Ineffective Leader Quotes

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Leaders must either invest a reasonable amount of time attending to fears and feelings, or squander an unreasonable amount of time trying to manage ineffective and unproductive behavior.
Brené Brown (Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.)
The only meaningful measure for a leader is whether the team succeeds or fails. For all the definitions, descriptions, and characterizations of leaders, there are only two that matter: effective and ineffective. Effective leaders lead successful teams that accomplish their mission and win. Ineffective leaders do not. The
Jocko Willink (Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win)
[Public housing projects] are not lacking in natural leaders,' [Ellen Lurie, a social worker in East Harlem] says. 'They contain people with real ability, wonderful people many of them, but the typical sequence is that in the course of organization leaders have found each other, gotten all involved in each others' social lives, and have ended up talking to nobody but each other. They have not found their followers. Everything tends to degenerate into ineffective cliques, as a natural course. There is no normal public life. Just the mechanics of people learning what s going on is so difficult. It all makes the simplest social gain extra hard for these people.
Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)
When the performance of a unit goes down after an officer leaves, it is taken as a sign that he was a good leader, not that he was ineffective in training his people properly.
L. David Marquet (Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders)
Ineffective leadership, is the plight of followers who anoint power to the autocratic persons who's visions are not founded but are rather arbitrary in their nature.
Wayne Chirisa
6. Focus on Them, Not Yourself: The number one problem of inexperienced speakers and ineffective leaders is that they focus on themselves.
John C. Maxwell (The Maxwell Daily Reader: 365 Days of Insight to Develop the Leader Within You and Influence Those Around You)
The only meaningful measure for a leader is whether the team succeeds or fails. For all the definitions, descriptions, and characterizations of leaders, there are only two that matter: effective and ineffective. Effective leaders lead successful teams that accomplish their mission and win. Ineffective leaders do not.
Jocko Willink (Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win)
People who lack vision almost always lack passion. Incompetent leaders are ineffective and they often stay that way.
John C. Maxwell
But without a team—a group of individuals working to accomplish a mission—there can be no leadership. The only meaningful measure for a leader is whether the team succeeds or fails. For all the definitions, descriptions, and characterizations of leaders, there are only two that matter: effective and ineffective. Effective leaders lead successful teams that accomplish their mission and win. Ineffective leaders do not. The
Jocko Willink (Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win)
Although we intuitively know the world has changed, most leaders reflect a model and leader development process that are sorely out of date. We often demand unrealistic levels of knowledge in leaders and force them into ineffective attempts to micromanage.
Stanley McChrystal (Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World)
Once I did find my voice, I saw that it was necessary to speak up in order to be as effective as possible in my role. Yet, many of the women around me still fell into the trap of being seen as ineffective or weak because they never took a vocal stand. No matter how brilliant and impressive these women may have been in one-on-one discussions, not speaking up in meetings hurt their chances of succeeding professionally. When women don't share their ideas with a large number of people, their contributions are easily over looked , and it's difficult for them to be seen as leaders. People naturally want to follow people who take a stand and voice their opinions with confidence.
Fran Hauser (The Myth of the Nice Girl: Achieving a Career You Love Without Becoming a Person You Hate)
It is important to note that the lampstand in the tabernacle did not cast a broad light, illuminating everything in the tabernacle; the focus of its beam was specifically on the bread of presence. Likewise, the church is not called to illuminate everything -- its light should be concentrated on showing others who God is. For church leaders, our jobs are clear: we have to keep the wicks trimmed, the light burning, and the lampstand in its proper place. if the light begins to dim, we must immediately move into action. God's intention is for the church to be placed strategically in culture in order to show Himself to the world. Anytime the church becomes ineffective in its role to illuminate Christ, it must rekindle and reinvent itself around its core purpose.
Reggie Joiner (Think Orange: Imagine the Impact When Church and Family Collide...)
Where should one turn for guidance in an appraisal of of the essence of justice, morality, ethics, religion, science, literaturem, and the like? Not to the past, for history is willfully misinterpreted; and not to the church, which is ineffective because of the cowardice of its leaders. Even science cannot be helpful beccause its exponents have succeeded only in destroying the harmony of life. It is therefore the duty of literature to rediscover the truth and beauty of life that other means have failed to find.
