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

Leadership quotations can be a powerful part of your personal leadership development plan. Taking a few quotes from people you admire and spending some time, deeply thinking about the quotes, 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 behind the quote and how their perspective applies to your leadership style.

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

This leadership 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 leadership quote is a strong reminder about when to be flexible and when to stand strong. To often people 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 an take process as this leadership quote points out.

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

If you want to lead you have to practice leading as this leadership quote points out.  Classroom experience isn’t nearly as valuable as actually leading people 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 people 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 people 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 leadership quote reminds us to see things from the perspective of the people 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 is an excellent way of explaining 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

This quote by Emerson reminds us to push into new areas and take people where no one has yet been.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leadership should be more participative than directive, more enabling than performing.
~Mary D. Poole
The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves.
~Ray Kroc

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

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

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

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

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

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
~Harold R. McAlindon

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

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

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What is the most important skill for a new leader?

Constant learning. Public speaking is also important – take toastmasters.
Jim Estill from Time Leadership – CEO Blog

It is much easier to want to follow someone who is constantly improving themselves.  Public speaking is something that is often overlooked. Even a leaders that does no public speaking needs the communication skills that come from having a good public speaking ability.

Connection skills: connection to work, organization, and the people you lead. Getting everyone to connect at an authentic level to their strengths and to leverage their strengths in the service of the organization. Remember as leaders we are human.
David Zinger from Employee Engagement

I have definitely seem many people try to lead who do not have this ability.  Some of this comes from having a “I’m the leader, you are the follower” attitude.  Some comes from simply not spending enough time paying attention to those around you.

There are so many, but I think the most important skill for a new leader is to learn the art of command. This includes a new leader taking unpopular stands when necessary, facing adversity head on and encouraging open debate as a way to work through tough challenges and crises. Young leaders have to develop the emotional and mental strength to be able to communicate with higher management, investors and tough competitors, and in order to do this, a leader has to come up with big ideas and express them with passion and conviction. A young leader has to know the “cutting line” as to when he/she will say “We’re moving on” and then follow through each decision with a presence that communicates strength and confidence.
Leadership Coach Bea Fields, President of Bea Fields Companies, Inc. from Five Star Leader.com

Very good advice.  At least part of this comes down to knowing what to do. Early in my career I watched my boss avoid confrontation on a particular issue.  I didn’t understand why she didn’t push to “take care of things.”  One month later, the situation resolved itself without her needing to create any type of conflict.  I realized that she had the experience to know when to push and when to let things go.  It was extremely valuable and something I worked hard to develop in myself.

Thought!!!!! Leaders must keep things in perspective and most of all, keep the Desired Outcomes in mind. They must also continually remind their people of the purpose behind the processes. People need to find meaning in their work.
Jim Cathcart from Cathcart Institute, Inc

This is another area where I’ve seen a number of counter examples.  I’ve worked with companies where no one knew exactly what they were trying to do because the head of the company didn’t want to tell them his goals.  His logic was that if they new his goals and missed them people would be discouraged.  What he didn’t seem to realize is that everyone was running in different directions because no one was communicating their purpose, direction and why those things were important.

The ability to connect with and communicate with others. Leadership is not so much about what you do. It’s about what you can encourage and inspire others to do. It’s about creating a vision and communicating that vision to others. Leaders inspire people and point people to a brighter and better future and empower them to take action to make that future a reality.

Jon Gordon, author of the international best seller, The Energy Bus from www.JonGordon.com

This is a good distinction about the role of a leader.  Leaders often get too caught up in doing all the work and don’t spend enough time communicating their vision to people around them.  This is one of the reasons leaders hit a glass ceiling when it comes to growth.

Humility
Bussta Brown from Leadership Cultivation

Humility is one of those things that can help everything else fall into place.

Humility – the ability to understand that they are a conduit for activity not the driver of activity. Leaders need to value the input and work of the team – demonstrate that value and continue to set goals and objectives for the team to tackle.
Paul Hebert from Incentive Intelligence

Another vote for humility.  It is sometimes difficult for a leader to get to the point where they understand that the value of their team working together toward the goal is often greater than getting things done exactly the way the leader would do it on their own.

As John F Kennedy once said ‘Leaders are perpetual learners’. An attitude of openess towards learning – learning from every single incident how much ever trivial it appears to be, learning from every single person that they meet, how much ever small that person appears to be – is the most important skill for a leader. Leaders should go around with a permenant ‘Learner’s Board’ around their neck.
Sangeeth Varghese from LeadCap: Building a nation of leaders

When a leader things they have “arrived” they are probably not going to accomplish much more.

