QuoteProject
If you look to lead, invest at least 40% of your time managing yourself - your ethics, character, principles, purpose, motivation, and conduct. Invest at least 30% managing those with authority over you, and 15% managing your peers.
Dee Hock
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Effective leadership requires significant investment in self-management and relationship management.

In this quote, Dee Hock emphasizes the importance of self-awareness and personal development in leadership. By allocating time to manage one's own ethics, character, and motivation, a leader sets a strong foundation for influencing and guiding others. Furthermore, understanding and managing relationships with those in authority and peers is essential for successful leadership dynamics, underscoring that leadership is as much about managing oneself as it is about managing others.

Themes

LeadershipSelf-ManagementEthicsCharacterRelationshipsInfluence

In practice

Example use cases

In a team meeting to emphasize the importance of personal responsibility in leadership.

More from Dee Hock

Money motivates neither the best people, nor the best in people. It can move the body and influence the mind, but it cannot touch the heart or move the spirit; that is reserved for belief, principle, and morality.
Dee HockRead
Making good judgments when one has complete data, facts, and knowledge is not leadership - it's bookkeeping
Dee HockRead
We are now at a point in time when the ability to receive, utilize, store, transform and transmit data - the lowest cognitive form - has expanded literally beyond comprehension. Understanding and wisdom are largely forgotten as we struggle under an avalanche of data and information.
Dee HockRead
You learn nothing form your successes except to think too much of yourself. It is from failure that all growth comes, provided you can recognize it, admit it, learn from it, rise above it, and then try again.
Dee HockRead
It is not making better people of others that management is about. It's about making a better person of self. Income, power, and titles have nothing to do with that.
Dee HockRead
Never hire or promote in your own image. It is foolish to replicate your strength and idiotic to replicate your weakness. It is essential to employ, trust, and reward those whose perspective, ability, and judgment are radically different from yours. It is also rare, for it requires uncommon humility, tolerance, and wisdom.
Dee HockRead

Similar quotes

All of us are mentors. You're mentors right here and now. And one of the things I've always done throughout my life, I have always found that person, that group of people that I was going to reach my hand out and help bring them along with me.
Michelle ObamaRead
I can make more generals, but horses cost money.
Abraham LincolnRead
The President of the United States should strive to be always mindful of the fact that he serves his party best who serves his country best.
Rutherford B. HayesRead
To capture an enemies army is better than to destroy it.
Sun TzuRead
I'd never been around or seen a black showrunner, and in some ways you wish that it wasn't a big deal.
Mahershala AliRead
I always like to take my time and examine the two candidates, see not only the two candidates but the policies they will bring in, the people they will bring in, who they might appoint to the Supreme Court, and look at the whole range of issues before making a decision.
Colin PowellRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.