Quotes About Leadership

Leadership can't be claimed like luggage at the airport. Leadership can't be inherited, even though you may inherit a leadership position. And leadership can't be given as a gift - even if you've been blessed with an abundance of leadership skills to share with someone else. Leadership must be earned by mastering a defined set of skills and by working with others to achieve common goals.

Leadership is not about personality, possessions, or charisma, but all about who you are as a person. I used to believe that leadership was about style but now I know that leadership is about substance, namely character.

I love free trade, but we need great leadership to have real free trade. And we don't have good leadership. We have leadership that doesn't know what it's doing.

As women's leadership qualities come to play a more dominant role in the public sphere, their particular aptitudes for long-term negotiating, analytic listening, and creating an ambiance in which people work with zest and spirit will help reconcile the split between the ideals of being efficient and being humane. This integration of female values is already producing a more collaborative kind of leadership, and changing the very ideal of what strong leadership actually is.

I have participated as a leader in many organizations where the leadership culture was just mean - ugly, where competitiveness, and destructive relationships stymied progress. There should be healthy tension and candid debate, but leadership teams need to practice communication, relationship building, emotional intelligence, and be aligned around common purpose to achieve organizational success. Senior leaders, chief executive officers, others need to ensure they are fostering the right environment for leadership otherwise all of that ugliness will trickle through the organization.

I think that you can't choose leadership. You have to deal with the leadership that the people respond to.

The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born - that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.

In the end, leadership is not intellectual or cognitive. Leadership is emotional.

Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

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.

By leadership, I mean taking complete responsibility for an organization's well-being and growth, and changing it for the better. Real leadership is not about prestige, power or status. It is about responsibility.

If you think that running your economy into the ground and having to send troops in in order to prop up your only ally is leadership, then we've got a different definition of leadership.

Without a vision people in leadership positions perish. You not only lose your people, you lose the person who is in a leadership position - you lose it all.

For a lot of women, one of the hardest things about leadership is the desire to be liked by everyone. That's often inconsistent with leadership. It's certainly inconsistent with taking positions on very controversial issues.

Leadership has become a heavy industry. Concern and interest about leadership development is no longer an American phenomenon. It is truly global. Though I will probably be in less demand, I wanted to move on.

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.

People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision. Many people who approach the area of vision in leadership have it backwards. They believe that if the cause is good enough, people will automatically buy in and follow. But that's not how leadership works. People don't follow worthy causes; they follow worthy leaders with a cause they can believe in. They buy into the leader first.

Leadership must be likeable, affable, cordial, and above all emotional. The fashion of authoritarian leadership is gone. Football is about life. You can't be angry all day.

I think any genuine leader today has to learn leadership the hard way-by doing it. That means embracing turbulence and crisis, not avoiding it. It means "flying through the thunderstorm." That's not to say that there are no basic principles to orient you to the challenge. Indeed, I describe some in the book. But there are no simple recipes. Until you have lived it, you don't really know how to do it. That's what I mean by "leadership the hard way."

(We need) leadership that is tough enough to demand a great deal from everyone, and leadership that is tender enough to encourage the heart.

Leadership is neither showmanship nor dictatorship. Leadership is a stewardship and a partnership.

A woman's long hair symbolizes that she submits to God's plan and to the family leadership of her husband. It is her glory. It is a sign to the angels of her commitment to God and her power with God. It is a covering so that she can pray and prophesy publicly without being ashamed. Similarly, a man's short hair symbolizes that he submits to God's plan and accepts the family leadership position. For both married and unmarried, this symbol indicates obedience to God's will.

People are selfish. But they can also be compassionate and generous, and they care about the country. But not when they feel threatened. That’s why this is such a crucial time. We can go in either direction. But if we don’t make a choice soon, it will be too late to turn things around. I think people are willing to make the right choice. But they need leadership. They’re hungry for leadership.

Leadership is not taken, it is given. People give leadership to those that they trust. They allow people that they trust to have influence over their lives.

People don't just show up and lie down in the middle of the street some place out of nothing. Somebody said meet me there, let's get together, and let's do this thing. The interesting thing is that we don't know who all of the leaders of these groups are, but we know that they're out there, and we know a new group of leadership is being created. It shows you that leadership can come from anywhere.

