manager reaches for when a one-to-one goes wrong in front of them.
Read it first if there is a conversation you are avoiding; before you have it, write the purpose you both share and one sentence that says what you do not mean.
4.Nonviolent Communication — Marshall Rosenberg
Four steps (observation, feeling, need, request) that turn 'you always' into something the other person can hear. Rosenberg developed the method in mediation, and his harder claim is that anger signals an unmet need: other people's actions may trigger it, but our own judgements cause it. The register is personal and some examples are intimate; the method transfers to a supplier or a colleague without change.
Read it for the sentence you have been unable to say to someone; the four steps make it sayable in twenty seconds.
5.Difficult Conversations — Stone, Patton & Heen
From the Harvard Negotiation Project, and the deepest of the six on why hard conversations go wrong. Under every one, the authors argue, run three conversations at once (what happened, feelings and identity), and most people fight only the first. Its moves (from blame to contribution, from delivering a verdict to learning, opening from the 'third story' a neutral observer would tell) change what the conversation is.
Read it alongside Crucial Conversations; one gives the stance, the other the sequence.
6.Talk Like TED — Carmine Gallo
Gallo studied hundreds of the most-watched TED talks and found recurring habits: open with a story, organise in threes, stay within eighteen minutes, give the audience one moment to remember, and rehearse until it sounds unrehearsed. For a work presentation the transferable parts are the order, the count, the length and the rehearsal.
Read it before the next time you have to stand up in front of a room.
The honest ending
If your problem is being read, start with Made to Stick and rewrite one message with the point in the first line. If your problem is a conversation you are avoiding, start with Crucial Conversations and write the purpose you both share before you have it. Carnegie supplies listening and feedback, Rosenberg the four steps for the hardest sentence, Stone and Heen the layers underneath, Gallo the presentation. BookYol's Communicate Better road works through all six, one Station a day for twelve days, and ends with a one-page playbook for each format you use.
Questions people ask
- Which communication book should I read first?
- Crucial Conversations if there is a conversation you are avoiding; Made to Stick if your messages are not being read.
- Is Nonviolent Communication too personal for work?
- The examples are personal; the four steps are not. Observation, feeling, need, request works on a supplier or a colleague without change.
- What about negotiation and persuasion?
- They have their own roads, Master Negotiation and Master Influence. This list is about being understood and understanding others in everyday work.