Hymen Chonon Berkowitz
What’s the mission? Planning begins with mission analysis. Leaders must identify clear directives for the team. Once they themselves understand the mission, they can impart this knowledge to their key leaders and frontline troops tasked with executing the mission. A broad and ambiguous mission results in lack of focus, ineffective execution, and mission creep. To prevent this, the mission must be carefully refined and simplified so that it is explicitly clear and specifically focused to achieve the greater strategic vision for which that mission is a part.
Jocko Willink (Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win)
I have again been asked to explain how one can "become a Daoists..." with all of the sad things happening in our world today, Laozi and Zhuangzi give words of advice, tho not necessarily to become a Daoist priest or priestess... " So many foreigners who want to become “Religious Daoists” 道教的道师 (道士) do not realize that they must not only receive a transmission of a Lu 籙 register which identifies their Daoist school, and learn as well how to sing the ritual melodies, play the flute, stringed instruments, drums, and sacred dance steps, required to be an ordained and functioning Daoist priest or priestess. This process usually takes 10 years or more of daily discipleship and practice, to accomplish. There are 86 schools and genre of Daoist rituals listed in the Baiyun Guan Gazeteer, 白雲觀志, which was edited by Oyanagi Sensei, in Tokyo, 1928, and again in 1934, and re-published by Baiyun Guan in Beijing, available in their book shop to purchase. Some of the schools, such as the Quanzhen Longmen 全真龙门orders, allow their rituals and Lu registers to be learned by a number of worthy disciples or monks; others, such as the Zhengyi, Qingwei, Pole Star, and Shangqing 正一,清微,北极,上请 registers may only be taught in their fullness to one son and/or one disciple, each generation. Each of the schools also have an identifying poem, from 20 or 40 character in length, or in the case of monastic orders (who pass on the registers to many disciples), longer poems up to 100 characters, which identify the generation of transmission from master to disciple. The Daoist who receives a Lu register (給籙元科, pronounced "Ji Lu Yuanke"), must use the character from the poem given to him by his or her master, when composing biao 表 memorials, shuwen 梳文 rescripts, and other documents, sent to the spirits of the 3 realms (heaven, earth, water /underworld). The rituals and documents are ineffective unless the correct characters and talismanic signature are used. The registers are not given to those who simply practice martial artists, Chinese medicine, and especially never shown to scholars. The punishment for revealing them to the unworthy is quite severe, for those who take payment for Lu transmission, or teaching how to perform the Jinlu Jiao and Huanglu Zhai 金籙醮,黃籙齋 科儀 keyi rituals, music, drum, sacred dance steps. Tang dynasty Tangwen 唐文 pronunciation must also be used when addressing the highest Daoist spirits, i.e., the 3 Pure Ones and 5 Emperors 三请五帝. In order to learn the rituals and receive a Lu transmission, it requires at least 10 years of daily practice with a master, by taking part in the Jiao and Zhai rituals, as an acolyte, cantor, or procession leader. Note that a proper use of Daoist ritual also includes learning Inner Alchemy, ie inner contemplative Daoist meditation, the visualization of spirits, where to implant them in the body, and how to summon them forth during ritual. The woman Daoist master Wei Huacun’s Huangting Neijing, 黃庭內經 to learn the esoteric names of the internalized Daoist spirits. Readers must be warned never to go to Longhu Shan, where a huge sum is charged to foreigners ($5000 to $9000) to receive a falsified document, called a "license" to be a Daoist! The first steps to true Daoist practice, Daoist Master Zhuang insisted to his disciples, is to read and follow the Laozi Daode Jing and the Zhuangzi Neipian, on a daily basis. Laozi Ch 66, "the ocean is the greatest of all creatures because it is the lowest", and Ch 67, "my 3 most precious things: compassion for all, frugal living for myself, respect all others and never put anyone down" are the basis for all Daoist practice. The words of Zhuangzi, Ch 7, are also deeply meaningful: "Yin and Yang were 2 little children who loved to play inside Hundun (ie Taiji, gestating Dao). They felt sorry because Hundun did not have eyes, or eats, or other senses. So everyday they drilled one hole, ie 2 eyes, 2 ears, 2 nostrils, one mouth; and on the 7th day, Hundun died.
