This collection of leadership quotes is a great source of inspiration.  If there is a great quote we missed, please add it in the comments below.

Quotations can be a powerful part of your personal leadership development plan. Taking a few quotes from those you admire and spending some time, deeply thinking about them, can help you better understand the mindset behind the leader.  Over the course of a year, you can cover a number of leadership quotes and develop a much better understanding of the person who said it how their perspective applies to your leadership style.

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.
~Margaret Drabble

This quote speaks to the possibilities that exist when you and your team don’t have a bunch of preconceived ideas.  Everyone is limited by what they are sure is possible.  Without those barriers, the glass ceiling goes away.

In matters of style, swim with the current;
In matters of principle, stand like a rock.
~T. Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson’s gives a strong reminder about when to be flexible and when to stand strong. To often leaders are rigid on their style and flexible on their principles–the exact opposite of what he recommends.

And when we think we lead, we are most led.
~Lord Byron

Leadership is a give and take process.

The only real training for leadership is leadership.
~Antony Jay

If you want to lead you have to practice leading.  Classroom experience isn’t nearly as valuable as actually leading experience and learning from your mistakes.

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.
~Henry Kissinger

Kissinger knew that it was no great feat to get others to do something they had done before.  Real leadership skill is getting them to do something they haven’t ever done or aren’t even sure is possible.

People are more easily led than driven.
~David Harold Fink

This leadership quote is an excellent reminder that leading is different than forcing others to do what you say.

Leadership should be born out of the understanding of the needs of those who would be affected by it.
~Marian Anderson

This is a reminder to see things from the perspective of those whose lives we impact–a very important lesson for leaders in any position.

The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.
~Eric Hoffer

This leadership quote addresses the proper balance for a leader between being realistic and being inspiring.

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson reminds us to push into new areas and take others to new places instead of doing the same old thing over and over.

The very essence of leadership is its purpose. And the purpose of leadership is to accomplish a task. That is what leadership does–and what it does is more important than what it is or how it works.
~Colonel Dandridge M. Malone

The colonel’s leadership quote shows that leadership needs to be focused on what it accomplishes instead of just being leadership for leadership’s sake.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
~Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln understood human nature and this quote illustrates the fact better than just about anything he ever said.

Where there is no vision, the people perish.
~Proverbs 29:18

This is common sense.  If you want to lead, you need to have a vision to show others where you are going.  Still it is amazing how many organizations suffer because their leaders don’t cast a clear vision.

Lead and inspire people. Don’t try to manage and manipulate people. Inventories can be managed but people must be lead.
~Ross Perot

Perot’s quote on leadership is unfortunately the opposite of what gets taught in a lot of management programs.

Leadership is understanding people and involving them to help you do a job. That takes all of the good characteristics, like integrity, dedication of purpose, selflessness, knowledge, skill, implacability, as well as determination not to accept failure.
~Admiral Arleigh A. Burke

There is a need for leaders to work with others rather than against them.

Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.
~Sandra Carey

Good plans shape good decisions. That’s why good planning helps to make elusive dreams come true.
~Lester R. Bittel

This is really where management and leadership come together.  Just having a vision isn’t enough.  You must have a plan and the ability to execute that plan to succeed.

I used to think that running an organization was equivalent to conducting a symphony orchestra. But I don’t think that’s quite it; it’s more like jazz. There is more improvisation.
~Warren Bennis

This leadership quote reminds us that you can’t just expect to follow some formula and have good results. Inspiring others requires constantly adapting to your environment.

A new leader has to be able to change an organization that is dreamless, soulless and visionless … someone’s got to make a wake up call.
~Warren Bennis

Leading is about inspiring others. Someone coming in to a new position will do well to remember this quote.

The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you.
~Max DePree

Leaders can easily forget that they are nothing without those who follow.  We must not to take others for granted.

People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. . . The leader works in the open, and the boss in covert. The leader leads, and the boss drives.
~Theodore Roosevelt

Roosevelt had some interesting thoughts on the role openness plays in leadership.

The real leader has no need to lead – he is content to point the way.
~Henry Miller

A true leader is following his vision and is more interested in achieving success than being the one who gets all the credit.

