Ineffective Leadership Quotes

Without appreciation and respect for other people, true leadership becomes ineffective, if not impossible.

Effective people lead their lives and manage their relationships around principles; ineffective people attempt to manage their time around priorities and their tasks around goals. Think effectiveness with people; efficiency with things.

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.

Speaking angrily to others is ineffective. Losing your temper is a sign of weakness. The aggression that wins on the battlefield, in business, or in life is directed not toward people but toward solving problems, achieving goals, and accomplishing the mission.

The person who is impatient with weakness will be ineffective in his leadership. The evidence of our strength lies not in the distance that separates us from other runners but in our closure with them, our slower pace for their sakes, our helping them pick it up and cross the line.

Leadership without the discipline of execution is incomplete and ineffective.

Let’s form a committee tasked with exploring why committees are so ineffective. Then we’ll stand-back and watch it argue and self-destruct.

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

I’ve seen many managers who shy away from leadership moments (e.g., any moment where the team/project needs someone to take decisive action) and retreat to tracking the efforts of others instead of facilitating or even participating in them. If all someone does is keep score and watch from the sidelines, he might be better suited for the accounting department. When someone in a leadership role consistently responds to pressure by getting out of the fray, he’s not leading — he’s hiding. Ineffective

Shifting customer needs are common in today's marketplace. Businesses must be adaptive and responsive to change while delivering an exceptional customer experience to be competitive. Traditional development and delivery frameworks such as waterfall are often ineffective. In contrast, Scrum is a value-driven agile approach which incorporates adjustments based on regular and repeated customer and stakeholder feedback. And Scrum’s built-in rapid response to change leads to substantial benefits such as fast time-to-market, higher satisfaction, and continuous improvement—which supports innovation and drives competitive advantage.

Often these approaches reflect the inverse of the habits of effective people. In fact, my brother, John Covey, who is a master teacher, sometimes refers to them as the seven habits of ineffective people: Be reactive: doubt yourself and blame others. Work without any clear end in mind. Do the urgent thing first. Think win/lose. Seek first to be understood. If you can’t win, compromise. Fear change and put off improvement. Just as personal victories precede public victories when effective people progress along the maturity continuum, so also do private failures portend embarrassing public failures when ineffective people regress along an

end of the continuum are the ineffective people who transfer responsibility by blaming other people, events, or the environment—anything or anybody “out there” so that they are not responsible for results. If I blame you, in effect I have empowered you. I have given my power to your weakness. Then I can create evidence that supports my perception that you are the problem. At the upper end of the continuum toward increasing effectiveness is self-awareness: “I know my tendencies, I know the scripts or programs that are in me, but I am not those scripts. I can rewrite my scripts.” You are aware that you are the creative force of your life. You are not the victim of conditions or conditioning. You can choose your response to any situation, to any person. Between what happens to you and your response is a degree of freedom. And the more you exercise that freedom, the larger it will become. As you work in your circle of influence and exercise that freedom, gradually you will stop being a “hot reactor” (meaning there’s little separation between stimulus and response) and start being a cool, responsible chooser—no matter what your genetic makeup, no matter how you were raised, no matter what your childhood experiences were or what the environment is. In your freedom to choose your response lies the power to achieve growth and happiness.