Michael Saso
In hunter-gatherer terms, these senior executives are claiming a disproportionate amount of food simply because they have the power to do so. A tribe like the !Kung would not permit that because it would represent a serious threat to group cohesion and survival, but that is not true for a wealthy country like the United States. There have been occasional demonstrations against economic disparity, like the Occupy Wall Street protest camp of 2011, but they were generally peaceful and ineffective. (The riots and demonstrations against racial discrimination that later took place in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, led to changes in part because they attained a level of violence that threatened the civil order.) A deep and enduring economic crisis like the Great Depression of the 1930s, or a natural disaster that kills tens of thousands of people, might change America’s fundamental calculus about economic justice. Until then, the American public will probably continue to refrain from broadly challenging both male and female corporate leaders who compensate themselves far in excess of their value to society. That
Sebastian Junger (Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging)
President Obama warned that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would pose a “red line” that would trigger an American military response. In August 2013, word filtered out that Assad’s forces had used poison gas against a rebel suburb of Damascus, killing as many as fourteen hundred people. This was a key moment. The United States was just a few hours away from launching airstrikes. “Our finger was on the trigger,” General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later said.13 Obama decided otherwise. He concluded that airpower would be insufficient and ineffective, and he wanted congressional authorization but could not get it. He had come into office to end America’s two wars—in Iraq and Afghanistan—and he was loath to slip into a third, with no clear path to success. Air power in Libya had helped remove Gadhafi, but it had left chaos behind. Obama was also demonstrating that, as he later said, he had broken with the military response “playbook” of the “foreign policy establishment.” Moreover, he feared that an air strike would not eliminate all the chemical weapons, and Assad could then claim that “he had successfully defied the United States.”14 Still, an American president had said using chemical weapons was a red line, but had not acted on that. Coming on top of Mubarak, it made leaders in other countries question the credibility of the United States and its reliability as an ally.
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
You will promote harmony in your words and actions. You will not compete with other leaders or compare to them. You will work together with others to make meaningful changes. You will not measure success in numbers: dollars, followers, ranks, sales, reviews, Facebook likes. Rather, you will measure by people helped, connections made, and moments savoured. You will help people accept themselves by being real with them. You will not show up on the pulpit for attention or approval. You will show up because you have something important to say. You will build tribes instead of cults. You will see your followers as equals. You will learn with them, and they will trust you. And there is nothing like the trust of people who resonate with your most authentic, vulnerable self to push you, every day, to do your best. It will hold you to a higher standard of behaviour. As a self-aware leader, you can be honest. This is the missing element in so many ineffective and addictive doctrines. You can tell people the things that are true but hard to hear. Not everyone will be brave enough to sidestep idealism, but those who do will appreciate your honesty. If you do not describe the darkness and the light, the voyager who has followed in your footsteps will believe he is lost. He will blame himself or blame you for teaching him lies. By being honest about what the journey looks like—failures, warts, and all—your teachings will become sources of consolation rather than frustration. As that voyager travels down the crooked, lonely paths within him, he may find a dark, terrifying cave, but if you mentioned it, he will feel elated. Yes, he will think, it looks horrifying, but at least I’m on track if I’ve found this awful thing. Your honesty may be bitter medicine, but when it digests, it’ll provide such potent healing that its taste will become a distant memory.
Vironika Tugaleva (The Art of Talking to Yourself)
Such creativity with statistics is by no means an isolated incident, as revealed by The Climate Change Performance Index[20] published by Germanwatch and Climate Action Network Europe in 2014. Again, the wrong countries were at risk of becoming the top performers, and again, the situation was fixed with creative carbon accounting for nuclear. This particular index went even further than WWF did and declared nuclear electricity to have the same emissions as the dirtiest mainstream electricity, coal power. Given that this was an especially climate oriented index, it is interesting to note that a country could improve its score by replacing nearly emission-free nuclear with practically any mix of fossil fuels. One really cannot make this stuff up. We are sure that similar creative ”indices” are already in preparation somewhere. Using deliberately falsified indices and reports for actual, sensible real world policy is of course impossible, as they simply seek to distort the reality to conform to an ideologically preconceived position. We believe that environmental organizations are in fact never going to tell us which countries have historically cut their carbon emissions the fastest and the most. The leaders in this game are those countries that built a lot of nuclear in the 1980s, like France and Sweden. It is worth noting that these cuts were accomplished with technology from the 1970s, and were achieved completely by accident, as a by-product of energy policy enacted for completely different reasons. There was no active climate policy, but the results were many times better than what Germany has managed with its Energiewende since the early 2000s. It is worth imagining what an active and evidence-based climate policy that pushed aggressively for renewables, energy savings and nuclear could therefore achieve. Image 10 - The best ten years of emissions reductions in four countries. A major part of Germany’s reductions, called “Wallfall”, are due to the country’s unification and the following closure of many of ineffective power plants and industry in eastern Germany. In addition to these countries, also Belgium and Finland have cut their emissions markedly with nuclear power.
