Quotes for the Journey: Leadership Good leaders must first become good servants. Robert Greenleaf

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 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 suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.        -Mohandas Gandhi     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     If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.        - John Quincy Adams      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

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 Tzu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leaders are more powerful role models when they learn than when they teach.        -Rosabeth Moss Kantor

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

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