Quotes about Leadership

That leadership is primarily a function of who you are, for this is the foundation for everything you do. How do you build leaders? You first build character.

There might be exceptions—and if so, you might rethink their employment—but few people really want to be mediocre. Most of your team members want to make a valued contribution—to find purpose in their work.

Level 5 leaders display a paradoxical combination of personal humility and professional will, channelling their energy, drive, creativity and discipline in to something larger and more enduring than themselves.

Many people wait for something to happen or someone to take care of them. But people who end up with the good jobs are the proactive ones who are solutions to problems, not problems themselves, who seize the initiative to do whatever is necessary, consistent with correct principles, to get the job done.

Leadership is communicating to another their worth and potential so clearly they are inspired to see it in themselves.

Taking initiative means] recognizing our responsibility to make things happen

if you are an effective manager of yourself, your discipline comes from within; it is a function of your independent will. You are a disciple, a follower, of your own deep values and their source. And you have the will, the integrity, to subordinate your feelings, your impulses, your moods to those values.

To value oneself and, at the same time, subordinate oneself to higher purposes and principles is the paradoxical essence of highest humanity and the foundation of effective leadership.

But is it possible that under that apparently disloyal behavior, these employees question whether I really act in their best interest? Do they feel like I'm treating them as mechanical objects? Is there some truth to that?

They want other people to be the way they want them to be. They often want to clone them, and they surround themselves with "yes" people—people who won't challenge them, people who are weaker than they.

if "success" were important in any area of life, it was supremely important in our role as parents.

While the word proactivity is now fairly common in management literature, it is a word you won't find in most dictionaries. It means more than merely taking initiative. It means that as human beings, we are responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions. We can subordinate feelings to values. We have the initiative and the responsibility to make things happen.