All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.
~John Kenneth Galbraith

Many of our great leaders rose up in times of turmoil for this very reason.

The best example of leadership is leadership by example.
~Jerry McClain

This leadership quote an excellent reminder that those who say “do as I say, not as I do” are not real leaders.

Leadership should be more participative than directive, more enabling than performing.
~Mary D. Poole

Leaders need to focus on helping their team succeed instead of trying to control everything.

The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves.
~Ray Kroc

You can’t be so concerned with others that you neglect to set the bar high for yourself.

To be able to lead others, a man must be willing to go forward alone.
~Harry Truman

A leader must be committed to the vision–to the point that their desire for results will push them forward even before they have others following.

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.
~John Quincy Adams

This leadership quote recognizes that leadership is about what you do–not your title or position.

The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men, the conviction and the will to carry on.
~Walter Lippman

This test shows whether or not a leader is trying to develop his team or simply promote his own ends.

Example is not the main thing in influencing others, it is the only thing.
~Albert Schweitzer

Once again, the example a leader set determines the actions of his/her followers.

Leadership: The art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.
~Dwight D. Eisenhower

This is the difference between leading and driving–whether or not someone else has a desire to see the thing done outside a reward or punishment.

Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.
~Stephen R. Covey

This is a nice explanation of the contrast between management and leadership.  For more perspective on management see our list of management quotes.

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.
~David R. Gergen

Leadership is action, not position.
~Donald H. McGannon

He that cannot obey cannot command.
~Benjamin Franklin

Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.
~John Fitzgerald Kennedy

The led must not be compelled; they must be able to choose their own leader.
~Albert Einstein

Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions.
~Harold S. Geneen

Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.
~John Maxwell

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.
~John Quincy Adams

The manager asks how and when; the leader asks what and why.
~Warren Bennis

The very essence of leadership is that you have to have a vision.
~Theodore Hesburgh

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

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

Good leaders must first become good servants.
~Robert Greenleaf

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

I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.
~Mohandas K. Gandhi

The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.
~Kenneth Blanchard

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

Leadership can be thought of as a capacity to define oneself to others in a way that clarifies and expands a vision of the future.
~Edwin H. Friedman

The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.
~Theodore Roosevelt

A leader is a dealer in hope.
~Napoleon Bonaparte

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
~Peter F. Drucker

Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.
~John F. Kennedy

A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.
~Dwight D. Eisenhower

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
~Steve Jobs

A lot of leaders know what they want from the people they lead, but are not particularly skilled in getting the desired results. Often, leaders in this position end up blaming the people they lead. Most often, the fault lies with the leader’s inability to focus effort toward a particular result.

A successful leader finds ways to focus effort toward their desired results. There are many ways to do this, but most of them boil down to measuring the results you want to impact. Management is often the art of taking abstract concepts and communicating them in a clear, quantitative way.

For example, the factory manager knows that he wants to lower the number of accidents, but having fewer accidents is a fairly abstract concept. However the number of days since the last accident is a very concrete concept that is easy for everyone to understand. That is why many factories have a large sign that shows the number of days they have gone without having an accident. It helps measure the concept of having fewer accidents in a way that is understood and measurable. Many factories have found they can lower the number of accidents simply by making people aware of how well they are doing at achieving the goal.

The trick is to find the proper thing to measure. There was an IT department where the manager decided to measure the number of trouble tickets they closed each week. This metric was used as part of the employees’ performance review. However, if everything was running just fine with no problems, there were no trouble tickets to close.

Once employees realized that their performance looked bad when things were running perfectly, they began unplugging certain pieces of networking equipment for 15 minutes at a time. The users would log a bunch of trouble tickets and the IT staff would plug the equipment back in and close all of the tickets.

In this case, the manager was basically measuring the number of problems that were fixed. If an IT department is functioning well, the number of problems from system outages will be very low. The manager basically created problems because that is what was being measured.

Making metrics visible keeps people focused on the desired results. A skilled leader can identify the measurements of success and come up with creative ways to make those metrics concrete and noticeable.

Respect is something that is earned. It doesn’t just happen because you are in a leadership position. If your subordinates respect you simply because you can fire them, you are a very poor leader.