Rauli Partanen (Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future? (2017 edition))
Within Germany, unrest fermented after Germany lost World War I, and the German people, including the workers and the military, detested the idea that they would be held accountable for the war and would have to pay reparations to their former enemies. On November 3, 1918, the Kaiserliche Marine, German Imperial Navy, had an internal revolt between the officers and the sailors, known as the Kiel mutiny. On November 6th, the revolt reached Wilhelmshaven, triggering a revolution throughout Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm II had proven to be an ineffective wartime leader and lost the support of his Generals. However, it was when he lost the support of his beloved Navy that he abdicated and fled to the Netherlands. This act heralded the end of the German monarchy. Living in exile in Huis Doorn, in the Netherlands, Wilhelm II died on June 3, 1941, of an embolism.
Hank Bracker
Over multiple generations they had failed to produce any leaders, so the ineffective had led the inefficient to produce the insufficient.
Michael Anderle (Ahead Full (The Kurtherian Gambit, #19))
If being a leader turns out to be a bad experience, it is almost always because of the leader’s own ineffectiveness. And considering that few people ever get any kind of specific training in leader effectiveness, it is easy to understand why being a leader so often is difficult, draining and disappointing.
Dr. Thomas Gordon
The biggest risk to democracies is that they produce such fragmented and antagonistic decision making that they can be ineffective, which leads to bad results, which leads to revolutions led by populist autocrats who represent large segments of the population who want to have a strong, capable leader get control of the chaos and make the country work well for them.
Ray Dalio (Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed or Fail)
The imperial Russian government's ineffectiveness in World War I had forced the tsar to abdicate in 1917. Following the February Revolution in that year the Provisional Government replaced the tsarist regime, but as a result of the October Revolution the Bolsheviks seized power, executing the tsar and his family, and the Russian Empire collapsed. The Ukrainian Central Rada, or governing council, proclaimed Ukraine an autonomous republic, but meanwhile the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, still at war with Russia, drove out the Russian army and occupied Ukraine. The Germans supported a coup led by Pavel Petrovich Skoropadsky (1873-1945), who in April 1918 declared himself the Hetman of All Ukraine, a position he held until the following December, when, following the end of the war and the withdrawal of the German army, he was deposed and fled. It is here, in December 1918, that the novel White Guard begins, in a Ukraine damaged by World War I and engulfed in the Russian Civil War, with all of its confusion, violence, and chaos. As the novel unfolds, the Germans have mostly withdrawn and the hetman, essentially a German puppet, is under siege by Ukrainian nationalist and socialist forces led by Semyon Vasilievich Petlyura (1879-1926), who fought unsuccessfully for Ukraine's independence following the Revolution of 1917. Petlyura's nationalism made him an enemy of the Bolsheviks, and his socialist ideas made him an enemy of the Whites, who were opposed to the Communists. The Russian forces (both political and military) who became known as the Whites fought against the Red Army in the Civil War from 1918 to 1921. Their military arm was known as the White Army, or White Guard. Ideologically quite diverse, the Whites were not so much a single army as a confederation of counterrevolutionary forces loosely united by their anti-bolshevism, and to a lesser extent by the idea of preserving and restoring the Russian monarchy and Russian Empire, as well as by their anti-liberalism and anti-Semitism. After the events described in the novel, the Soviet army recaptured Ukraine, driving Petlyura out, and held Kiev in 1919 from February 6 until August 31. From August 31 until about December 16, forces under Anton Ivanovich Denikin (1872-1947), a general in the imperial Russian army before the Revolution and one of the leaders of the Whites in the Civil War, were in charge. Then, from December 16 the Soviet government was back in the city until May 6, 1920, when it was occupied by the Poles, who on June 11 were forced out by the Red Army. Three centers of power, revealing the basic vectors of all the coups, had taken shape in Kiev: the military district headquarters (which included counterrevolutionaries, monarchists, and White Guards), the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies (Bolsheviks and other Communists), and the Ukrainian Central Rada (national-ist, independence-oriented, and Petlyurist).
