There's a shelf behind my desk. Most of the books on it look new. Uncracked spines, white pages, square corners. They photograph beautifully on a video call.
The books I care about look awful. Cracked spines. A coffee ring on one cover. Pencil scrawl down the margins where I argued with the author at midnight. Corners folded so often the paper has gone soft.
Those are the ones I keep giving away.
Nobody hands you the manual
The first time someone handed me a team, nobody handed me anything else. No manual. No training. A new title, a bigger pile of problems, and an unspoken assumption I would work it out on my own.
I did work it out. Slowly. Badly, at first. The people on my first team paid part of the price for my learning, and I still think about it.
My experience turns out to be the normal one. Research by YouGov and the Chartered Management Institute, covering 4,500 UK workers and managers, found 82% of people who step into management have had no formal management or leadership training. They call them accidental managers. The same research found 28% of employees had left a business because of a bad relationship with their manager, and 33% were less motivated at work because of poor management.
My own survey work points the same direction. 99.5% of respondents told me they had suffered one or more types of bad boss. Not a rounding error. Near enough everyone.
So the supply chain for management wisdom is broken at the source. Organisations promote their best engineer, their best nurse, their best salesperson, and then leave them alone with a title and a calendar full of meetings.
The training won't arrive, so the shelf has to do the work
If formal training isn't coming, informal training has to fill the hole. And most of us are sitting on a pile of it.
You have read things. You have survived things. Somewhere on your shelf sits a book which rearranged how you think about work. Where is it right now? Behind you. Spine outward. Doing nothing for anybody.
I know why it's still there. I left mine there for years.
Hoarding looks a lot like modesty
Nobody says out loud, "I am hoarding leadership wisdom." What we say is softer and more reasonable.
"I don't want to come across preachy."
"They'll think I'm criticising their work."
"Handing someone a book is a bit much, isn't it?"
Underneath one or two of those sits something less comfortable. If I give away what took me a decade to learn, what do I have left? The knowledge feels like an edge. Passing it on feels like filing down my own advantage.
I have felt exactly this pull. I was wrong about it. What took a decade to learn does not transfer in an afternoon. Handing over the book doesn't hand over the scar tissue. All it does is shorten someone else's road by a year or two, which is the whole point of having walked it first.
There's a second reason, and it's quieter. Giving someone the book you underlined means letting them see what you didn't know. Your notes are a record of your gaps. A clean copy protects your reputation. A battered copy admits you needed help.
Admit it anyway.
The number I keep coming back to
LinkedIn's 2025 Workplace Learning Report contains a finding I find hard to shake. Only 15% of employees say their manager helped them build a career plan in the past six months. Down five percentage points from the year before.
In the same report, 84% of employees agree learning adds purpose to their work, and career progress ranks as their number one motivation to learn.
Read those two together. People want the growth. Their managers are handing over less of it, not more. The gap is widening while everyone talks about upskilling.
A used paperback costs less than a round of coffees. It won't fix a broken organisation. It will absolutely fix one Tuesday afternoon for one person who is stuck.
What sharing looks like in practice
Sharing a book is not a ceremony. Skip the inscription. Skip the all-hands announcement of a company reading list, because company reading lists go to a shared drive and die there.
Here's the whole method.
- Notice someone wrestling with a problem you have wrestled with. Not a hypothetical problem. The one they mentioned on Thursday, with a sigh, at the end of a one-to-one.
- Name it back to them in their own words. They need to know you heard it before they'll take anything from you.
- Say the sentence. "I have a book on this. It helped me when I was where you are. Want it?"
- Hand over your copy. Yours. The battered one. Not an Amazon link.
- Two weeks later, ask one question about it. One. "Did the bit about feedback land for you?" Then shut up and listen.
Step four does the heavy lifting, and step five turns a gift into a relationship.
The notes are the real gift
A clean copy says: here is some information.
Your copy says: here is where I struggled.
The underlining shows what landed. The word "rubbish" scrawled beside a paragraph shows you read critically instead of obediently. The folded corner on page 112 marks the exact spot where something broke open for you.
You are handing over a map with your own footprints on it. Including the wrong turns.
And there's a bonus nobody warns you about. Once your notes are out in the world, the conversations change. People argue with you about page 112. They come back with a different reading. Two of my strongest working relationships started with someone telling me I had underlined the wrong sentence.
Some of them won't read it
True. Some won't. A few will put it on a shelf and let it go quietly white and square again.
Fine.
The offer is the message. What you're telling them is: I see you struggling, I struggled too, and I don't think you should struggle alone. The paper is a delivery mechanism for the sentence. Even unread, the sentence lands.
Losing the book is fine, too. If a book comes back to me, something has gone wrong. Books are supposed to keep moving.
Where I'm putting my own effort
I spend a good chunk of my working life on the far end of this problem now, over at Step It Up HR, helping organisations build leaders on purpose rather than by accident. Formal programmes have their place, and I run them.
But the programme reaches twelve people twice a year. Your shelf reaches whoever sits next to you, on the day they need it. Don't wait for the budget cycle.
Start with one
Pick one person on your team. Pick one book off your shelf. Do the five steps this week.
Then look at the rest of the shelf and ask yourself the honest question: which of these has done nothing for a single human being in three years?
Who needs it more than your shelf does?