Quotes About Leadership

Most people think leadership is about being in charge. Most people think leadership is about having all the answers and being the most intelligent person or the most qualified person in the room. The irony is that it is the complete opposite. Leadership is about empowering others to achieve things they did not think possible. Leadership is about pointing in the direction, articulating a vision of the world that does not yet exist. Then asking help from others to insure that vision happens.

When you practice leadership,The evidence of quality of your leadership, Is known from the type of leaders that emerge out of your leadership.

People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand.

Leadership is a concept we often resist. It seems immodest, even self-aggrandizing, to think of ourselves as leaders. But if it is true that we are part of a community, then leadership is everyone's vocation, and it can be an evasion to insist that it is not. When we live in the close-knit ecosystem called community, everyone follows and everyone leads.

In order to reclaim the joy and passion of leadership, we must walk the valley of the shadow of death and name the cost of leadership.

I like Paul [Ryan]. But these are horrible times for our country. We need very strong leadership. We need very, very strong leadership. And I'm just not quite there. I'm not quite there yet.

Leadership starts with understanding responsibility, not ability. Leadership is a Stewardship, not a show.

There are a lot of men with feminine leadership styles and there are a lot of women with masculine leadership styles.

Leadership is accomplishing something through other people that wouldn't have happened if you weren't there. . . Leadership is being able to mobilize ideas and values that energize other people. . . . Leaders develop a story line that engages other people.

The single biggest barrier to effective leadership is, in my view, the leadership industry itself. Instead of telling people the skills and behaviors they need to be effective in getting things done, we tell them almost the opposite - blandishments about how we wish people would be, and how we wish workplaces were. That information is worse than useless as, to the extent people believe it, they often wind up losing their jobs.

More and more, leadership, whether it's profit or nonprofit, is about recruiting and keeping talented people. That's the biggest challenge. Yes, you've got to create systems that will enable people easily to innovate continuously; you've got to be a system-builder. But finding and keeping geeks and shrinks is the biggest challenge. That means leaders have got to be salespeople, they've got to be recruiters, and they've got to be actively able to understand and keep the talent they have. Leadership is courtship. That's what it's becoming.

Oil policy, policy toward the United States, policy toward Iran, Bahrain, Yemen, very unlikely, I think, to see significant change. These policies were the policies that had a wide family consensus. The question I think would be if the king becomes sick, whether you have weak Saudi leadership in the Arab world and the Middle East rather than strong Saudi leadership, but I think the fundamental policies will continue, the ones we’re familiar with under King Abdullah.

I don't consider myself an expert in the why. I don't consider myself an expert in leadership. I consider myself a student of leadership and I consider myself a student of the why. I'm constantly learning and I'm constantly looking for opportunities where it it will fail.

The majority of America's colossal fortunes have been made by entering industries in their early stages and developing leadership in them.... Think of what opportunities the present and the future contain in such fields as ship-building and ship-owning, aircraft, electrical development, the oil industry, different branches of the automotive industry, foreign trade, international banking, invention, the chemical industry, moving pictures, color photography, and, one night add, labor leadership.

I speak directly to the people, and I know that the people of California want to have better leadership. They want to have great leadership. They want to have somebody that will represent them. And it doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or a Republican, young or old.

Leadership is not just one quality, but rather a blend of many qualities; and while no one individual possesses all of the needed talents that go into leadership, each man can develop a combination to make him a leader.

Too often when people think of their journey into leadership, they envision a career path. What they should be thinking about is their own leadership development!

Leadership is hard to define and good leadership even harder. But if you can get people to follow you to the ends of the earth, you are a great leader.

My view is that leadership is not about position - you can lead very well with no one reporting to you in a hierarchy and you can lead quite poorly with many people below you in the traditional chain of command. Leadership is about mobilizing people toward valued goals, and anyone can do this, in any aspect of life.

We should always be learning or we will cease to be able to change or adapt. I think the best work on leadership today is by Ronald Heifetz. His work is focused on adaptive leadership.

Leadership isn't about simply being in charge and treating your people like soldiers and barking orders. Leadership is sharing your knowledge and your direction so that others grow and reach their potential.