Being able to learn from everyone around them – as quickly as possible.
Marshall Goldsmith from Marshall Goldsmith Library

This is an interesting perspective.  So much of the time we focus on the way that leaders need to communicate out and teach people around them.  It is just as important for them to quickly learn from the people they are working with.

This is a tough question. There are so many important skills to be developed simultaneously and that development is continual. If I have to choose one I would say communication. If a leader is a poor communicator, he will never be able to create the cultural climate necessary to bring about positive change. Leadership is about taking people from point A to point B and this rarely happens in a straight line. It’s more like leading people through an obstacle course while blindfolded. The leader has to stay ahead of the team, pointing out the obstacles and communicating where to go next.

In the ancient middle east, shepherds would share large, walled, areas for their sheep to sleep in at night. These areas were meant for the protection of the sheep from predators such as wolves. The sheep would intermingle in the fold and there was no way to distinguish on shepherd’s sheep from the other by looking at them. Interestingly, when a particular shepherd was ready to take their sheep to pasture, he would simply walk into the fold and make a unique sound with his voice. His sheep knew his voice and his special command. They would get up and follow him out of the fold.

Leaders must develop their unique voice.
Tad Thompson from Total Leadership

The way leadership is often taught is to point out how other leaders did things. Tad’s point about developing your unique voice is often overlooked.  This isn’t to say you can’t learn from the success and failures of others, but it is always important to look at what is working for someone else and figure out how to apply it given your particular personality, goals, and values.

The two essentials for any successful leader are the ability to choose the right strategy and the right people. I have found that the most difficult part of solving this equation is learning to eliminate bad strategy and fire unproductive leaders. There is a natural human reluctance to do much of either, which is why most leaders are mediocre.
Will Marre from Will Marre’s Blog Site

Having a good definition of success is vital for both of these things.  I see a lot of leaders particularly in non-profits who determine success based on how things feel–not on how well they are working. With a business dollars becomes a pretty easy to understand metric, but you need to have other very measurable goals besides money.  Once you have a good measurement, it is easier to determine who needs to go and what strategies are not effective.

Setting sensible priorities for him or herself and those being supervised. It’s easy to yell for results and set near-impossible targets, but all it proves is that you’re an idiot. Macho management, the approach most often practiced today, is based on the erroneous belief that pushing people to their limit is both motivating and acceptable. In reality, all it does is encourage them to cut corners and feed you with whatever you want to hear, just to get you off their backs. No one can do quality work, let alone be creative, if they’re stressed and exhausted. Focus only on what really matters and dump the rest.
Carmine Coyote from Slow Leadership

In this respect, good leaders are kind of like good teachers.  They set goals/assignments that are carefully chosen to help people stretch but still succeed.  The momentum of success is then carried on to the next goal/assignment.

I know it’s three, but I believe these three are the tripod of success: Insight, Influence, Integrity.
Shelley Holmes from Leadership and Motivation Training

The ability to understand beyond what is apparent on the surface, the ability to move people toward a desired result, and the ability to operate ethically and inline with your values are all key traits.

Empathy. Understanding others. ‘Sizing people up’.
David Straker from Changing Minds

“Sizing people up” is an interesting skill to try to develop.  Some people have an uncanny ability to read people, but everyone can develop at least some skill in this area simply by becoming more conscious of how you “feel” about various people you meet.

Listening. It is the key to learning, adapting, building community, and developing vision.
Don Frederiksen from Lead Quietly

I think this ties in well with humility that was suggested earlier.  People who are not humble are not going to listen.  People who don’t listen are going to make mistakes that could have been avoided.

Effective communication skills are vital. That includes giving assignments, checking for understanding, following up to make sure that understanding translates into behavior and talking to people about performance or behavior in ways that help them and the team perform better.

For one behavior, I’d pick touching base a lot. Many good things flow from this.
Wally Bock from Three Star Leadership

I see a lot of leaders with a deficit in the area of followup.  They give assignments without any clear indication of how or when success will be measured.  From what I’ve seen of the military leadership model, they seem to do a great job of associating goals and assignments with measurements of success and planned followup.  It is much easier to move forward when followup becomes part of the culture instead of something that only occurs when things go wrong.

