LEADERSHIP


Welcome! This list of quotes is part of the Management & Leadership Quotes series of the Bigroads.com website.

Author/Contributor: Greg Parsons



Be aware of the tension between the need to remain accessible to others as a leader and the need to withdraw from them to think with focus.

- John Maxwell

Spend one hard hour every day planning, dreaming, scheming, thinking, calculating. Consider options. Ponder problems. Write down ideas.

- Jeffrey Fox

Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain cool and unruffled under all circumstances.

- Thomas Jefferson

The team must understand that their leader cares about them and their well-being.

- Jocko Willink & Leif Babin

The only way to deliver to the people who are achieving is to not burden them with the people who are not achieving.

- Jim Collins

Rampant office politics is symptomatic of a weak leader.

- Jeffrey Fox

Fall in love with the idea of helping others build their careers and realize their ambitions.

- Paul Falcone

Being a leader means doing what has to be done, when it has to be done, in the way it should be done, whether you like it or not, and whether they like it or not.

- Lee Cockerell

People join companies, but generally leave because of their managers.

- unknown

Give people a fine reputation that they will feel compelled to live up to.

- Dale Carnegie

Too many leaders are afraid to admit mistakes, thinking it will undermine their credibility or be taken as a weakness. But it’s actually a great teaching tool.

- Lee Cockerell

Leaders must never be satisfied. They must always strive to improve, and they must build that mindset into the team.

- Jocko Willink & Leif Babin

Unless you give motived people something to believe in, something bigger than their job to work toward, they will motivate themselves to find a new job.

- Simon Sinek

At the end of it all, nothing will stick with you more than the people you’ve helped, the careers you’ve developed and built, and the people along the way who thanked you for all you did to help them excel and become their best.

- Paul Falcone

Leaders must be heavily engaged in training and mentoring their junior leaders to prepare them to step up and assume greater responsibilities.

- Jocko Willink & Leif Babin

A leader is one who sees more than others see, who sees farther than others see, and who sees before others do.

- John Maxwell

Most people love being a part of something bigger than themselves.

- Simon Sinek

If you plan for emergencies, there won’t be any.

- Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

Leaders must face the facts through a realistic, brutally honest assessment of themselves and their team’s performance.

- Jocko Willink & Leif Babin

Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and then figure out where to drive the bus.

- Jim Collins

Junior leaders must communicate with senior leaders to recommend decisions outside of their authority and pass critical information up the chain of command so that senior leadership can make informed strategic decisions.

- Jocko Willink & Leif Babin

Put your best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems.

- Jim Collins

The little celebration following a win can be good for the body and spirit. Relax for a few minutes and celebrate. Constant tension for long periods of time is not healthy for people.

- John Kotter

A great leader never settles for good enough.

- Lee Cockerell

To become an excellent leader you need to work on it every day.

- John Maxwell

Leaders who lose their temper also lose respect.

- Jocko Willink & Leif Babin

Leadership is about vision. But leadership is also about creating a climate where the truth is heard and the brutal facts are confronted.

- Jim Collins

Business leaders must aim to eliminate “broken windows" to create an image of management effectiveness, systematization, efficiency, quality, care, and round-the-clock surveillance.

- Rancord Society (link)

People buy into the leader, then the vision.

- John Maxwell

What do the right people want more than almost anything else? They want to be part of a winning team. They want to contribute to producing invisible, tangible results. They want to feel the excitement of being involved in something that just flat out works.

- Jim Collins

Spend time in the field. Travel with salespeople. Make calls. Attend sales meetings. Conduct training sessions. Learn what goes on out there. This will earn you credentials with the sales force, always a powerful constituency in any corporation. It will earn your spurs with sales management, always a powerful group in a corporation. You will know what motivates and demotivates the salespeople. You will have knowledge of customers, and that knowledge is a source of great power.

- Jeffrey Fox

We are drawn to leaders and organizations that are good at communicating what they believe. Their ability to make us feel like we belong, to make us feel special, safe, and not alone is part of what gives them the ability to inspire us.

- Simon Sinek

All leaders know that the royal road to a person’s heart is to talk about things he or she treasures most.

- Dale Carnegie

I suggest communicating to staff what the organization as a whole is doing well and where it can stand improvement.

- Lee Cockerell

When it comes to performance standards, it’s not about what you preach, it’s about what you tolerate.

- Jocko Willink & Leif Babin

There is a world of difference between a strong ego, which is essential, and a large ego, which can be destructive. The guy with a strong ego knows his own strengths. He’s confident. He has a realistic idea of what he can accomplish, and he moves purposefully toward his goal. But the guy with the large ego is always looking for recognition and always needs to be patted in the back. He thinks he’s a cut above everybody else. And he talks down to the people who work for him.

- Lee Iacocca

Leaders must never put their own drive for personal access ahead of the overall mission success of the greater team.

- Jocko Willink & Leif Babin

If you provide excellence in a world where excellence is rare, the chances of being noticed by the right person skyrocket.

- Lee Cockerell

Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. It’s not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious – but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.

- Jim Collins

Most people create an inner circle of people. However, they are usually not strategic about it.

