Quotations and passages on leadership

Leadership means not giving orders
to others, but giving of yourself.

East African Tribal Proverb

Divorced from ethics, leadership is reduced to management and politics to mere technique.

James MacGregor Burns

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself.
When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.

Jack Welch

I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles;
but today it means getting along with people.

Mohandas Gandhi

The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say "I." And that's
not because they have trained themselves not to say "I." They don't think "I."
They think "we"; they think "team." They understand their job to be to make
the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but "we" gets
the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.

Peter F. Drucker

Humans are ambitious and rational and proud. And we don't
fall in line with people who don't respect us and who we
don't believe have our best interests at heart. We are
willing to follow leaders, but only to the extent that we
believe they call on our best, not our worst.

Rachel Maddow

Good leaders must first become good servants.

Robert Greenleaf

Most important, leaders can conceive
and articulate goals that lift people
out of their petty preoccupations and
unite them in pursuit of objectives
worthy of their best efforts.

John Gardner

If your actions inspire others to dream
more, learn more, do more and
become more, you are a leader.

John Quincy Adams

Leaders are more powerful role models when they learn than when they teach.

Rosabeth Moss Kantor

A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people
where they don't necessarily want to go but ought to be.

Rosalynn Carter

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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.

Warren G. Bennis

To lead people, walk beside them . . . As for the best leaders, the people do not
notice their existence. The next best, the people honor and praise.
The next, the people fear; and the next, the people hate . . . When the best
leader's work is done the people say, "We did it ourselves!"

Lao-Tsu

The task of leaders is to get their people from
where they are to where they have not been.

Henry Kissinger

Leadership must be based on goodwill. Goodwill does not mean posturing and,
least of all, pandering to the mob. It means obvious and wholehearted commitment
to helping followers. We are tired of leaders we fear, tired of leaders we love,
and of tired of leaders who let us take liberties with them. What we need for leaders
are people of the heart who are so helpful that they, in effect, do away with the need
of their jobs. But leaders like that are never out of a job, never out of followers.
Strange as it sounds, great leaders gain authority by giving it away.

James B. Stockdale

Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through
argument, debate, and doubt to offer a solution everybody can understand.

Colin Powell

Leadership is not magnetic personality, that can just as well be a glib tongue.
It is not "making friends and influencing people", that is flattery. Leadership is
lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance
to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.

Peter F. Drucker

Leadership is not so much about technique and methods as it is about
opening the heart. Leadership is about inspiration—of oneself and of
others. Great leadership is about human experiences, not processes.
Leadership is not a formula or a program, it is a human activity that
comes from the heart and considers the hearts of others.
It is an attitude, not a routine.

Lance Secretan

I never had much faith in leaders. I am willing to be charged with almost anything,
rather than to be charged with being a leader. I am suspicious of leaders, and especially
of the intellectual variety. Give me the rank and file every day in the week. If you go
to the city of Washington, and you examine the pages of the Congressional Directory,
you will find that almost all of those corporation lawyers and cowardly politicians,
members of Congress, and mis-representatives of the masses--you will find that almost
all of them claim, in glowing terms, that they have risen from the ranks to places of
eminence and distinction. I am very glad I cannot make that claim for myself. I would
be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be
with the ranks, and not from the ranks.

Eugene V. Debs

Be a Leader
Dale Carnegie

A leader's job often includes changing your people's attitudes and behavior. Some suggestions to accomplish this:

Principle 1
Begin with praise and honest appreciation.

Principle 2
Call attention to people's mistakes indirectly.

Principle 3
Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person.

Principle 4
Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.

Principle 5
Let the other person save face.

Principle 6
Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be "hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise."

Principle 7
Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.

Principle 8
Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.

Principle 9
Make the other person happy about doing the things you suggest.

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