Quotes About Leadership

Yes, leadership is about vision. But leadership is equally about creating a climate where the truth is heard and the brutal facts confronted. There's a huge difference between the opportunity to "have your say" and the opportunity to be heard. The good-to-great leaders understood this distinction, creating a culture wherein people had a tremendous opportunity to be heard and, ultimately, for the truth to be heard.

The good-to-great companies paid scant attention to managing change, motivating people, or creating alignment. Under the right conditions, the problems of commitment, alignment, motivation, and change largely melt away.

In our research, we found no systematic pattern linking executive compensation to the process of companies going from good to great. Financial incentives don't—indeed cannot—cause companies to achieve greatness, for the simple reason that you cannot turn the wrong people into the right people with money. After all, if someone needs financial incentives to perform at a high level, he or she lacks the intense inner drive, the productive neurosis, required to do great things.

Smith never wavered. Twenty-five years later, Kimberly-Clark owned Scott Paper outright and beat Procter & Gamble in six of eight product categories.12 In retirement, Smith reflected on his exceptional performance, saying simply, "I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job."13

Delegating decisions doesn't mean being detached, nor does it mean standing idly by if the whole ship is going to crash into the rocks. It simply means giving people the power to make decisions that affect their area. It gives people a chance to test themselves and to build their own decision-making "muscle.

Asked to paint a picture of the company in 20 years, the executives mentioned such things as "on the cover of Business Week as a model success story . . . the Fortune most admired top-ten list . . . the best science and business graduates want to work here . . . people on airplanes rave about one of our products to seatmates . . . 20 consecutive years of profitable growth . . . an entrepreneurial culture that has spawned half a dozen new divisions from within . . .

Darwin Smith stands as a classic example of what we came to call a Level 5 leader—an individual who blends extreme personal humility with intense professional will.

Whatever style you use, be up front about it. Pretending to be participative or consensus-oriented in an effort to get "buy-in" to a decision that you've already made is terribly destructive. If you practice this type of deception, people will see it, be unimpressed, and feel manipulated. Such deception creates cynicism and lack of genuine commitment. If you're going to be autocratic, then just be honest about it.

Another great coach, Bill Walsh (who oversaw three Super Bowl Championship teams at the San Francisco 49ers), emphasized the importance of personal and positive encouragement. Walsh would shake hands and say a positive personal word of encouragement to every player just before each game. He also asked his assistant coaches to acknowledge each player, shake his hand, and offer supportive thoughts.

The main point is to first get the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) before you figure out where to drive it. The

As the Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu pointed out 2,500 years ago, "True leaders inspire people to do great things and, when the work is done, their people proudly say, 'We did this ourselves.

The function of leadership—the number one responsibility of a leader—is to catalyze a clear and shared vision for the company and to secure commitment to and vigorous pursuit of that vision. As we discussed earlier, this is a universal requirement of leadership, and no matter what your style, you must perform this function.

Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. It's not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious—but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.

James C. Collins

Cultivating debate, argument, dialogue, and disagreement—all this takes time, resulting in a slower decision-making process than just issuing an executive order. But it also increases the probability of choosing a wise course of action.

The most constructive approach to critical feedback follows from the concept of leader as teacher. When you need to provide corrective or negative guidance, think not of yourself as a critic—or even a boss—but as a guide, mentor, and teacher. The process of critique should be an educational experience that contributes to the further development of the individual.

Washington cultivated a culture of open dialogue, practicing his famous self-discipline of silence, encouraging arguments to compete, listening and probing, until he made up his mind to act.

Entrenched myth: Successful leaders in a turbulent world are bold, risk-seeking visionaries. Contrary finding: The best leaders we studied did not have a visionary ability to predict the future. They observed what worked, figured out why it worked, and built upon proven foundations. They were not more risk taking, more bold, more visionary, and more creative than the comparisons. They were more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid.

Having a great idea or being a charismatic visionary leader is "time telling"; building a company that can prosper far beyond the presence of any single leader and through multiple product life cycles is "clock building.

Leading as a charismatic visionary—a "genius with a thousand helpers" upon whom everything depends—is time telling. Shaping a culture that can thrive far beyond any single leader is clock building.

Searching for a single great idea upon which to build success is time telling. Building an organization that can generate many great ideas is clock building. Our research showed that leaders who build enduring great companies make the shift from time telling to clock building. Clock builders create highly replicable recipes, extensive training programs, leadership-development pipelines, and tangible mechanisms to reinforce core values.

When you turn over rocks and look at all the squiggly things underneath, you can either put the rock down, or you can say, 'My job is to turn over rocks and look at the squiggly things,' even if what you see can scare the hell out of you."25 That quote, from Pitney Bowes executive Fred Purdue, could have come from any of the Pitney Bowes

The task before you is not to be a single charismatic individual with vision. The task is to build an organization with vision. Individuals die; great companies can live for centuries.

people worried more about the leader—what he would say, what he would think, what he would do— than they worried about external reality and what it could