I believe strongly that a group's potential is eventually limited by the strength of its leadership. I'm an outsider, but it still looks to me like the leadership in the Java w orld is Fouled Up Beyond ALL Recognition. Java ISVs don't know whether to listen to Mom or Dad. Everybody knows IBM should just buy Sun and clean up the mess. When are they going to do it?

The end point of leadership is not just the position of power we reach, but the continual change and deepening we experience that makes a difference in our lives, our work, our world. Our leadership journeys are only at midpoint when we have achieved a position of power.

The only difference I ever found between the Democratic leadership and the Republican leadership is that one of them is skinning you from the ankle up and the other, from the ear down.

I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to the point of responsibility. I don`t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.

Always was Morocco. And recently the country's leadership seems to have embraced it in all its ill-reputed glory. The days of predatory poets in search of literary inspiration and young flesh are probably over for good. Hippies can just as easily get their bong riffs in Portland or Peoria. But the good stuff, the real good stuff, the sounds and smells and the look of Tangier -- what you see and hear when you lean out the window and take it all in -- that's here to stay.

In my view it is better for the Labour Party, the leadership and the new prime minister that he be given the maximum flexibility.

Donald Trump is a man who just absorbs information and people and experiences. And I've witnessed him firsthand with his five children, his 10 year old son, his wife Melania, who's just an incredible first lady for all of us, amazing. God bless her, we're all very luck to have her leadership, as well. And I've witnessed him with his four adult children and his eight grandchildren. He's a family man.

Coaching will become the model for leaders in the future... I am certain that leadership can be learned and that terrific coaches... facilitate learning.

I hope that the responsible figures in the Ukrainian leadership will not hinder soldiers in the Ukrainian army from putting down their weapons.

We make our own criminals, and their crimes are congruent with the national culture we all share. It has been said that a people get the kind of political leadership they deserve. I think they also get the kinds of crime and criminals they themselves bring into being.

If you apply conservative principles and you stick with it, and you have the leadership skills to bring people toward the cause, you can move the needle on these things, i reject the notion that we can't solve problems, that the gridlock is too enormous to forge consensus. It requires some creativity to get to a win for everybody.

President Bush has shown great leadership. He has said that the 21st century will not be ruled or dictated by terrorists, dictators, and murderers. He is absolutely right. God bless him for his resolve.

It is not easy to build a great brand. It takes leadership to persuade the rest of the company to follow your vision. It takes an artistic sense of proportion and timing. It takes a ruthless willingness to distinguish yourself from competing brands and, hopefully, bury them in the process.

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right 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.

Mother Earth is giving birth to a co-creative humanity. There's not a majority anywhere, but it's cropping up everywhere, because old leadership does not have the authority to guide us.

Leadership is a choice to protect the person to the left of us, and protect the person to the right of us, and sometimes that may come at a cost. It may cost us our benefits, it may cost us our comfort, it may sometimes cost us our perks, whatever it is, credit.

There can be no progress on climate change without strong and aggressive leadership from the White House. While we have been frustrated that it took until now, we find that the President’s plan contains plenty of smart proposals and pathways for action. Stonyfield stands firmly behind the President's vision.

The dictatorship of the proletariat and the leadership of the Marxist-Leninist party are indispensable conditions for the triumph of the Socialist revolution and the building of Socialism.

You've seen [Doanld Trump] come out with a lot more specifics. He's not in hiding or smashing BlackBerry or BleachBit himself to death like we've seen Hillary do or Hillary [Clinton] throwing her stuff, you know, under the bus. She's not showing presidential leadership qualities.

[T]here's a difference between confident leadership and empty-headed delusion or cheerleading. And this is a difference that many CEOs miss.

Character is the direct result of mental attitude. I believe that character is higher than the intellect. I believe that leadership is in sacrifice, in self-denial, in humility and in the perfectly disciplined will. This is the distinction between great and little men.

I think there's just a lot of apprehension in Australia about the Trump victory. It's not that there are - some people are supportive, of course, and some people are dismayed by it. I think one thing that draws most people together - maybe 80 percent of the people - is a very strong view of American leadership and the American alliance.