Evgeny Dobrenko (The White Guard)
For all the definitions, descriptions, and characterizations of leaders, there are only two that matter: effective and ineffective. Effective leaders lead successful teams that accomplish their mission and win. Ineffective leaders do not. The
Jocko Willink (Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win)
When a bad SEAL leader walked into a debrief and blamed everyone else, that attitude was picked up by subordinates and team members, who then followed suit. They all blamed everyone else, and inevitably the team was ineffective and unable to properly execute a plan.
Jocko Willink (Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win)
For all the definitions, descriptions, and characterizations of leaders, there are only two that matter: effective and ineffective. Effective leaders lead successful teams that accomplish their mission and win. Ineffective leaders do not.
Jocko Willink (Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win)
We know some effective leaders who work only 40–50 hours a week, but who we nonetheless classify as very hard workers—their level of intensity and concentration when at work is incredibly high. Conversely, we know some workaholics who work 90 hours per week and are basically ineffective. More is not necessarily better.
Jim Collins (BE 2.0 (Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0): Turning Your Business into an Enduring Great Company)
If you read these stories and think Who has the time? I’d ask you to calculate the cost of distrust and disconnection in terms of productivity, performance, and engagement. Here’s what I know to be true from my experience and what I consider to be one of the most important learnings from this research: Leaders must either invest a reasonable amount of time attending to fears and feelings, or squander an unreasonable amount of time trying to manage ineffective and unproductive behavior.
Brené Brown (Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.)
Meanwhile, the members of Jepsen’s Russian management team were equally annoyed at Jepsen’s apparent lack of competence as a leader. Here are some of the complaints they offered during focus group interviews: 1.​He is a weak, ineffective leader 2.​He doesn’t know how to manage 3.​He gave up his corner office on the top floor, suggesting to the company that our team is of no importance 4.​He is incompetent
Erin Meyer (The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business)
Ineffective leaders lack personal structure, so they often chose the path of easy in their personal lives rather than choosing the hard work that produces results. They have chaotic schedules, are disorganized, and always seem to operate in a state of overwhelm and irritation. Weak leaders lack the discipline to structure their days, their thoughts, and their actions, and they constantly have their priorities out of order.
Bedros Keuilian (Man Up: How to Cut the Bullsh!t and Kick @ss in Business (and in Life))
When you see a leader’s behavior (even when it may appear obviously effective or ineffective to you), you should not automatically conclude something good or bad about the leader, or what is the right way or wrong way for leaders to act. You need to think about the effectiveness of that behavior in that context with those followers.
Richard L. Hughes (Leadership: Enhancing the Lessons of Experience)
The best, most successful personal relationships are with those who routinely enjoy shared values, beautiful chemistry, and work through past and present differences. Vulnerability is very important for leaders in life and the workplace. There is game-changing power and strength in being openly vulnerable and transparent, allowing leaders to emotionally connect with family, teammates, and employees. In contrast, ineffective leadership is an inability to communicate and display vulnerability.
Erik Seversen (Peak Performance: Mindset Tools for Leaders (Peak Performance Series))
2. “When you make simple things complicated, you will struggle over issues others with very little effort are excelling at, and you will naturally find all the rational opinions and suggestions why you should stick to your ineffective approach. Don't because you want things perfectly done refuse to take the reasonable simple steps you can take now; if you are a leader of a people, try not to define Integrity in terms of your own sense of piety, try an inclusive baseline approach or, you may just end up driving your people insane
Onakpoberuo Onoriode Victor
There are, likewise, other senior leaders who are so far removed from the troops executing on the frontline that they become ineffective. These leaders might give the appearance of control, but they actually have no idea what their troops are doing and cannot effectively direct their teams. We call this trait “battlefield aloofness.” This attitude creates a significant disconnect between leadership and the troops, and such a leader’s team will struggle to effectively accomplish their mission.
Jocko Willink (Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win)
it is very ineffective (perhaps irresponsible) for organizations that build software systems to decide on the shape, responsibilities, and boundaries of teams without input from technical leaders.
