Quotes About Leadership

As leaders I certainly believe we all want to do the right thing, but we don't always have the bandwidth or experience to take care of someone the way they need to be taken care of.

who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.

as the poet June Jordan wrote, "We are the ones we have been waiting for.

In the past, jobs were about muscles, now they're about brains, but in the future they'll be about the heart. —MINOUCHE SHAFIK, director, London School of Economics

My other quasi-selfish goal is this: I want to live in a world with braver, bolder leaders, and I want to be able to pass that kind of world on to my children. I define a leader as anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.

This means that if we do not have a sense of caring toward someone we lead and/or we don't feel connected to that person, we have two options: Develop the caring and connection or find a leader who's a better fit. There's no shame in this

Understanding that commitment to care and connection is the minimum threshold, we need real courage to recognize when we can't fully serve the people we lead.

If you've created a work culture where vulnerability isn't okay, you've also created a culture where innovation and creativity aren't okay.

Dare to Lead: I'm here to get it right, not to be right.

In shame-prone cultures, where parents, leaders, and administrators consciously or unconsciously encourage people to connect their self-worth to what they produce, I see disengagement, blame, gossip, stagnation, favoritism, and a total dearth of creativity and innovation.

Adam Grant has been the top-rated professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for seven years. As an organizational psychologist, he is a leading expert on how we can find motivation and meaning, and live more generous and creative lives.

We disengage to protect ourselves from vulnerability, shame, and feeling lost and without purpose. We also disengage when we feel like the people who are leading us--our boss, our teachers, or principal, our clergy, our parents, our politicians--aren't living up to their end of the social contract.

What we are teaches the child more than what we say, so we must be what we want our children to become.

we just can't fill a self-worth gap by leading and using power over people,

The real barrier to daring leadership is our armor—the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that we use to protect ourselves when we aren't willing and able to rumble with vulnerability.

when leaders don't have the skills to lean into vulnerability, they're not able to successfully hold the tension of the paradoxes that are inherent in entrepreneurship.

To reignite creativity, innovation, and learning, leaders must rehumanize education and work. This means understanding how scarcity is affecting the way we lead and work, learning how to engage with vulnerability, and recognizing and combating shame.

I want to live in a world with braver, bolder leaders, and I want to be able to pass that kind of world on to my children.

only about 10 percent of organizations have operationalized their values into teachable and observable behaviors

her job was creating the space for others to perform.

There's probably not a single act at work that requires more vulnerability than holding people responsible for ethics and values, especially when you're alone in it or there's a lot of money, power, or influence at stake.

In the midst of uncertainty and fear, leaders have an ethical responsibility to hold their people in discomfort—to acknowledge the tumult but not fan it, to share information and not inflate or fake it.

We need to be the adults we want our children to be.

How and why am I only hearing about what feels like a character issue after I lost the promotion? I use this as an example because it happens every day. We're so afraid to talk about trust that our team members don't even know it's an issue until there are irreversible consequences. It's totally demoralizing.