Leadership Quotes - Page 15

Leadership is a series of behaviors rather than a role for heroes.

Integrity is the most valuable and respected quality of leadership. Always keep your word.

Never play leapfrog with a unicorn.

Servant leadership always empathizes, always accepts the person, but sometimes refuses to accept some of the person's effort or performance as good enough.

If you set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.

You don't lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case.

We expect teachers to handle teenage pregnancy, substance abuse, and the failings of the family. Then we expect them to educate our children.

Give whatever you are doing and whoever you are with the gift of your attention.

Stay focused. Your start does not determine how you're going to finish.

In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still.

One man's Poison Ivy is another Fellow's Spinach.

When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.

It's awfully important to win with humility. It's also important to lose. I hate to lose worse than anyone, but if you never lose you won't know how to act. If you lose with humility, then you can come back.

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?

In the past a leader was a boss. Today's leaders must be partners with their people... they no longer can lead solely based on positional power.

Passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effort of independent thought, and seems rational because the teacher knows more than his pupils; it is moreover the way to win the favour of the teacher unless he is a very exceptional man. Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes man to seek and to accept a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position.

What is defeat? Nothing but education, nothing but the first step to something better.

The art of leadership is saying no, not saying yes. It is very easy to say yes.

No leader can possibly have all the answers . . . .The actual solutions about how best to meet the challenges of the moment have to be made by the people closest to the action. . . .The leader has to find the way to empower those frontline people, to challenge them, to provide them with the resources they need, and then to hold them accountable. As they struggle with . . . this challenge, the leader becomes their coach, teacher, and facilitator. Change how you define leadership, and you change how you run a company.

The masses are in reality their own leaders, dialectically creating their own development process.

The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.

As for leadership, I am the kind who leads reluctantly and more by example than anything else. Someone had to be on the incorporation papers as president.

The road to Easy Street goes through the sewer.

At a time when we are facing threats from nations such as North Korea and Iran, and attempting to convince others such as India and Pakistan to become responsible nuclear powers, it is vital that America reclaims the leadership we once had on arms control.

It is better to have a lion at the head of an army of sheep, than a sheep at the head of an army of lions.