Quotes on Leadership

Leaders who refuse to listen, will eventually be surrounded by people who have nothing helpful to say

A leader's role is to raise people's aspirations for what they can become and to release their energies so they will try to get there.

You have to learn what makes this or that Sammy run. For one it's a pat on the back, for another it's eating him out, for still another it's a fatherly talk, or something else. You're a fool if you think as I did as a young coach, that you can treat them all alike.

Inventories can be managed, but people must be led.

Your past is not your potential. In any hour you can choose to liberate the future.

Leaders come in many forms, with many styles and diverse qualities. There are quiet leaders and leaders one can hear in the next county. Some find strength in eloquence, some in judgment, some in courage.

No easy problems ever come to the President of the United States. If they are easy to solve, someone else has solved them.

Ultimately, leadership is not about glorious crowning acts. It's about keeping your team focused on a goal and motivated to do their best to achieve it, especially when the stakes are high and the consequences really matter. It is about laying the groundwork for others' success, and then standing back and letting them shine.

We must be silent before we can listen. We must listen before we can learn. We must learn before we can prepare. We must prepare before we can serve. We must serve before we can lead.

The servant-leader is servant first... It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first.

I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.

Learn to say 'no' to the good so you can say 'yes' to the best.

Comparing the three domains, I found that for jobs of all kinds, emotional competencies were twice as prevalent among distinguishing competencies as were technical skills and purely cognitive abilities combined. In general the higher a position in an organization, the more EI mattered: for individuals in leadership positions, 85 percent of their competencies were in the EI domain.

Time is more valuable than money, because time is irreplaceable.

If you're not confused, you're not paying attention.

There is a crisis of leadership and governance in Africa, and we must face it.

For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs. It's not "integrity," it's "always do the right thing." It's not "innovation," it's "look at the problem from a different angle." Articulating our values as verbs gives us a clear idea - we have a clear idea of how to act in any situation.

For those who say you're thinking too big... be smart enough not to listen. For those who say the odds are too small ... be dumb enough to give it a shot. And for those who ask, how can you do that?... look them in the eyes and say, I'll figure it out.

That is what leadership is all about: staking your ground ahead of where opinion is and convincing people, not simply following the popular opinion of the moment.

I found that while life drags on when you're losing, it marches on when you're winning.

We spent our whole married life in the ultra-competitive world of professional football, Lauren and I had always tried to view it through God's eyes. As much fun as it was to be winning, we tried not to get caught up in it. We knew that our family life and our faith walk were more important.