Quotes About Leadership

I am responsible for holding you accountable in a respectful and productive way. I'm not responsible for your emotional reaction to that accountability

I've learned that power is not bad, but the abuse of power or using power over others is the opposite of courage; it's a desperate attempt to maintain a very fragile ego.

I kept asking myself: What do these people with strong relationships, parents with deep connections to their children, teachers nurturing creativity and learning, clergy walking with people through faith, and trusted leaders have in common? The answer was clear: They recognize the power of emotion and they're not afraid to lean in to discomfort.

This notion that the leader needs to be "in charge" and to "know all the answers" is both dated and destructive. Its impact on others is the sense that they know less, and that they are less than. A recipe for risk aversion if ever I have heard it. Shame becomes fear. Fear leads to risk aversion. Risk aversion kills innovation.

There is no vision without vulnerability.

We asked a thousand leaders to list marble-earning behaviors—what do your team members do that earns your trust? The most common answer: asking for help. When it comes to people who do not habitually ask for help, the leaders we polled explained that they would not delegate important work to them because the leaders did not trust that they would raise their hands and ask for help. Mind. Blown.

There is an incredibly important, uncomfortable, and brave discussion that every single leader and every organization in the world should be having about privilege.

Like the word hope, we often think of power as negative. It's not. The best definition of power comes from Martin Luther King Jr. He described power as the ability to effect change.

A brave leader is someone who says I see you. I hear you. I don't have all the answers, but I'm going to keep listening and asking questions.

If you're not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it's almost certain you're not reaching your potential as a leader." As

Leaders must either invest a reasonable amount of time attending to fears and feelings, or squander an unreasonable amount of time trying to manage ineffective and unproductive behavior.

If leaders really want people to show up, speak out, take chances, and innovate, we have to create cultures where people feel safe—where their belonging is not threatened by speaking out and they are supported when they make the decision to brave the wilderness, stand alone, and speak truth to bullshit.

I can always tell about the health of a culture of an organization by how much gossiping is happening

Silence is not brave leadership, and silence is not a component of brave cultures.

A brave leader is not someone who is armed with all the answers.

acknowledge and reward great questions and instances of "I don't know, but I'd like to find out" as daring leadership behaviors. The big shift here is from wanting to "be right" to wanting to "get it right.

The big challenge for leaders is getting our heads and hearts around the fact that we need to cultivate the courage to be uncomfortable and to teach the people around us how to accept discomfort as a part of growth. For

Leadership is scarce because few people are willing to go through the discomfort required to lead.

Our ability to be daring leaders will never be greater than our capacity for vulnerability. Once we start to build vulnerability skills, we can start to develop the other skill sets.

Courage is contagious. To scale daring leadership and build courage in teams and organizations, we have to cultivate a culture in which brave work, tough conversations, and whole hearts are the expectation, and armor is not necessary or rewarded.

Leading for true belonging is about creating a culture that celebrates uniqueness. What serves leaders best is understanding your players' best efforts. My job as a leader is to identify their unique gift or contribution. A strong leader pulls players toward a deep belief in themselves.

build a culture of trust.

The difference between leading from hurt and leading from heart is not what you've experienced or are currently experiencing, it's what you do with that pain and hurt.

power with multiplies individual talents, knowledge, and resources to make a larger impact.