You earn respect in different ways. The biggest way to earn people’s respect is to do what you say you are going to do. I’ve seen many moderately skilled leaders lose a tremendous amount of respect simply because they didn’t follow through on what they said they would do.

The Honest Leader

I once worked at an organization where the CEO was trying to increase the skill level of his management staff. Many of the people in management had a rudimentary education when they started at the organization and were doing very little to expand their skills and knowledge.

The CEO told all the managers that he wanted them to be continually pursuing their education and that he expected every manager to take at least two college classes each year at a minimum. He made it clear that year-end raises would be tied to meeting this goal.

No one heard any more about this requirement. I took several classes toward a second masters degree that I was planning on taking anyway, so I was prepared to document my educational efforts for the year. In December, my manager (a vice president) stopped me in the parking lot and told me that they had decided to give me a 2% raise.

I was kind of surprised because it had been made clear that we would only be getting a raise if we had documented our educational efforts for the year. Assuming that I must have missed the instructions on where to document this, I wrote up a summary and sent it to my manager stating that I wanted my raise to be based on the educational achievement as we had been informed would be the case.

Basically, the reply I got back made it clear that year-end raises were in no way impacted by our meeting the educational goal. Later, when talking with some of the other employees who had been there much longer than I, it became clear that the educational goal was treated almost as a joke. They had been around enough to know that, like many other goals and policies before, it was just a passing fad that wouldn’t ever actually be implemented.

This type of behavior is one of the easiest ways to damage your credibility and respect as a leader. If you have to change your mind for some reason, you should make it clear that you are changing your mind. Think twice before ordering something if you are not completely sure you will follow through.

The Competent Leader

Another way to cultivate respect is by being really good at what you are managing. This doesn’t mean you need to be an expert in everything every one of your subordinates does, but if your conversation makes it clear that you haven’t even spent the effort to understand their job, it will be very difficult for them to respect your expertise.

Your direct reports are going to run into roadblocks and difficulties in their work. While you don’t need to help them work through every single issue, being able to understand the problem and point to solutions will go a long way in building respect. This isn’t something you can fake. If you don’t understand their job, you will probably lose more respect than you gain by trying to help.

The Leader Who Cares

A third practice that will help you gain respect is to take a genuine interest in your employee’s success. If they feel like you are trying to help them achieve success, not just in their current job, but over their whole career, they will respect that you care beyond just the fact that they work for you.

Respect isn’t something that happens automatically and it is easier to lose than to gain. These three practices (following through, being an expert, and caring about your employee’s success) will go a long way toward helping you build respect.

The best leaders I’ve worked with are the ones that know when to wait. Early on in my career, I tended to respond to things quickly—especially when I was angry or upset. This is the exact opposite of what the leaders I respected did.

Mature leaders know that some problems go away if they are ignored. There are some leaders who try to take this to an extreme and never deal with anything. The correct balance is somewhere in the middle. There are very few times where putting off sending a scathing email or administering a harsh verbal rebuke will give you cause for regret. On the other hand, it is pretty frequent that haste to respond to a loaded situation will make you wish you had taken more time to think about it.

There are times where a situation calls for immediate attention. The skilled leader will keep an eye out for those types of situations before they happen and make a decision about what to do ahead of time. This allows you to respond quickly, but not be reactive—you’ve spent the time in prudent thought ahead of time, so you are not acting on impulse.

Some of the situations where a swift response would probably be necessary are extreme insubordination, breach of ethics, etc. Sometimes a delayed response will send the wrong signal to your team. Most of the time, delaying in order to act wisely will be to your advantage.

Many leaders assume that everyone understands their vision. Often, there is a big gap between their vision and what the people they lead see as the vision. Unfortunately, many leaders don’t take the time to actually find out how well they have communicated their vision.

When the vision is unclear, people tend to default to doing whatever seems best to them. If they are effective at communicating their version of the vision to people they lead, you can easily end up with a direction where each department or organizational unit is heading in a very different direction.

I was sitting in a meeting at a medium sized organization that was having a discussion about branding strategy. One of the vice presidents gave his opinion on a branding issue and then casually mentioned how it aligned with the vision. The only problem was that the vision he articulated was in the complete opposite direction of what the CEO was trying to do.

