AI technology is changing how we work, but the heart of HR remains human. For HR practitioners and people leaders, combining new tools with empathy, strategy, and culture-building leads to success.
This list includes some of the best books to read in 2026, selected for practical insights and trusted expertise. Their selection is based on Lattice’s mission to make work meaningful by empowering people leaders in building stronger teams and successful workplaces.
Why HR Books Still Matter in an AI-Powered World
Even with all the automation and AI tools available, what makes an organization stand out is its people. Leadership, empathy, and strategic thinking are qualities technology can support and enhance, but never replace. These books offer advice on using those strengths to create workplaces where people feel valued and grow.
While some of these titles may already be familiar, they speak to what’s happening in HR right now — whether it’s AI, hybrid work, diversity and inclusion, or leadership development. These books are shaped by voices that are respected in the HR community and offer solid ideas to help people leaders succeed.
New, Updated, & Noteworthy Releases (2025–2026)
Artificial Intelligence for HR: Use AI to Support and Develop a Successful Workforce
- Author(s): Ben Eubanks
- Audience: HR leaders, HR analytics professionals, and HR tech strategists
- Extras: Ebook
In its most recent edition, Eubanks, Chief Research Officer at Lighthouse Research and Advisory, offers a fresh perspective on how AI can be thoughtfully integrated into HR — not to replace people, but to empower them. The book stresses ethical use and the importance of keeping the human element front and center.
The intent is to truly do more with less, freeing up our high-value HR talent to pursue more strategic activities and letting the algorithms do the repetitive heavy lifting and analysis.
Culture Design: How to Build a High-Performing Resilient Organization With Purpose
- Author(s): James D. White and Krista White
- Audience: HR leaders, executives, and managers at all levels
- Extras: Audiobook, Ebook
Based on their experience, the founders of Culture Design Lab offer a practical framework rooted in inclusive leadership and design thinking to help leaders get intentional about their organizational structure and make it stronger.
We’ve all learned, especially since the pandemic, that life is not so neatly compartmentalized. The point is not that colleagues and family members are the same—they’re not. The point is that your colleagues’ humanity should be treated with the same empathy and respect you’d give your child, parent, spouse, or sibling.
Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
The bestseller’s 15th anniversary edition has an updated forward by the author. Sinek, founder of The Optimism Co., shows that the leaders who have had the greatest influence in the world all think, act, and communicate in the same way — and how their methods are the opposite of what everyone else does.
With a little discipline, any leader or organization can inspire others, both inside and outside their organization, to help advance their ideas and their vision. We can all learn to lead.
Leadership and Management Books with HR Takeaways
Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.
- Author(s): Brené Brown
- Audience: Executives, managers, and team leaders
- Extras: Audiobook, Ebook, Daring Leadership Assessment
Brown, research professor at the University of Houston and Professor of Practice in Management at the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business, shows how embracing vulnerability creates stronger leadership that has greater freedom to be innovative. The podcast host and bestselling author uses research, stories, and examples to empower leaders to develop and embed courage in their organization’s culture.
[...] We desperately need more leaders who are committed to courageous, wholehearted leadership and who are self-aware enough to lead from their hearts, rather than uninvolved leaders who lead from hurt and fear.
The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You
Zhuo’s advice focuses on the core skills managers need — from feedback and hiring to running meetings and delegation. The former Vice President, Product Design at Facebook, she became a rookie manager at 25 and since then, has managed dozens of teams spanning tens to hundreds of employees.
You can be someone’s manager, but if that person does not trust or respect you, you will have limited ability to influence him.
Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter
- Author(s): Liz Wiseman
- Audience: Leaders and coaches
- Extras: Audiobook, Ebook, The Multipliers Accidental Diminisher Quiz
Wiseman, a bestselling author and CEO of leadership research and development firm the Wiseman Group, explores how some leaders multiply their team’s intelligence and capabilities, while others unintentionally hold talent back. Her book offers actionable insights to maximize team potential.
Multipliers are genius makers. What we mean by that is that they make everyone around them smarter and more capable. Multipliers invoke each person’s unique intelligence and create an atmosphere of genius—innovation, productive effort, and collective intelligence.
People Strategy: How to Invest in People and Make Culture Your Competitive Advantage
Altman, former CEO of Lattice, shares a framework for integrating people strategy into every aspect of business planning to accelerate growth. He points out that while companies meticulously develop product and go-to-market strategies, they often overlook creating a people strategy, even though employees are the foundation of business success.
Regardless of how you define success, knowing that your work matters to the world and that you have a chance to make a dent in the universe is so important to employees.
Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
- Author(s): Kim Scott
Audience: Managers and leaders at all levels - Extras: Audiobook, Ebook, Radical Candor online community
Scott’s framework encourages leaders to care personally while challenging directly, such as giving honest feedback that helps someone grow, rather than harsh criticism or avoiding tough conversations. The CEO coach and cofounder of the company Radical Candor explains how that approach fosters trust and drives better performance.
Challenging others and encouraging them to challenge you helps build trusting relationships because it shows 1) you care enough to point out both the things that aren’t going well and those things that are and that 2) you are committed to fixing mistakes that you or others have made.
Trust and Inspire: How Truly Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Other
- Author(s): Stephen M.R. Covey with David Kasperson, McKinley Covey, and Gary T. Judd
- Audience: Executives and managers
- Extras: Audiobook, Ebook
Stephen M.R. Covey, bestselling author and former President and CEO of the Covey Leadership Center, explains that a dispersed workforce requires trust and collaboration across time zones, cultures, generations and technology. He and his team share that people don’t want to be managed. They want to be inspired and led.
While both management and leadership are vitally needed, we live in a world that is overmanaged and underled.
The Way of the HR Warrior: Leading the Charge to Transform Your Career and Organization
- Author(s): Monica Frede and Keri Ohlrich, PhD
- Audience: HR executives, managers, and team members
- Extras: Ebook
The debut book by Frede, a strategic consultant and HR manager at several Fortune 1000 companies, and Ohlrich, CEO of Abbracci Group, defines an HR Warrior as courageous, humble, accurate, resilient, goal-oriented, and exemplary. It is a tough-love guide for HR professionals who want to be stronger leaders.
Employee engagement has a significant impact on a company’s success. The happier employees are at work, the more productive they are, and the more the company benefits.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB)
Good Guys: How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace
- Author(s): David Smith and W. Brad Johnson
Audience: Male leaders and allies, DEIB educators - Extras: Audiobook, Ebook, Workplace Allies Tools
The authors explain how men can become effective allies and sponsors by actively supporting and partnering with women to advance women’s leadership and equality. Smith, a professor of sociology in the College of Leadership and Ethics at the US Naval War College, and Johnson, a psychology professor at the US Naval Academy and Johns Hopkins University, bring their expertise to this guide filled with strategies for building inclusive leadership.
Speaking out isn’t easy, and no one expects perfection. But becoming a partner and ally to women is a crucial element of helping them reach equity in the workplace. If you think you’re doing enough, you’re probably not. Push further.
Inclusion: Diversity, the New Workplace and the Will to Change
- Author(s): Jennifer Brown
Audience: HR professionals and organizational leaders - Extras: Audiobook, Ebook, The Inclusive Leader Self-Assessment
Founder and CEO of Jennifer Brown Speaks offers a guide to building authentic allyship and accountability at every level, with actionable steps to foster inclusive cultures, empower individuals, and drive lasting organizational change.
A change will not occur on its own, and if it does, but it wasn’t planned or is forced, there is the potential for lasting collateral damage—not just in terms of morale from a tone-deaf leadership team, but in real business bottom-line terms, too.
Smart, Not Loud: How to Get Noticed at Work for All the Right Reasons
- Author(s): Jessica Cheng
Audience: HR professionals, team leaders, and individuals - Extras: Audiobook, Ebook
Cheng, a former TV news journalist, offers advice on how to be noticed at work by speaking up, advocating for yourself, and building strategic relationships without being loud, aggressive, boastful or pretending to be someone you’re not. Leaders who understand this can better recognize these authentic contributors.
How we reframe the way we show up will be the key to creating more visibility at work while staying true to ourselves.”
Unwavering: Rejecting Bias, Igniting Change, Celebrating Inclusion
- Author(s): Nellie Borrero
- Audience: Leaders, managers, HR professionals, and employees
- Extras: Audiobook, Ebook
Borrero draws on her experience as a Latina executive at Accenture where she spent more than 38 years and led global inclusion and diversity initiatives across the company. She explains the importance of removing barriers, such as unconscious bias and systemic obstacles, and claiming space for oneself and for others to create inclusive workplaces.
If the leader is not comfortable giving feedback, then it is up to you to ask the necessary questions. Getting to a place of belonging also requires representing ourselves and asking the tough questions that help us position ourselves to evolve. We have to own some of that belonging.
Organizational Psychology & Culture
Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?
Founder of The Ready, a firm that helps organizations change the way they work, Dignan challenges traditional bureaucracy, advocating for organizations as adaptable, trust-based systems. He says that organizations aren’t machines that can be predicted and controlled, they are complex human systems full of potential.
