17 Inspiring Quotes to Take Your Leadership From Good to Great
Posted Sep 01, 2024
Great leadership is something that everyone knows when they see it. Even so, decades ago, management guru James MacGregor Burns famously wrote, "Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth."
I beg to differ.
From what I've seen, leadership is without a doubt one of the most observed and the most understood phenomena on earth. Aside from the countless hours of research that have been expended to get to the heart of what makes leaders tick, all of us intuitively know what great leadership looks and feels like.
Many people have said some very inspiring words about leadership. Here are 17 of my personal favorite leadership quotes.
1. "Half the leaders I have met don't need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop." --Marshall Goldsmith
2. "I learned to always take on things I'd never done before. Growth and comfort do not co-exist." --Ginni Rometty
3. "Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results, not attributes." --Peter Drucker
4. "I define a leader as anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential." --Brené Brown
5. "Leadership is hard to define, and good leadership even harder. But if you can get people to follow you to the ends of the earth, you are a great leader." --Indra Nooyi
6. "What you do has far greater impact than what you say." --Stephen Covey
7. "Great vision without great people is irrelevant." --Jim Collins
8. "Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence, and making sure that impact lasts in your absence." --Sheryl Sandberg
9. "You can't demand respect because of a title or a position and expect people to follow. That might work for a little while, but in the long run, people respond to what they see." --Michael Jordan
10. "People respond well to those that are sure of what they want." --Anna Wintour
11. "Leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do." --Frances Hesselbein
12. "A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus." --Martin Luther King Jr.
13. "Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality." --Warren Bennis
14. "You manage things; you lead people." --Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper
15. "People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision." --John Maxwell
16. "Don't be intimidated by what you don't know. That can be your greatest strength and ensure that you do things differently from everyone else." --Sara Blakely
17. "The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant." --Max DePree