LEADERSHIP QUOTES VII

quotations about leadership

Little leading makes much following.

LYMAN ABBOTT

Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish

Tags: Lyman Abbott


To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men.

HAVELOCK ELLIS

introduction, Against the Grain

Tags: Havelock Ellis


Leadership is understanding people and involving them to help you do a job. That takes all of the good characteristics, like integrity, dedication of purpose, selflessness, knowledge, skill, implacability, as well as determination not to accept failure.

ARLEIGH BURKE

attributed, Naval Leadership: Voices of Experience


Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them.

ROBERT JARVIK

attributed, Deliberate Success


Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.

DAN SIMMONS

The Fall of Hyperion

Tags: Dan Simmons


I see [it said that] leaders should keep their ears to the ground. All I can say is that the ... nation will find it very hard to look up to leaders who are detected in that somewhat ungainly posture.

WINSTON CHURCHILL

speech in House of Commons, Sep. 30, 1941

Tags: Winston Churchill


If you command wisely, you'll be obeyed cheerfully.

THOMAS FULLER

Gnomologia

Tags: Thomas Fuller


Real leadership is not about calling yourself "leader"; rather, it's about taking up the cause to change some piece of the world for the better. Real leadership, in other words, is an extreme act rooted in love and motivated by a desire to create a better world--whether it's the world of your company, team, neighborhood, or family.

STEVE FARBER & MATTHEW KELLY

Greater Than Yourself


Leaders are said to be responsive to what their followers want because the followers choose the leader and leaders want to keep their leadership positions. The assumption that leaders will be responsive to followers because leaders want to win and hold power is a useful starting point for understanding the politics of leadership in any democratic institution. However, such an assumption may become misleading if leaders are understood to care only about retaining their leadership positions. If some congressional leaders are strongly committed to political goals beyond remaining leader--and we shall see that some are--we would not expect those leaders always to be inclined to take their bearings from what their followers want. When opportunities arise to pursue other intensely held goals, some may be willing to act independently of followers and even risk their leadership positions in pursuit of those goals. If so, leaders who are more risk-tolerant may be consequential for influencing outcomes in a wider range of political situations than just those situations in which their followers are already mostly in agreement.

RANDALL STRAHAN

Leading Representatives


Leadership is about mobilising people to tackle tough changes and thrive, while authority simply looked at protection, direction and order and can be a strait jacket if not used correctly.

KIRK HUMPHREY

"The Time for Adaptive Leadership is Right Now", Barbados Advocate, April 24, 2016


I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.

DESMOND TUTU

The Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 20, 1984


Effective leaders are made, not born. They learn from trial and error, and from experience.

COLIN POWELL

"10 Leadership Tenets from Colin Powell", Stanford Graduate School of Business


Good leadership is largely invisible. When everything runs smoothly, no one notices.

BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON

Dune: House Harkonnen


What was leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretense that the decision was based on reason.

ROBERT HARRIS

Pompeii


Leadership is not something you do to people, but something you do with people.

KEN BLANCHARD

Leading at a Higher Level


To some extent, leaders are storytellers; really, though, they are characters in stories. They play leading roles, but in dramas they can't predict and don't always understand. Because the serialized drama of history is bigger than any one character's arc, leaders can't guarantee our ultimate narrative satisfaction. Because events, on the whole, are more protean than people, leaders grow less satisfying with time, as the stories they're ready to tell diverge from the stories we want to hear.

JOSHUA ROTHMAN

"Shut Up and Sit Down", The New Yorker, February 29, 2016


That's the first rule of command; be consistent! You can be sadistic, you can be lazy, you can be stupid, but if you're consistent the crew will still let you sit in when they play dominoes.

JAMES ALAN GARDNER

Expendable

Tags: James Alan Gardner


At the heart of leadership is the leader's relationship with followers. People will entrust their hopes and dreams to another person only if they think the other is a reliable vessel.

DAVID GERGAN

Eyewitness to Power


When one sheep leads the way all the rest follow.

CHINESE PROVERB

Tags: Chinese proverbs


Because leadership is contextual and culturally contingent, its practice cannot be divorced from the specific socio-cultural context within which it occurs. Leadership development must begin to make contextual sense to its recipients, and to the social contexts in which they will be practicing as leaders.

VANESSA IWOWO

"Leadership: one size does not fit all contexts", Business Review, April 20, 2016