As it turned out, Mary Jo White and other attorneys for the Sacklers and Purdue had been quietly negotiating with the Trump administration for months. Inside the DOJ, the line prosecutors who had assembled both the civil and the criminal cases started to experience tremendous pressure from the political leadership to wrap up their investigations of Purdue and the Sacklers prior to the 2020 presidential election in November. A decision had been made at high levels of the Trump administration that this matter would be resolved quickly and with a soft touch. Some of the career attorneys at Justice were deeply unhappy with this move, so much so that they wrote confidential memos registering their objections, to preserve a record of what they believed to be a miscarriage of justice. One morning two weeks before the election, Jeffrey Rosen, the deputy attorney general for the Trump administration, convened a press conference in which he announced a “global resolution” of the federal investigations into Purdue and the Sacklers. The company was pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States and to violate the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, as well as to two counts of conspiracy to violate the federal Anti-kickback Statute, Rosen announced. No executives would face individual charges. In fact, no individual executives were mentioned at all: it was as if the corporation had acted autonomously, like a driverless car. (In depositions related to Purdue’s bankruptcy which were held after the DOJ settlement, two former CEOs, John Stewart and Mark Timney, both declined to answer questions, invoking their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves.) Rosen touted the total value of the federal penalties against Purdue as “more than $8 billion.” And, in keeping with what had by now become a standard pattern, the press obligingly repeated that number in the headlines. Of course, anyone who was paying attention knew that the total value of Purdue’s cash and assets was only around $1 billion, and nobody was suggesting that the Sacklers would be on the hook to pay Purdue’s fines. So the $8 billion figure was misleading, much as the $10–$12 billion estimate of the value of the Sacklers’ settlement proposal had been misleading—an artificial number without any real practical meaning, designed chiefly to be reproduced in headlines. As for the Sacklers, Rosen announced that they had agreed to pay $225 million to resolve a separate civil charge that they had violated the False Claims Act. According to the investigation, Richard, David, Jonathan, Kathe, and Mortimer had “knowingly caused the submission of false and fraudulent claims to federal health care benefit programs” for opioids that “were prescribed for uses that were unsafe, ineffective, and medically unnecessary.” But there would be no criminal charges. In fact, according to a deposition of David Sackler, the Department of Justice concluded its investigation without so much as interviewing any member of the family. The authorities were so deferential toward the Sacklers that nobody had even bothered to question them.

We cannot ignore the importance of spiritual character ineffective leadership journey.

The person who is impatient with weakness will be ineffective in his leadership.

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.

Archbishop Benson lived in a different era, but his rules for life carry relevance today: • Eagerly start the day’s main work. • Do not murmur at your busyness or the shortness of time, but buy up the time all around. • Never murmur when correspondence is brought in. • Never exaggerate duties by seeming to suffer under the load, but treat all responsibilities as liberty and gladness. • Never call attention to crowded work or trivial experiences. Before confrontation or censure, obtain from God a real love for the one at fault. Know the facts; be generous is your judgment. Otherwise, how ineffective, how unintelligible or perhaps provocative your well-intentioned censure may be. • Do not believe everything you hear; do not spread gossip. Do not seek praise, gratitude, respect, or regard for past service. • Avoid complaining when your advice or opinion is not consulted, or having been consulted, set aside. • Never allow yourself to be placed in favorable contrast with anyone. • Do not press conversation to your own needs and concerns. Seek no favors, nor sympathies; do not ask for tenderness, but receive what comes. • Bear the blame; do not share or transfer it. • Give thanks when credit for your own work or ideas is given to another.6

A mission without action is equally ineffective and futile as action without mission. Use the “power of precision,” and remember language shapes thought and thought shapes action.

Good units walk a thin line between indiscipline and ineffectiveness. Ignore the rules too often and you’ve got a mob, but enforce the rules too strictly and you’ve got a herd.

The accumulation of non-obvious, ineffective, or misapplied actions leads to low productivity.

So often, people feel powerless and ineffective because they have been told that they are wrong and that they don’t have what it takes to lead effectively. For

• Associated with Habit 3: Put First Things First is the endowment of willpower. At the low end of the continuum is the ineffective, flaky life of floating and coasting, avoiding responsibility and taking the easy way out, exercising little initiative or willpower. And at the top end is a highly disciplined life that focuses heavily on the highly important but not necessarily urgent activities of life. It’s a life of leverage and influence.

