Quotes About Leadership

When shame becomes a management style, engagement dies. When failure is not an option we can forget about learning, creativity, and innovation.

Self awareness and self-love matter. Who we are is how we lead.

Leaders must care for and be connected to the people they lead.

In our personal, social, and political worlds, we do a lot of screaming and finger-pointing, but we rarely hold people accountable. How could we? We're so exhausted from ranting and raving that we don't have the energy to develop meaningful consequences and enforce them.

Martin Luther King, Jr. In a 1968 speech given to striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Reverend King defined power as the ability to achieve purpose and effect change.

believe that feedback thrives in cultures where the goal is not "getting comfortable with hard conversations" but normalizing discomfort. If leaders expect real learning, critical thinking, and change, then discomfort should be normalized: "We believe growth and learning are uncomfortable so it's going to happen here—you're going to feel that way. We want you to know that it's normal and it's an expectation here.

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.

Daring leaders, even in compliance-driven and highly structured industries like banking, healthcare, and the food industry, create and share context and color. They take the time to explain the "why" behind strategies, and how tasks link to ongoing priorities and mission work. Rather than handing down black-and-white mandates stripped of story, they hold themselves responsible for adding texture and meaning to work and tying smaller tasks to the larger purpose.

There's a terrible pattern in organizations in which leaders turn to their teams, or their investors, or their board, and say "You need to trust me." Typically, that happens in a moment of crisis, when it is far too late. Trust is the stacking of small moments over time, something that cannot be summoned with a command

Hierarchy can work, except when those in leadership positions hold power over others—when their decisions benefit the minority and oppress the majority.

If we can't handle uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure in a way that aligns with our values and furthers our organizational goals, we can't lead.

These are narrowed down to: Date: Meeting intention: Attendees: Key decisions: Tasks and ownership:

Often, leaders and executive coaches gather people together and try to teach resilience skills after there's been a setback or failure. It turns out that's like teaching first-time skydivers how to land after they hit the ground. Or, maybe worse, as they're free-falling. Our research shows that leaders who are trained in rising skills as part of a courage-building program are more likely to engage in courageous behaviors because they know how to get back up.

The Australian National Secretariat of Catholic Action, then little more than an idea in the making, needed a deputy for the director, Frank Maher. Santamaria's words—'so I said…"Yes", because I would have said yes to anything he asked'—echo down the years.7

Sheer scholarship alone cannot reveal to us the gospel of grace. We must never allow the authority of books, institutions, or leaders to replace the authority of KNOWING Jesus Christ personally and directly. When the religious views of others interpose between us and the primary experience of Jesus as the Christ, we become unconvicted and unpersuasive travel agents handing out brochures to places we have never visited.

We must never allow the authority of books, institutions, or leaders to replace the authority of knowing Jesus Christ personally and directly. When the religious views of others interpose between us and the primary experience of Jesus as the Christ, we become unconvicted and unpersuasive travel agents handing out brochures to places we have never visited.

There's nothing like self-pity for thoroughly dissipating a man. And when a nation indulges in that luxury it finds itself with a dictator.

With my pen I will rule the world. You'll see, they'll call me the scourge of princes.

Ed Catmull says, "Toy Story 2 was the defining moment for our studio.… People and how they work together is more important than ideas. They [other companies] could copy our technology but they couldn't copy our team.

Robert Kennedy, on his own, left no great legislative legacy, founded no great institution, led no great movement. His most extraordinary accomplishment - and it was extraordinary - was to embody in himself, and create in others, a kind of transcendent yearning for the possibility of redemptive change.

The original mistake, which was responsible for all this misery, was committed when our scientists began to create a new world of steel and iron and chemistry and electricity and forgot that the human mind is slower than the proverbial turtle, is lazier than the well-known sloth, and marches from one hundred to three hundred years behind the small group of courageous leaders.

Big changes don't happen at the battlefield; they are made in closed rooms where very powerful people decide in which direction things should go.

Someone must lead the way.

Wherever battles are waged there are casualties, and death is a common occurrence. But what is closest to our hearts is the best interest of the people and the suffering of the vast majority, and when we die for the people, it is an honorable death. Nevertheless we should do our best to avoid unnecessary casualties. Mao Zedong, 1944