Here’s the most valuable leadership advice I, as an independent career and executive coach, can ever give you. Take it and follow it now. You can thank me later.
But first, take a deep breath, slow down, and let’s set the stage with this backdrop.
The Backdrop
A quiet stillness sets in, blanketing a foundational self-centeredness into which you selectively admit enriching influences and exclude unwanted interruptions. You have, with intent and aforethought, set aside this time and it is sacrosanct. You have reserved a comfortable environment and appointed it with all the trappings; your wing chair or backyard garden lounge chair, lighting, and music (Brahms #2, Beethoven #7, Grateful Dead’s “American Beauty” album). You’re as far away from your phone as possible. So to speak, you’re in another world. Now you can…
Read a book. Not a business book. Not a book for business. Not a book about business. A book like the ones you were required to read in elementary and junior high school and then write book reports regularly, like biographies, novels, history, poetry, memoirs, travelogs, anthologies, collections of essays – anything but business, in other words.
For the remainder of this essay, I will offer my reasons – unassailable in my view – supporting this viewpoint from my vantage point as a coach, journalist, leadership advisor, and graduate-level adjunct professor of leadership and communication.
For two and a half decades I was in high hiring gear all over the country and internationally as well. Candidates who initially stirred my interest ultimately got this question from me: “What’s the last book you read?” Candidates who quickly answered with the name of the latest business book either gave me the answer they thought I wanted or were too narrow-minded to know better. Truth is, I was looking for far more interesting and far less disingenuous people to join my teams.
Critical reading: more critical than ever
The National Association of Educational Progress released a report last month that bodes ill for the future of literacy in America. Thirty-three percent of eighth graders failed to register a “basic” proficiency score in reading. They could not extract the main idea of a text, nor could they recognize two opposing arguments in a text. If you’re looking for the root cause, look no further. In 2023, only 14% of students said they read for fun almost every day, a jaw-dropping drop of 13% since 2012. Let’s say this another way. It took only a decade to lose half our young readers.
Meanwhile, only 37% of high school seniors were rated proficient or better, which means this appalling, horrifying trend is long, wide, and deep.
And now, when we understand that good, healthy reading – recreational reading – is linked to critical thinking skills, language aptitude, cultural awareness, self-concept, problem solving, ethical and moral north stars, aesthetic appreciation, and general civic responsibility, we see how the problem is magnified.
It’s gotta’ be the right kind of reading.
To be clear, we are not discussing the kind of reading most people do: clicking on one link after another, interrupting one short staccato moment with another, lacking any continuity whatsoever, never mind being deprived of the style and art of good writing. That’s simply a manifestation of an awful syndrome called “continuous partial attention,” which gets everybody absolutely nowhere.
Further, good readers are almost always good writers and good communicators overall, and communications skills, we know, are priceless in the workplace, so good readers give themselves a big career advantage.
You’re welcome.