Matthew Skelton (Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow)
Without cultural change, we are hopeless to change existing results.5 Of all changes, cultural change is the most difficult. It is essentially changing the collective DNA of an entire group of people. To understand how to change culture, it is helpful to know how change works in general. Changing Church Culture Change is extremely difficult. One of the most vivid and striking examples of this painful reality is the inability of heart patients to change even when confronted with grim reality. Roughly six hundred thousand people have a heart bypass each year in the United States. These patients are told they must change. They must change their eating habits, must exercise, and quit smoking and drinking. If they do not, they will die. The case for change is so compelling that they are literally told, “Change or die.”6 Yet despite the clear instructions and painful reality, 90 percent of the patients do not change. Within two years of hearing such brutal facts, they remain the same. Change is that challenging for people. For the vast majority of patients, death is chosen over change. Yet leadership is often about change, about moving a group of people to a new future. Perhaps the most recognized leadership book on leading an organization to change is John Kotter’s Leading Change. And when ministry leaders speak or write about leadership, they often look to the wisdom found in the book of Nehemiah, as it chronicles Nehemiah’s leadership in rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem. Nehemiah led wide-scale change. Nehemiah never read Kotter’s book, and he led well without it. The Lord well equipped Nehemiah for the task of leading God’s people. But it is fascinating to see how Nehemiah’s actions mirror much of what Kotter has observed in leaders who successfully lead change. With a leadership development culture in mind, here are the eight steps for leading change, according to Kotter, and how one can see them in Nehemiah’s leadership. 1. Establish a sense of urgency. Leaders must create dissatisfaction with an ineffective status quo. They must help others develop a sense of angst over the brokenness around them. Nehemiah heard a negative report from Jerusalem, and it crushed him to the point of weeping, fasting, and prayer (Neh. 1:3–4). Sadly, the horrible situation in Jerusalem had become the status quo. The disgrace did not bother the people in the same way that it frustrated Nehemiah. After he arrived in Jerusalem, he walked around and observed the destruction. Before he launched the vision of rebuilding the wall, Nehemiah pointed out to the people that they were in trouble and ruins. He started with urgency, not vision. Without urgency, plans for change do not work. If you assess your culture and find deviant behaviors that reveal some inaccurate theological beliefs, you must create urgency by pointing these out. If you assess your culture and find a lack of leadership development, a sense of urgency must be created. Leadership development is an urgent matter because the mission the Lord has given us is so great.
Eric Geiger (Designed to Lead: The Church and Leadership Development)
Leaders must either invest a reasonable amount of time attending to fears and feelings, or squander an unreasonable amount of time trying to manage ineffective and unproductive behavior. What this means is that we must find the courage to get curious and possibly surface emotions and emotional experiences that people can’t articulate or that might be happening outside their awareness. If we find ourselves addressing the same problematic behaviors over and over, we may need to dig deeper to the thinking and feeling driving those behaviors.
Brené Brown (Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.)
Overreaction” also comes from the experience that people have had with loss in the past. When old losses haven’t been adequately dealt with, a sort of transition deficit is created—a readiness to grieve that needs only a new ending to set it off. We see this when people overreact to the dismissal of an obviously ineffective manager or leader or to some apparently insignificant change in policy or procedure. What they are actually reacting to is one or more losses in the past that have occurred
William Bridges (Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change)
If you have to spend your time motivating people, you're not a leader, you're an ineffective manager.
Richie Norton
Quoting page 56-57: Most important for the content of immigration reform, the driving force at the core of this movement, reaching back to the 1920s, were Jewish organizations long active in opposing racial and ethnic quotas. These included the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and the American Federation of Jews from Eastern Europe. Jewish members of Congress, particularly representatives from New York and Chicago, had maintained steady but largely ineffective pressure against the national origins quotas since the 1920s. But the war against Hitler and the postwar movement against colonialism sharply changed the ideological and moral environment, putting defenders of racial, caste, and ethnic hierarchies on the defensive. Jewish political leaders in New York, most prominently Governor Herbert Lehman, had pioneered in the 1940s in passing state antidiscrimination legislation. Importantly, these statutes and executive orders added “national origin” to race, color, and religion as impermissible grounds for discrimination. Following the shock of the Holocaust, Jewish leaders had been especially active in Washington in furthering immigration reform. To the public, the most visible evidence of the immigration reform drive was played by Jewish legislative leaders, such as Representative Celler and Senator Jacob Javits of New York. Less visible, but equally important, were the efforts of key advisers on presidential and agency staffs. These included senior policy advisers such as Julius Edelson and Harry Rosenfield in the Truman administration, Maxwell Rabb in the Eisenhower White House, and presidential aide Myer Feldman, assistant secretary of state Abba Schwartz, and deputy attorney general Norbert Schlei in the Kennedy-Johnson administration.