Boundaries can be clearly defined or purposefully blurry. Agreements within teams can be explicit or informal. Enforcement can be lenient or strict. What matters is that we are intentional.
The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business
- Author(s): Erin Meyer
Audience: Global managers and remote team leaders - Extras: Audiobook, Ebook, Country Mapping Tool, Personal Profile Tool, Team Mapping Tool, The Corporate Culture Mapping Tool
Meyer, a professor of management practice at INSEAD in Europe, explores how cultural differences can affect business interactions and offers advice to help diverse teams bridge gaps, build understanding, and collaborate more effectively.
Cultural patterns of behavior and belief frequently impact our perceptions (what we see), cognitions (what we think), and actions (what we do).
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Pink’s bestselling nonfiction books cover topics ranging from the science of timing to a graphic novel career guide. In Drive, he explores how autonomy, mastery, and purpose fuel motivation beyond money and other traditional rewards. The researcher, former newspaper columnist, and one-time National Geographic TV series host explains that at work, people need to direct their own lives, learn and create new things, and do better.
Too many organizations—not just companies, but governments and nonprofits as well—still operate from assumptions about human potential and individual performance that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science.
The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth
- Author(s): Amy C. Edmondson
- Audience: Leaders, managers, and HR professionals
- Extras: Audiobook, Ebook, The Fearless Organization Personal Scan, The Fearless Organization Team Scan
Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, highlights psychological safety and explains why creating an environment where employees feel safe to speak up and share ideas helps organizations perform better.
Psychological safety exists when people feel their workplace is an environment where they can speak up, offer ideas, and ask questions without fear of being punished or embarrassed.
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … And Others Don’t
Collins and his team researched companies that stayed great after making the leap to greatness, which means they beat the stock market an average of seven times in 15 years. The factors included humble leaders who put the right people in the right place, then figured out where to go.
The good-to-great leaders never wanted to become larger-than-life heroes. They never aspired to be put on a pedestal or become unreachable icons. They were seemingly ordinary people quietly producing extraordinary results.
People Analytics & HR Technology
The Algorithmic Leader: How to Be Smart When Machines Are Smarter Than You
Walsh explores how leaders can use data and automation to unlock human creativity and collaboration, rather than compete with machines. He shows how embracing technology can free people from routine tasks, letting them focus on what machines cannot do — innovate, connect, and lead with empathy.
Technology may have changed the hardware of your business, but culture is your true operating system.
Data-Driven HR: How to Use AI, Analytics and Data to Drive Performance
- Author(s): Bernard Marr
- Audience: HR professionals and business partners
- Extras: Ebook, Data Strategy Course
Marr, a business consultant who writes about data and analytics, explains how to link HR metrics to business outcomes in areas of recruitment, employee engagement, performance management, wellbeing, and training. He discusses implementing data-driven HR practices.
What you want to avoid is technology for technology’s sake. Because, yes, you can do some really cool stuff with data and AI, but if it doesn’t add value to the organization, what’s the point?
Work Rules! Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead
Former head of Google’s Innovative People Operations, Bock shares the company’s data-driven HR philosophy, highlighting how rigorous analytics and evidence-based practices can trump gut feelings and better inform decision-makers.
We all want our work to matter. Nothing is a more powerful motivator than to know you are making a difference in the world.
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Classics Every HR Pro Should Read
The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization
Senge, founding chairperson of the Society for Organizational Learning and a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argues that successful organizations maintain their competitive advantage because they learn faster than others and are accepting of new ways of thinking and operating.
The organizations that will truly excel in the future will be the organizations that discover how to tap people’s commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in an organization.
The No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
In this bestseller, Hastings, cofounder of Netflix, and Meyer explore the unorthodox culture behind the entertainment company that started as a DVD rental service and had to reinvent itself multiple times, demonstrating the success that can come from flexibility, innovation, and responsibility.
For top performers, a great workplace isn’t about a lavish office, a beautiful gym, or a free sushi lunch. It’s about the joy of being surrounded by people who are both talented and collaborative. People who can help you be better.
Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage in Human Consciousness
- Author(s): Frederic Laloux
Audience: Organizational designers, founders, and leaders - Extras: Ebook, Insights for the Journey Video Series
Laloux, adviser for corporate leaders and former Associate Partner with McKinsey and Company, discusses how forward-thinking companies make progress by setting aside traditional hierarchies to create workplaces where people can bring their authentic selves and find real purpose. He says it is an approach that allows self-management to thrive and companies to grow naturally.
When we plot the successive stages of human and organizational consciousness on a timeline, the result is striking. Evolution seems to be accelerating, and accelerating ever faster.
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