The problem wasn’t that the CEO didn’t have a vision. He just hadn’t communicated it effectively to the rest of the organization. I’m sure he thought he had communicated the vision, but the test of a well-communicated vision is whether or not the people responsible for implementing the vision understand it.

A very simple way to test your organization’s vision alignment is ask people to write down the vision anonymously in a short paragraph. It doesn’t need to be a long drawn out thing, but this feedback will give you a much better idea of how well aligned everyone is. Keeping it anonymous helps people concentrate more on articulating the vision and less on worrying about getting it wrong. After all, you are really testing your performance, not their ability to remember.

Once you get the feedback, read over each and every vision statement. If you notice that most of them miss something that you consider to be important, that is a good sign that you need to do some more vision casting in that area. It is very likely that you’ll find things that aren’t part of your vision. These are areas where you may need to apply some course correction to make sure everyone is headed in the same direction.

If everyone comes back and states the vision exactly as you feel you’ve communicated it, consider yourself fortunate. Most of us will find that there is some room for improvement in conveying our vision.

Teamwork is not something that is easy to teach. While you may know certain teamwork principles, it is something that needs to be developed in each team on its own. If you take 5 people from separate organizations and try to put them together into one team, there will be a certain amount of learning that takes place, regardless of how skilled each individual is at teamwork.

When it comes down to it, most of learning to work together as a team is learning to communicate with and trust your fellow team members. When you are creating a team, keep this in mind and try to create an environment where people can learn how to communicate and trust each other.

Often, you can improve your team by creating a temporary environment that requires everyone to learn to communicate and trust each other. Many of the infamous corporate games and simulations help attempt to achieve this. You just have to know what you are trying to accomplish. Corporate games and team building exercises get a bad name when they are done without any particular end in mind. If you don’t know why you are doing them, there are probably better uses of your time.

One of the easiest ways to improve communication and trust is put people in a difficult situation and let them work their way out of it. In day to day business settings, we have a lot of ways to avoid communicating directly or learning to trust each other. You want to look for a situation that doesn’t lend itself to these types of avoidance mechanisms.

Here are a few ideas of ways to help create a temporary environment to help your team grow:

Take an afternoon and go work on something together where it is easy to see what you’ve accomplished. For example, take your team out to paint walls at a local charity. Painting works well because it is easy to see how much you’ve accomplished. Many of our business activities are difficult to quantify, so we are deprived from a real feeling of team accomplishment in our day-to-day work. Painting is also good because it gives people a chance to talk while they paint and get to know each other better outside of work conversations.

Do a ropes course or something similar together. This gets everyone working together in a hands-on way and solving problems. With the right activities, it can really help strengthen the trust in a team. I’m not just talking about the activities where you close your eyes and fall backwards and let another team member catch you. There is a lot of benefit in just forcing people to work through problems together in a different type of setting.

Do one of the survival simulation type games. In these types of simulations, your team has to work together to rank the most important objects to take with them after an airplane crash or similar disaster. The point is that they have to reach a consensus about what items to take, and they aren’t allowed to just take a vote and go with the majority. This forces people to explain themselves and helps them work through conflicting opinions.

In the military, “the men” are separated from “the officers.” The basic idea is that the leaders shouldn’t be too close to the people they will be commanding. In the army, this makes a lot of sense because if you are too close, you might have a difficult time making decisions that could result in someone’s death. On the military base, they have an officer’s club, where the officers go to eat. On Sundays the facility is opened up for everyone, but there is a separate side for the men and a separate side for the officers. The officers’ side is generally a little fancier with slightly better chairs and table settings.

There is a certain amount of separation that is wise to keep in non-military leadership as well. If you are too friendly with your direct reports, it may be difficult for them to respect your authority. This doesn’t mean you need to intentionally be a jerk, but you need to be aware that certain individuals misinterpret an overly friendly attitude as a sign that they don’t need to follow the rules because they are “on your good side”.