I think America has a responsibility to maintain its leadership in technology and its moral leadership in the world, to explore, to seek knowledge.

I often ask myself: "What would Theodore Roosevelt do?" One can never know, of course. The ultimate contribution of consequential leaders is often their capacity to reframe issues in novel ways. That said, his leadership engaged, at a foundational level, whether the American "national character" would accept decline and mediocrity, or would go all-in for leadership and excellence. Amid the myriad of otherwise disconnected issues before us, that choice is emerging yet again.

I never give answers. I lead on from one question to another. That is my leadership.

The height of ability in the least able consists in knowing how to submit to the good leadership of others.

Character is more important than any other leadership trait.

What did Bush do on 9/11? He ran away and hid. Even Reagan knew more about leadership than that, and he was as bad a symbol of America as I can think of, off-hand. But at least he's been in enough cowboy movies to know he had to come out and stand on top of the rubble and be seen shaking his fist or something.

Why wouldn't female Marines come forward? Because they don't trust us. They don't trust the command. They don't trust the leadership.

Democracy, thus French revolution, was not invented by philosophic theory nor by the bourgeois leadership. It was discovered by the masses in their method of action.

The courage of leadership is giving others the chance to succeed even though you bear the responsibility for getting things done.

The first key to leadership was self-control, particularly the mastery of pride, which was something more difficult, he explained, to subdue than a wild lion and anger, which was more difficult to defeat than the greatest wrestler. He warned them that "if you can't swallow your pride, you can't lead.

Each one of us, and, indeed, all those who aspire to national leadership must bring their own visions, views and styles to the business of reforming Nigeria, and the search for solutions.

I've made tough calls and tough times and been held accountability. I think that is the kind of leadership that the American people need now to produce results.

It's our own throat that we are cutting in the end along with everyone else's. We need to be exercising precisely the kind of leadership that might allow us to nudge China and India, say, onto different energy trajectories, in order to improve our own chances of surviving this century.

True leaders understand that leadership is not about them but about those they serve. It is not about exalting themselves but about lifting others up.

In terms of having views and being prepared to express them, yes, I think New Zealand's had a leadership role in a lot of things.

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said no matter how much they attacked him and the Nation of Islam under his leadership, they only helped the Nation to grow. So, the more they attacked me and the more I withstood that onslaught, the more thousands of people came out to, at least, hear a man that was being so vilified in the media. When they recognized that they were not hurting but helping me, they decided they wouldn't say anything except to continue to discredit. So, there is a conscious effort not to publicize anything that the Nation is doing of value.

It is time for a new generation of leadership.

Leadership (according to John Sculley) revolves around vision, ideas, direction, and has more to do with inspiring people as to direction and goals than with day-to-day implementation. A leader must be able to leverage more than his own capabilities. He must be capable of inspiring other people to do things without actually sitting on top of them with a checklist.

The Hoffman Process brings forth spiritual leadership in a person. It made my spirituality come alive. Through the Hoffman Process I actually brought my faith into my daily actions.

I'm out talking about this company (General Electric) seven days a week, 24 hours a day, with nothing to hide. We're a 130-year-old company that has a great record of high-quality leadership and a culture of integrity.

I'm the first secretary of defense that's had to deal with sequestration. I've prepared two budgets that deal with sequestration. And you bring the chiefs together, the leadership of this enterprise together, to work through, how do we then take these cuts? Where do we apply those cuts? Readiness is the first thing that suffers.

Real leadership comes from the quiet nudging of an inner voice. It comes from realizing that the time has come to move beyond waiting to doing.

I don't have any faith, but I have a lot of hope, and I have a lot of dreams of what we could do with our intelligence if we had the will and the leadership and the understanding of how we could take all of our intelligence and our resources and create a world for our kids that is hopeful.

Cooperation is just like two pagodas - one hardware and one software. Combined, we can take the leadership position in the world.

I don't believe our country will last the way we know it much longer unless there's a change. And we just continue this moral decline going down, and the only hope, I believe, is God. We just hope and pray that maybe he'll hear our prayers and give us some godly leadership.

I took a gamble to exercise leadership without losing my feminine nature.

Ethics must begin at the top of an organization. It is a leadership issue and the chief executive must set the example.