Quotes About Leadership

There are times in world history when it is far wiser to act than to hesitate," and "there is some risk involved in action—there always is. But there is far more risk in failure to act.

My experience has shown me that if you have to say what you are, you probably aren't. Think about that for a moment. "I'm honest," "I'm ethical," even "I'm the boss," or "I'm in charge," usually indicates just the opposite. Doesn't it?

The act of deeply thinking through problems, energizing people, and aligning them toward a common goal is the only way to practice and develop real leadership ability.

I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers. —Ralph Nader, consumer advocate

Ownership means once I detect a problem I own it. I am responsible for it.

management has no more critical role than to motivate and engage large numbers of people to work together toward a common goal. Defining and explaining what the goal is, sharing a path to achieving it, motivating people to take the journey with you, and assisting them by removing obstacles—those are management's reasons for being. We

Senior management is simply a flag bearer when a business decision is made. It is of no use unless others follow the flag. —Eiji Toyoda, former chairman of Toyota

Basically people will do what upper management wants them to do. So if that's consistent, if they're not whipsawed and being governed by different priorities, they learn what is truly important and what is not….

Source: Peter R. Scholtes, The Leader's Handbook, McGraw-Hill, 1998.

Go to the people. Live with them. Learn from them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have. But with the best leaders, when the work is done, the task accomplished, the people will say "We have done this ourselves." —Lao-Tsu, founder of Daoism

Rough waters are truer tests of leadership. In calm water, every ship has a good captain. —Swedish proverb

We want organizations to be adaptive, flexible, self-renewing, resilient, learning, intelligent—attributes found only in living systems. The tension of our times is that we want our organizations to behave as living systems, but we only know how to treat them as machines. —Margaret J. Wheatley, author of Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time

If you are responsible for a problem and make recommendations on possible solutions, you might be asked whether you went and looked at the situation yourself in person.

Actually putting your people first and treating them as if they matter to the organization's success, although easy to talk about and easy to understand, is notoriously difficult to implement.

But I no longer believe that trust is essential to organizational functioning or even to effective leadership. Why? Because the data suggest that trust is notable mostly by its absence. Nevertheless, organizations continue to roll along, as do their leaders who seemingly suffer few consequences for being untrustworthy.

the higher one rises in an organization, the more likely it is that people will tell you you're right. People will agree with powerful leaders as a strategy of ingratiation, as nothing is as flattering as others' telling you how right and how smart you are.

Business school students seem to be particularly narcissistic, an important fact because many leaders in both the for-profit and the nonprofit world come from business school backgrounds, particularly in the more recent past.

overconfident individuals achieved higher social status, respect, and influence in groups.

people with higher narcissism scores were more likely to emerge as leaders during four-person initially leaderless group discussions.

Asian professionals are frequently held back from senior positions by the perception that they don't have "executive presence," a factor that similarly operates against other minority groups in the workplace, including women.39 And what constitutes executive presence? Certainly not modesty:

narcissistic CEOs led firms to bounce back more successfully during the post-crisis recovery.42

80 percent of founders are forced out of their companies by their venture capital investors

were also among the least successful, and he provided advice about how to be generous without being a patsy.

givers were not only among the most successful individuals