Many times, people go to one extreme or the other. On the overly friendly side of things, they look to their direct reports to provide a social life. This isn’t healthy, because it means the leader may not be able to make difficult decisions without having an extreme emotional impact on themselves. Putting yourself in this type of situation can cloud your judgment about an individual’s contribution or effectiveness. It is also unhealthy because, if all of your personal friends report to you, it is possible to end up with a bunch of sycophants instead of true honest friends.

On the other extreme are the leaders who place themselves way above the people they lead. These types of people end up making lots of rules that apply to everyone except themselves and often carry an air of being better than everyone else.

Somewhere in between these two extremes is a healthy balance. The balance may be different for each person who reports to you. Part of your job as a leader is to identify and sense the proper equilibrium that will give your reports the satisfaction of feeling like they have a personal relationship with you, while keeping yourself in an authority role.

Many inexperienced leaders fail to adequately communicate a vision to the people they lead. If you don’t tell everyone which direction to head, you’ll have confusion. For some leaders, their deficiency comes not from a lack of communication, but from not having a vision, themselves.

Leadership is an important trait, but sometimes people get so caught up in trying to become better leaders that they forget to spend anytime figuring out where it is they want to lead. It is much easier to lead if you have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish and your ideas are good.

In fact, a poor leader with a great vision will accomplish more than a great leader with no clue where they want to go. Success covers a multitude of failures. If you are successful, people will tend to overlook many mistakes you make as a leader. If you are unsuccessful, people are less likely to overlook your deficiencies in vision.

If you are driving people toward shared success, they will tend to stick with you because they are succeeding. In some cases, they may even start copying some of your poor leadership habits thinking they are part of the reason for your success.

This is the same type of latitude we give to geniuses. If you take a look at a photo of Einstein and think what your reaction would be meeting someone who looked like him in almost any social setting, you probably wouldn’t automatically have much respect for him simply based on his appearance. However, since he was successful, people overlook his appearance. I imagine there were even some younger physicists who stopped combing their hair with the idea that mimicking his (bad) habits would help them achieve success as well.

Obviously, leadership skills are very important. It is much better to lead with a solid vision and tremendous leadership acumen. Just make sure that as you develop your leadership skills, you don’t overlook the skills that will let you develop a vision worth following.

Most people assume that large organizations are well led. Some people assume that any successful business has good leadership. Leadership is interesting because it isn’t particularly easy to pass on to someone else. Because of this, there are many businesses that are successful (they haven’t gone bankrupt) that aren’t particularly well led. Many times an organization will rely on the success of its previous leader who has been gone for years.

Great leadership is a very rare thing. For most people, it isn’t something that comes naturally. What is amazing is that so many organizations are very successful with only marginally competent leaders. Sometimes, this is because the structure of an organization helps make up for the leader’s shortcomings. Sometimes, inadequate leaders are able to succeed because their support staff specifically makes up for their weaknesses.

While great leadership skills will help make someone successful, don’t assume that being successful indicates that someone is a good leader. This is a trap that many people fall into when they are looking for someone else to emulate. They find someone successful and assume that following their example will make them a better leader. Obviously, if you are mimicking good solid leadership skills, this might be a good thing, but many people can’t tell the difference between a skill that leads to success and a bad habit that someone succeeds in spite of.

When you stop assuming that successful people got that way because of their leadership skills, you are in a much better position to truly observe the strengths and weaknesses of others. Don’t assume that every habit of a successful person is a strength and don’t assume that every habit of an unsuccessful person is a weakness.

My dad teaches at a community college. He has some students in his class who don’t have to take tests like everyone else. They take their tests with a special proctor who reads the test to them. This is so they don’t get confused by reading it themselves. I’m not joking. The idea is that they might be at a disadvantage if they have to read it by themselves.

I feel sorry for these individuals because they have never been allowed to fail. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I don’t think you should be able to get a high school degree if you are incapable of taking a simple multiple choice test without help.

Our educational system is set up to keep people from failing. But failure is an important part of growth. It is sad to see someone who should have experienced failure in 2nd or 3rd grade making it all the way to college. When they enter the workforce, they are going to fail terribly once their employer discovers that they can’t read.

Make failures learning experiences, but don’t gloss over or ignore them. You need to recognize failures to build a strong team, but you also need to recognize failure to help people grow as individuals.