Your personality is unique to you and you'll find external advice fitting your personal style in a believable AND effective way less often than you might think. Even from the same sources, you'll find better and worse pieces for yourself, like for example I adopted the super easy question from Joel Spolsky's "Guerilla Guide to Hiring Engineers" because it's a super good predictor for me, while I found his brainteaser utterly useless after testing both a few times.
Lots of pieces on HBR are rather abstract and handle topics in a meta way, which I did not find very usable. As for me, I'd give my former self this URL for starters and then tell them to dive right in and find out for yourself:
https://www.defmacro.org/2014/10/03/engman.html
Then again, that's the right advice for my own (very pragmatic) personality, so YMMV.
Theory and practice, when done together, is much more powerful than either alone.
Good practice books like "High Output Management", "Influence", "Hard Things about Hard Things" gives you a view of what other people at other (high-functioning) organizations do and exposes you to the norms in industry. They also give you mental models to think about things, and helps you to become aware of the problems you never knew existed. And it helps your normalize your expectations: you may think your company sucks, but reading widely and critically helps you realize even the very best companies deal with the same problems and don't really have significantly better solutions.
Reading a good book is like having a conversation with and picking the brain of a really competent mentor, dead or alive, and of a calibre that not exist in your organization. Internal mentorship is sometimes oversold. Most organizations have managers that have merely adapted to their local ecosystem and don't really have any insight on management as a craft. Managers who learned purely through experience tend to be shaped by the company's culture and may do very well in their niche but lack imagination to go beyond because they have no theory to hang their thoughts on.
Also, books are like travel -- you don't know what you don't know until you've seen for yourself what exists. You sometimes need to peek outside your organization to see what other cultures exist.
(I've only read the former though)
I read the 10 Must Reads on Communication book last week and 4 of the 10 articles were particularly good, the rest were quite milquetoast. I wrote some thoughts here: https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/reading/hbr-10-reads-on-co...