Quotes on Leadership Development

The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.

The single biggest way to impact an organization is to focus on leadership development. There is almost no limit to the potential of an organization that recruits good people, raises them up as leaders and continually develops them.

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.

A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better.

Failing forward is the ability to get back up after you've been knocked down, learn from your mistake, and move forward in a better direction.

Inventories can be managed, but people must be led.

Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.

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.

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.

I emphasize self-esteem, self-confidence, and dignity, not as an ideal, but as a real test of community organization. Without leadership development, community organizations do not have staying power.

Good leadership consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people.

Good leaders make people feel that they're at the very heart of things, not at the periphery.

A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.

Leaders aren't born they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that's the price we'll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.

There is no such thing as a perfect leader either in the past or present, in China or elsewhere. If there is one, he is only pretending, like a pig inserting scallions into its nose in an effort to look like an elephant.