Why Leaders Should Read Fiction
What novels teach about leadership that nonfiction books can't.
If you ask someone “what’s the one book every founder/CEO/entrepreneur should read,” chances are they’ll say something like Shoe Dog, Lean In, or Grit.
But how many people would name a novel? Macbeth, Beowulf, Mrs. Dalloway?
When I first stepped into a manager role, I did what most new managers do - I went straight for the shelf. The Making of a Manager. Professional Troublemaker. Quiet. Radical Candor. All great books, and I’d recommend every one of them. They gave me frameworks on how to lead as an introvert, how to motivate a team, how to give feedback, etc.
But if I’m being honest about what actually made me a stronger leader…it was fiction.
Sure, the management books explicitly taught me what to do. But I learned much deeper lessons from fiction, and because fiction is a uniquely memorable medium, those are the lessons that stuck.
What fiction actually trains
Business books teach you frameworks. Fiction teaches you about people. We expand our capacity for empathy and emotional intelligence when we put ourselves into characters’ shoes and see how they relate to others. We deepen our understanding of human nature. This heightened awareness is what sets leaders apart from the herd.
It trains you to read people. Self-help gives you tidy categories, for instance: people are motivated by status, fear, belonging - one paragraph each. Fiction gives you the messier truth: how those motivations actually show up, contradict each other, and drive someone to act against their own stated interests.
Spend enough time inside characters' heads and you start recognizing real motivation in real people, not just what they say they want. That's the difference between managing someone and inspiring them. Managing works on stated incentives, inspiring works on what actually moves a person, and fiction is a far better teacher of the second one than any leadership book.
It trains pacing. A pitch that front-loads every strength and saves nothing for the end falls flat the same way a story does when it reveals everything in chapter one. Tension, release, payoff - novelists spend their whole career learning how to sequence information so it lands. That’s the exact same skill as a fundraising narrative, a crisis statement, or a keynote.
It trains your ear for what real voice sounds like. This is something I think about a lot, because I’ve written about the alternative already; AI-generated writing defaults to generic, interchangeable phrasing. Reading a lot of very good fiction is one of the fastest ways to stay allergic to that. You start noticing the difference between a sentence that’s merely correct and one that strikes a chord, and once you notice it, you can’t un-notice it in your own writing.
I’m thinking of The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield as an example of a character with a distinctive voice. Reading reminds you of the value in being completely yourself.
It makes you well-rounded, not just effective. Leaders aren’t just people who clock in and clock out. People who read fiction are disproportionately the same people who care about art and culture, who are passionate philanthropists, who show up for their families and friends. They have true depth, and that makes them excellent leaders, because life rarely rewards people who stay surface-level.
The actual argument
Nobody’s saying skip the management books and memoirs. Frameworks are useful, but nonfiction teaches you what to think whereas fiction teaches you how to notice, and noticing is most of what good leadership communication actually is. And the leaders whose stories land aren’t the ones with the best framework. They’re the ones who can tell you, authentically and memorably, what actually happened and why it mattered.
This is your sign to pick up that novel you’ve been meaning to read.
If this resonated, please subscribe! I’ll keep writing about narrative, craft, and what actually makes writing (and leadership) sound human.
Originally published on Substack.