Insights From The World’s Leading Thinkers On Leadership

‘Leadership is about feelings. Leadership is about emotions. Leadership is about those who follow. Leadership is about the people who are touched by the actions of leaders.’- Stuart Crainer & Des Dearlove

‘A turnaround leader must facilitate a psychological change of attitudes and behavior before organizational recovery can take place.’- Rosabeth Moss Kanter

‘Greatness starts with superb people. Great groups don’t exist without great leaders ….’- Warren Bennis

‘Most organizations are dull, and working life is mundane. … A great group is more than a collection of first-rate minds. … By looking at the possiblities, we can all improve.’- Warren Bennis

‘The leader is rarely the best or the brightest in the new organizations.’- Warren Bennis

‘No one can depend on lifelong loyalty or commitment to any organization.’- Warren Bennis

‘Successful leaders had four essential competencies: the ability to engage others through shared meaning, a distinctive and compelling voice, integrity, and adpative capacity.’

‘Dialogue between generations is important.’- Warren Bennis

‘Leadership is about hope, leadership is about change, and leadership is about the future.’– C.K. Prahalad

‘You cannot lead unless you have a point of view.’- C. K. Prahalad

‘Building a company requires 1 percent vision (without it, nothing matters) and 99 percent alignment of that vision with implementation. Vision provides the context, but alignment allows anyone to understand what the company is about and where it is headed…’- Jim Collins

‘To begin the journey to authentic leadership, a leader must understand the story of his or her own life.’- Bill George and Peter Sims

‘Authentic leaders work through others to achieve success.’- Bill George

‘Leadership is relational, and therefore followers are required if leadership is to exist. … Leadership is also nonhierarchical. In other words, having a fancy title does not make you a leader.’- Goffee and Jones

‘Leadership is also contextual- authentic leaders change their behavior to suit the context, while remaining true to themselves.’- Goffee and Jones

‘Leadership is about results. … Great leadership has the potential to excite people to extraordinary levels of achievement. But it is not only about performance; it is also about meaning.’- Rob Goffee

‘What works for one leader will not work for another. If you want to become a leader, you need to discover what it is about yourself that you can mobilize in a leadership context.’- Gareth Jones

‘Great organizations have leaders at all levels. Successful organizations- whether they be hospitals, charities, or commercial enterprises- seek to build leadership capability widely and to give people the opportunity to exercise it.’- Rob Goffee

‘Leadership is a relationship that is built actively by both parties. This web of relationships is fragile and requires constant re-creation.’- Gareth Jones

‘Leaders must be themselves in context. Great leaders are able to read the context and respond accordingly. They tap into what exists and bring more to the party.’- Gareth Coffee

‘To be effective, the leader needs to ensure that his or her bahaviors mesh sufficiently with the organizational culture to create traction. Leaders who fail to mesh will simply spin their wheels in isolation from their followers.’- Gareth Coffee

‘Leaders who succeed in changing organizations challenge the norms- but rarely all of norms, all at once. ... To change things, the leader must first gain at least minimal acceptance as a member- and the rules for early survival are rarely the same as the rules for longer-term success.’- Gareth Coffee

‘Leaders must reveal strengths, but show weaknesses; be individuals, but conform enough; establish intimacy, but keep their distance.’ Rob Jones

‘Why should anyone be led by you? Why should we be led by you? Effective leaders must answer these questions every day in everything they say and do.’- Gareth Coffee

‘Not only do leaders have to stop doing what they’re doing today in order to gaze into the future, but they also have to understand and respect the past, and to know which bits to keep and honor and which bits to discard and when.’- Liz Mellon

‘Charismatic leaders communicate through both verbal and nonverbal means.’- Jay Conger, leadership theorist

‘Charismatic leaders obtain the trust of their followers by translating their dissatisfaction with the status quo and the goals that will deliver their vision into behavior that appears to have a high risk of personal loss of position or status.’- Liz Mellon

‘People will follow bad leaders for much the same reasons that they follow good leaders. Bad leaders, for a time at least, provide order and structure, safety, simplicity, and certainty.’- Barbara Kellerman

‘Good leaders learn to temper their excesses. As leader who is ruled by his or her urges is a bad leader. Intemperate leaders lack self-control, and this is compounded by having followers who are willing or unable to intervene.’- Barbara Kellerman

‘What defines evil leadership? Deriving satisfaction from hurting others is one definition of evil. Evil leaders not only terrorize but seek to prolong suffering. With evil leadership, the leader and at least some followers commit atrocities.’- Barbara Kellerman

‘To get to the top of an organization, you’ve got to have this gigantic ego that keeps you going and allows you to make the sacrifices required, in terms of your personal life and your family, for example.’- Syd Finkelstein

‘Leaders are people with feelings (for the most part), and they are affected by the actions of their followers on both a professional and a personal level. If the followers underperform, it reflects poorly on the leader and may have an adverse impact on the leader’s career.’- John Gabarro and John Kotter

‘Leaders who don’t pay serious attention to those who are their subordinates miss out on an enormous opportunity to lead wisely and well. You can’t presume that all your subordinates are the same. You need to be able to distinguish among and between them, in order to lead appropriately for the particular audience you’re trying to target.’- John Gabarro and John Kotter

‘Great leaders conquer nations. Poor leaders get their troops killed, and possibly themselves as well.’- John Adair

‘Effective leaders manage their network well. Rather than recoiling from organizational politics, they embrace it, knowing that they need to make the right contacts in the organization if they are to exert influence in a productive way.’- Linda A. Hill

‘Leadership is not a popularity contest.’

‘Leadership is multifaceted balancing act. It demands learning. And it is driven by context as much as personal energy and ambition. It is dauntingly human.’

Source

Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove (2014). Leadership: Organizational Success Through Leadership