Mahi’s Top Book Recommendations for Building Team Culture

With an extensive career spent building and leading successful teams, our co-founder and CEO, Susan Cooney, has been busily expanding her knowledge about culture in business.

Whether she’s utilising her experiences travelling abroad for work and observing teams, identifying ways to improve her team’s culture, or implementing positive changes to better the workplace at MahiMarkets, this is an area she’s certain will never stop evolving. 

There’s an incredibly diverse range of books on this topic, providing a helpful resource to help shape your culture. Here are 3 of the most frequently referenced books that have been incredibly useful throughout Susan’s journey: 

Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do (2015) - by Matthew Syed

Mistakes are inevitable, but learning from them is optional - and most people won’t bother doing so. In Black Box Thinking, Syed uses two industries, healthcare and aviation, to demonstrate how they’ve evolved by learning from the past. In 1912, eight out of every 14 flights had an accident, compared to today, it’s now approximately one out of every 2.4 million flights.

As with all aspects of business, embracing your failures and making improvements based on them is an incredibly important skill to have in order to grow. The same is applicable to team culture. 

Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life (2013) - by James Kerr 

In this bestselling book, Kerr investigates one of the world’s most successful sports teams, the New Zealand All Blacks, to gain a comprehensive understanding of what it takes to bounce back from adversity. In today’s volatile and complex business world, personal leadership is more valuable than ever. Kerr provides actionable steps for becoming a great leader, addressing important topics like values, vision, purpose and mindset to help you bring thoughtful, effective change to your business’ culture. 

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know (2019) - by Malcolm Gladwell

Talking to Strangers provides an in-depth insight into the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. Gladwell argues that as we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding nuances that can drastically affect the direction of a conversation and, ultimately, change a whole relationship. Gladwell challenges history, psychology and scandals, allowing us to question our initial interpretation of popular events and the way in which we view them. This is a great book for understanding both your own appearance to others, as well as the way you communicate with your team to cultivate a successful team culture.