Great Quotes from business leaders

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Looking for an inspirational quote about leadership or leaders for your newsletter, business presentation, bulletin board or inspirational posters? These leadership quotes are useful to help motivation and inspiration at work. These quotes will help you and your coworkers talk and think about leadership.

Quotations

"A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves." -Lao Tzu

"The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority." -Ken Blanchard

"Leaders are made, they are not born. They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile." -Vince Lombardi

"Good leaders make people feel that they're at the very heart of things, not at the periphery.

Everyone feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the organization. When that happens people feel centered and that gives their work meaning." -Warren G. Bennis

"You do not lead by hitting people over the head - that's assault, not leadership." -Dwight D. Eisenhower

"A good leader is not the person who does things right, but the person who finds the right things to do." -Anthony T. Dadovano

"Leadership rests not only upon ability, not only upon capacity; having the capacity to lead is not enough. The leader must be willing to use it. His leadership is then based on truth and character. There must be truth in the purpose and will power in the character." -Vince Lombardi

"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

"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

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

"The quality of leadership, more than any other single factor, determines the success or failure of an organization." -Fred Fiedler and Martin Chemers in Improving Leadership Effectiveness

"I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers." -Ralph Nader

"Leadership is a combination of strategy and character. If you must be without one, be without the strategy." -Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf

"Leadership is a matter of having people look at you and gain confidence, seeing how you react. If you're in control, they're in control." -Tom Landry

"The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes." -Tony Blair

"Outstanding leaders go out of the way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it's amazing what they can accomplish." -Sam Walton

"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 high sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations." -Peter F. Drucker

"Not many of us will be leaders; and even those who are leaders must also be followers much of the time. This is the crucial role. Followers judge leaders. Only if the leaders pass that test do they have any impact. The potential followers, if their judgment is poor, have judged themselves. If the leader takes his or her followers to the goal, to great achievements, it is because the followers were capable of that kind of response."