The primary human endowments are 1) self-awareness or self-knowledge; 2) imagination and conscience; and 3) volition or willpower. The secondary endowments are 4) an abundance mentality; 5) courage and consideration; and 6) creativity. The seventh endowment is self-renewal. All are unique human endowments; animals don’t possess any of them. But they are all on a continuum of low to high levels. • Associated with Habit 1: Be Proactive is the endowment of self-knowledge or self-awareness—an ability to choose your response (response-ability). At the low end of the continuum are the ineffective people who transfer responsibility by blaming other people, events, or the environment—anything or anybody “out there” so that they are not responsible for results. If I blame you, in effect I have empowered you. I have given my power to your weakness. Then I can create evidence that supports my perception that you are the problem. At the upper end of the continuum toward increasing effectiveness is self-awareness: “I know my tendencies, I know the scripts or programs that are in me, but I am not those scripts. I can rewrite my scripts.” You are aware that you are the creative force of your life. You are not the victim of conditions or conditioning. You can choose your response to any situation, to any person. Between what happens to you and your response is a degree of freedom. And the more you exercise that freedom, the larger it will become. As you work in your circle of influence and exercise that freedom, gradually you will stop being a “hot reactor” (meaning there’s little separation between stimulus and response) and start being a cool, responsible chooser—no matter what your genetic makeup, no matter how you were raised, no matter what your childhood experiences were or what the environment is. In your freedom to choose your response lies the power to achieve growth and happiness.

In order to ensure ownership and efficiency of communication we are going to share an elegant linguistic tool: To help remove the risk that you’ve ineffectively communicated, utilize a simple follow-up question: “What did you hear me say?

Without company values or leadership principles explicitly crafted and executed as clear accountability anchors, they remain to be seen as only ineffective invitations instead of Revisited expectations.

You’ve already learned an effective way to do what performance reviews have been failing to do for decades. Using the Results Model regularly will meet these exact objectives without the ineffectiveness of reviewing a year’s worth of work through a triggering experience that statistically (and neurochemically) decreases performance.

Divided leadership is dangerous because people in groups often think and act in ways that are illogical and ineffective—call it Groupthink. People in groups are political: they say and do things that they think will help their image within the group. They aim to please others, to promote themselves, rather than to see things dispassionately. Where an individual can be bold and creative, a group is often afraid of risk. The need to find a compromise among all the different egos kills creativity. The group has a mind of its own, and that mind is cautious, slow to decide, unimaginative, and sometimes downright irrational.

Second, and even more important, meetings are ineffective. The most justifiable reason to loathe meetings is that they don’t contribute to the success of our organizations.

Meetings are ineffective because they lack contextual structure. Too many organizations have only one kind of regular meeting, often called a staff meeting. Either once a week or twice a month, people get together for two or three hours of randomly focused discussion about everything from strategy to tactics, from administrivia to culture. Because there is no clarity around what topics are appropriate, there is no clear context for the various discussions that take place.

Speaking angrily to others is ineffective. Losing your temper is a sign of weakness.

Archbishop Benson lived in a different era, but his rules for life carry relevance today: • Eagerly start the day’s main work. • Do not murmur at your busyness or the shortness of time, but buy up the time all around. • Never murmur when correspondence is brought in. • Never exaggerate duties by seeming to suffer under the load, but treat all responsibilities as liberty and gladness. • Never call attention to crowded work or trivial experiences. • Before confrontation or censure, obtain from God a real love for the one at fault. Know the facts; be generous is your judgment. Otherwise, how ineffective, how unintelligible or perhaps provocative your well-intentioned censure may be. • Do not believe everything you hear; do not spread gossip. • Do not seek praise, gratitude, respect, or regard for past service. • Avoid complaining when your advice or opinion is not consulted, or having been consulted, set aside. • Never allow yourself to be placed in favorable contrast with anyone. • Do not press conversation to your own needs and concerns. • Seek no favors, nor sympathies; do not ask for tenderness, but receive what comes. • Bear the blame; do not share or transfer it. • Give thanks when credit for your own work or ideas is given to another.6

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Mon Mothma told me that the Senate worries more about success than failure. They’ll tolerate ineffective leadership forever, but effective leadership frightens them.

If you have to spend your time motivating people, you're not a leader, you're an ineffective manager.

There are only two types of leaders: effective and ineffective.

Satan doesn’t want you applying the principles in this book. He will do all he can to make you feel insecure and fearful, not wanting your group to continue. Why? Because he doesn’t want the Great Commission and Great Commandment happening. He doesn’t want you developing your leadership gifts. He wants you ineffective. He will use all he can to keep you from being focused and purposeful.

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.