Connected to my first answer, my vote would be for communication skills. You can have the most fabulous, legacy-destined message in the world, but you won’t get very far if you cannot articulate it clearly enough to inspire others, causing them to enroll in your goal or movement. Campaigning wow projects has to be your forte: Great leaders are energy creators who infuse people with optimism and fire them up with positive expectancy.
Rosa Say from Managing with Aloha Coaching

Another vote for communication.  It is interesting to consider that the leader with a mediocre vision and good communication skills may still accomplish more than someone with a great vision and mediocre communication skills.

Assertiveness. Clean, clear, unequivocal, don’t-mess-about-with-me, communication is the essential tool of leadership. People need to understand you and they need to know what is important, why it is important, and when it has to be done by. Without this skill, you’ll find delegating very difficult and will become endlessly mired down in tactical detail.
Rowan Manahan from Fortify Your Oasis

When Lafayette was working with Washington’s troops he commented on how the American soldiers would do anything once they knew the reasoning behind it.

Relationship-building. You must be able to walk the walk and talk the talk with people from all angles of the organization. Be nice, friendly, firm, and persuasive. I had a great boss who said that you can easily learn the ‘analytics stuff’, but it takes years of grinding to influence throughout the organization.
Dan Naden from Naden’s Corner

Influence is something very hard to measure, but very vital in getting almost anything done.

The ability to enroll their team in helping to deliver the solution or change needed by helping them all to become leaders, i.e. by building a “distributed leadership” approach in the team, rather than the old-fashioned hierarchical structures.
Mick Yates from LeaderValues

Having compassion and heart is an essential ingredient to leadership. The heart is often a difficult thing to discuss in a business context because people automatically feel that they will be “walked all over” if they are too compassionate. But real compassion and heart is not necessarily soft, but it is truthful. Great leaders see individuals and see their strengths. You can’t really ‘see’ another person without having full compassion and releasing judgments. The slate needs to be clean as a leader. When a leader comes loaded with preconceived notions about people and/or situations, they don’t allow room for others to rise to the occasion.
Laura Lopez from Laura Lopez and Company

It’s not so much a skill as it is an ability. Leaders must develop the ability to challenge their own mental models (assumptions, beliefs, perceptions) that shape their decision-making and the actions they take. If their mental models are oriented in the right way (for instance, believing that people generally want to contribute their best every day), then it’s easy to help them develop the specific skills necessary to unleash the talents of the people in their organization. If their mental models are oriented in the wrong way (for instance, believing that people don’t want to perform their best or they are merely trading time for money), then all the skill development in the whole world won’t help the leader be more effective.

Here’s a real world example. Organizations spend millions of dollars every year developing the listening skills of their leaders. They teach them very specific skills about establishing the right environment for most effective listening, minimizing distractions, maintaining eye contact, asking appropriate follow-up questions and re-stating what the other person said. All of which are important. But, if the leader thinks the person they are “listening to” is just a whiner or complainer, the skills don’t matter. They leader is not going to hear what the other person is saying. On the other hand, if the leader truly believes that the other person has something valuable to contribute, even if they are “whining,” then the leader will get the message almost in spite of their actual “skills.” The leader’s effectiveness is determined by his/her mental models.

The challenge is that most of our mental models about leadership are baked in and hidden. Often, leaders aren’t aware of the assumptions they make or their underlying beliefs. And, it can be scary to hold those assumptions and beliefs up for examination and possible changes. So, developing the capability to do so distinguishes great leaders from others.
Sean Ryan from WhiteWater Consulting Group

I think that strongly relates to some of the previous suggestions of trying to learn from everyone. Listening to learn is a lot more effective that following some type of list where you are supposed to repeat what they say, etc. Sean is right. If you think the person has nothing to contribute, it doesn’t matter how good your “listening skills” are developed.

Maintain confidentiality for what they are told. Whether it is something from employees (“I have cancer”) or from other managers (“We need to lay off 10% of the department”), a leader has to maintain confidentiality in order to have trust.
Scot Herrick from Career Management for Cubicle Warriors

This can be a challenge, but I’ve seen many people in leadership positions ruin any influence they have with their employees because they violated their trust.

Communication. Work on your ability to share your ideas in verbal and written form. Be comfortable standing in front of a group. Be able to communicate with passion on subjects you know only a little about! Have solid skills in clear, concise writing.

Military leaders must be able to give clear orders, to share their vision, to inspire people. All require good communication skills. I do not know a senior military leader who cannot command a room!
Thomas Magness from Leader Business

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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