- John Maxwell

Company culture eats strategy for lunch every day of the week.

- Fred Lee

When great leaders think they are on the right track, they don’t let the resistance of others stop them from doing what they believe in.

- Lee Cockerell

Great companies have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of their current reality, whatever they might be.

- Fred Lee

Many people consider going out on a limb a sure way to endanger your career, but this conventional wisdom is no way for an organization to stay alive and strong. Organizations should reward risk-takers, even if they fall short once in a while. Let them know that promotions and glory go to innovators and pioneers, not to stand-patters who fear controversy and avoid trying to improve anything. To me, that’s the key to keeping an organization young, vital, growing, and successful. Stasis is death to any organization. Evolve or die: It’s the law of life.

- Michael Abrashoff

Ask yourself, are you making things better for the people who follow you?

- John Maxwell

Leaders use solitude to put the pieces of a problem together, to work out solutions, to plan, and to do their super-thinking.

- David J. Schwartz

To a larger degree, leadership deals with the long-term and management with the immediate future.

- John Kotter

Leaders should get out of their comfort zone but stay in their strength zone.

- John Maxwell

It’s the feeling of “we’re in this together" that makes great leaders.

- Simon Sinek

Every business, no matter what its size, requires continual self-assessment and self-improvement to stay ahead of the game or, quite frequently, to stay in the game at all.

- Cy Charney

Leaders who demand excellence need to model excellence, otherwise they have no credibility.

- Lee Cockerell

Leadership in a nutshell: Be humble. Listen to them. Be on time. Work hard. Treat people with respect. Make decisions carefully. Talk to people and then make a good decision. And power your folks to lead. Don’t micromanage them, but give clear guidance about what the expectations are.

- Jocko Willink & Leif Babin

Leadership requires two things: a vision of the world that does not exist and the ability to communicate it.

- Simon Sinek

To solve big problems you have to be willing to do unpopular things.

- Lee Iacocca

Inexperienced leaders are quick to lead before knowing anything about the people they intend to lead. But mature leaders listen, learn, and then lead.

- John Maxwell

Your people know when you make mistakes. The real question is whether you’re going to fess up.

- John Maxwell

If your leadership ability to read people is weak, read some books on relationships.

- John Maxwell

My job was not to know every single thing that was going on in all my areas of responsibility; it was to buzz around helping every one of those executives, managers, and frontline people perform just a little better every day.

- Lee Cockerell

Great things happen when you don’t care who gets the credit.

- John Maxwell

It’s lonely at the top, so make sure to take some people with you to it.

- John Maxwell

Every great leader is a dreamer.

- Napoleon Hill

When times are tough, uncertainty is high, and chaos threatens to overwhelm everyone, follows need a clear picture from their leaders the most.

- John Maxwell

Leaders are naturally impatient. Leaders want to move fast. They want to see the vision fulfilled.

- John Maxwell

As hard as it is to find and gather good leaders, it’s even more difficult to keep them. The only way to lead leaders is to become a better leader yourself. If you keep growing and stay ahead of the people you lead, then you will be able to keep adding value to the leaders who follow you. Your goals must be to keep developing them to that they can realize their potential. Only a leader can do that for another leader, because it takes a leader to raise up another leader.

- John Maxwell

I often tell people to begin each workday as if they were stepping on stage to perform the show of their lives.

- Lee Cockerell

The only way to get excellence is with training, education, and enforcement.

- Lee Cockerell

The more willing you are to compare yourself with different organizations the more receptive you are to radically new ideas, the more opportunities you will have.

- Cy Charney

In order to aspire to leadership you need a determination to undertake a personal program of self-development. This is something which takes time, work, and sacrifice. Nobody can do it for you.

- David J. Schwartz

The leaders of winning teams always-always-let their people know where they stand. Winning teams always know the game plan.

- Lewis Howes

Think about whether you want your company to the best or the biggest.

- Timothy Ferriss

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

- John Quincy Adams

One year in my leadership conferences, I took an informal poll to find out what prompted the attendees to become leaders. The results were as follows: (a) Natural gifting = 10%; (b) Result of crisis = 5%; and (c) Influence of another leader = 85%.

- John Maxwell

Characteristics of an effective vision:

(a) Imaginable – conveys a picture of what the future will look like;
(b) Desirable – appeals to the long-term interests of employees, customers, stockholders, and others who have a stake in the enterprise;
(c) Feasible – comprises realistic, attainable goals;
(d) Focused – is clear enough to provide guidance in decision-making;
(e) Flexible – is general enough to allow individual initiatives and alternative responses in light of changing outcomes; and
(f) Communicable – is easy to communicate; can be successfully explained within five minutes.


- John Kotter

8 signs of a confident leader:

(a) They hire people better than themselves;
(b) They give credit to others;
(c) They are not afraid to take the blame;
(d) They admit when they don't know something;
(e) They empower the team;
(f) They hire people who don't check off all the boxes, they focus on the potential;
(g) They give others a chance they deserve; and
(h) They don't see good people as a threat to the own position.


- unknown

Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.

- Sheryl Sandberg