Hugh Davis Graham (Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America)
When a bad SEAL leader walked into a debrief and blamed everyone else, that attitude was picked up by subordinates and team members, who then followed suit. They all blamed everyone else, and inevitably the team was ineffective and unable to properly execute a plan. Continuing, I told the VP, “In those situations, you ended up with a unit that never felt they were to blame for anything. All they did was make excuses and ultimately never made the adjustments necessary to fix problems. Now, compare that to the commander who came in and took the blame. He said, ‘My subordinate leaders made bad calls; I must not have explained the overall intent well enough.’ Or, ‘The assault force didn’t execute the way I envisioned; I need to make sure they better understand my intent and rehearse more thoroughly.’ The good leaders took ownership of the mistakes and shortfalls. That’s the key difference.
Jocko Willink (Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win)
Joseph too was now firmly established in the public mind as the leader of the Nez Perce, and in public depictions he became both fiercer and greater. To those in the West, who saw each confrontation and Indian escape as another bloody step toward their own extinction, he became the embodiment of all that was dark and cunning in the Indian character. For those in the East, who rankled at the cruelty and ineffectiveness of the government’s Indian policy and were not in harm’s way from Indian actions, he became a heroic symbol of noble resistance—the father figure of a beleaguered band of men, women, and children who were accomplishing a brilliant escape from the relentless pursuit of the bumbling U.S. military. The man who was spending his days trying to move lodges and herds of horses and his nights worrying over a newborn infant and a wounded wife was being elevated in the public imagination to the status of a red Napoleon or red fiend; and he was becoming the lightning rod for a national debate on the justice and sufficiency of the government’s Indian policy. On the trail, however, the issues were much less abstract and much more dire. The warriors had little fear of pursuing soldiers because they knew that most were on foot and had proven cowardly when forced to fight armed men rather than sleeping women and children. They shared mocking stories of how the soldiers in the grove of trees had cried like babies when they were trapped, and they formed teepee-shaped piles of horse dung on the trail behind as a signal of derision to any troops who might be following.
Kent Nerburn (Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce: The Untold Story of an American Tragedy)
There are only two types of leaders: effective and ineffective.
Jocko Willink (Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win)
Unfortunately, when he looked at churches, he noted a pattern of neglect. Spiritual formation was pushed to the side by leaders who focused on other priorities and projects. When this happened, character formation became ineffective, watered down, or dropped altogether. Christian leaders often did not take character transformation seriously. Poor character was the elephant in the church no one wanted to acknowledge.4 Willard believed that obedience comes from inner character transformation, what he called “the renovation of the heart.” In his opinion, disappointingly few hearts were being renovated.
Jim Wilder (The Other Half of Church: Christian Community, Brain Science, and Overcoming Spiritual Stagnation)
How much awareness does the HR department have about software systems? Does the group of department leaders deciding how to allocate budget across teams know of the likely effects of their choices on the viability of the software architecture? Given that there is increasing evidence for the homomorphism behind Conway’s law, it is very ineffective (perhaps irresponsible) for organizations that build software systems to decide on the shape, responsibilities, and boundaries of teams without input from technical leaders. Organization design and software design are, in practice, two sides of the same coin, and both need to be undertaken by the same informed group of people. Allan Kelly’s view of a software architect’s role expands further on this idea: More than ever I believe that someone who claims to be an Architect needs both technical and social skills, they need to understand people and work within the social framework. They also need a remit that is broader than
Matthew Skelton (Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow)
I think somewhere along the way, in their evangelistic zeal, these church leaders lost sight of the baby and the manger and "peace on earth, goodwill to all." I do believe that the motives of those who use scare tactics to propel people down the aisle are sincere. I think they truly believe that if these methods are effective in bringing people to Christ, they are legitimate. But I also agree with Edge that if conversions aren't rooted in a thorough understanding of costly discipleship, they are ultimately ineffective in bringing people into the authentic Christian living that can't be separated from conversion.7
Susan M. Shaw (God Speaks to Us, Too: Southern Baptist Women on Church, Home, and Society)
Leaders can often convince themselves that they are too important to be dealing with the mundane issues of the organization . . . Never forget that there are also problems that need solving at the lowest possible level. Problems that, if not addressed, result in inefficiency, ineffectiveness, and low morale.
William H. McRaven (The Wisdom of the Bullfrog: Leadership Made Simple (But Not Easy))