How to Lead Others or Trillion Dollar Coach: which should a new manager read first?
Two good books on leading people, written for very different moments in a career. Here is how to choose.
Updated 2026-10-07 · 2 min read
The short answer
Read [How to Lead Others](/book/how-to-lead-others) first if you have just started managing people. Read [Trillion Dollar Coach](/book/trillion-dollar-coach) once you are comfortable running a team and want to get better at developing the people in it.
Both are about leading people well. The difference is where they start from. John Adair's book assumes you are new and gives you a model of the job. Trillion Dollar Coach assumes you already have the job and shows how one exceptional coach made experienced executives better at theirs.
What How to Lead Others gives you
Adair has taught leadership for decades, and this book is his approach cut down to eight lessons for beginners. The idea at its centre is easy to hold on to: a leader has to keep three things in view at once, the task, the team and each individual. Most new managers drift towards one of them. Engineers promoted to team lead tend to stay on the task; people promoted for being popular tend to look after the team and avoid hard conversations with individuals.
At 216 pages, it is short enough to read before your first week and practical enough to reread after a bad one.
Less suitable if you want Indian workplace examples. Adair writes from British management and military experience.
What Trillion Dollar Coach gives you
Bill Campbell coached senior executives in Silicon Valley for years, and the book was written by Google leaders who worked with him. It turns his habits into short lessons: build trust before anything else, say the hard thing directly, and put the team ahead of your own position.
It is a better book about coaching than about managing. That is why it lands harder once you have the basics. When you are still working out how to run a weekly meeting, advice from people coaching chief executives can feel far away.
Less suitable if you need something quick. At 352 pages it is the longer of the two, and its examples are senior American tech leaders.
Side by side
| | How to Lead Others | Trillion Dollar Coach | |---|---|---| | Best moment to read it | Your first month as a manager | Six months or more into the job | | What it gives you | A simple model of what a leader does | Habits for coaching and building trust | | Length | 216 pages | 352 pages | | Setting | British management | Silicon Valley executives |
If you read both
Read Adair first, then try his model for a few months. When you notice that your biggest problems are now about helping individual people grow rather than getting the work done, move on to Campbell. You will get more from him at that point.
For more options, see our full list of [books for first-time managers](/collections/books-for-new-managers), or the [short reads](/collections/short-reads-for-new-managers) if time is tight.