Leadership Foundations Quotes

Consistency is the true foundation of trust. Either keep your promises or do not make them.

Business leaders make one of two mistakes: overestimating or underestimating their capabilities.

Communication is how entrepreneurs tell their story, which, in turn, should inspire employees to work smart and encourage customers to action.

Think of one thing you can do that will make a big difference in what you are trying to achieve.

Every entrepreneur faces mediocre moments or points in their careers when they are not meeting their goals. What they do in response to these shortcomings is what either leads them astray or guides them to success.

A Visionaire always takes a step back during a crisis to get out of their own way.

Good leaders ask great questions that inspire others to dream more, think more, learn more, do more, and become more.

No matter what type of leader you are or how widespread your influence, you face personal temptations, challenges, and stresses. And only a foundation of character will sustain you and your leadership.

Successful people do daily what unsuccessful people do occasionally. They practice daily disciplines. They implement systems for their personal growth. They make it a habit to maintain a positive attitude. At

If you are a leader, the true measure of your success is not getting people to work. It’s not getting people to work hard. It is getting people to work hard together. That takes commitment.

How people treat you is their karma. How you react is yours.” —Wayne W. Dyer

The beauty of trust is that it erases worry and frees you to get on with other matters. Trust means confidence.” —Stephen M.R. Covey

You don’t really understand people until you hear their life story. If you know their stories, you grasp their history, their hurts, their hopes and aspirations. You put yourself in their shoes. And just by virtue of listening and remembering what’s important to them, you communicate that you care and desire to add value.

Africa is crying out for entrepreneurial leaders & for leaders who are entrepreneurial.

If you pair excellence with humility, people not only won’t run over you, they will respect you.

Never complain about what you allow.

(Patrick Henry) He understood that the home was the foundation of a stable society and that the authority a man "exercised within the larger society was rooted in the authority exercised at home." Thus ... the training ground for all sound leadership is the family.

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.

Asking and hearing people’s opinions has a greater effect on them than telling them, ‘Good job.’ ” —Sam Walton

When values, thoughts, feelings, and actions are in alignment, a person becomes focused and his character is strengthened. That allows a leader to lead himself successfully.

believe leadership is servanthood. It’s my responsibility to make sure my people have what they need to succeed and get their work done.

If a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” —Martin Luther King Jr.

People who wait for the one great opportunity often keep waiting.

The book you don’t read can’t help you; the seminar you won’t attend can’t change your life. The business gets better when you get better. Never wish it were easier, wish you were better.

Come, captain, we had no leadership worthy of the name then, and we faced the cleverest opponent, the heaviest armor, the strongest force of all. Yet we won by the inevitability of history.

Effective listening is the single most powerful thing you can do to build and maintain a climate of trust and collaboration. Strong listening skills are the foundation for all solid relationships.

Desire is the foundation of our greatness. Without it, we are stranded; we cannot go anywhere. You won't get, what you don't eagerly desire.

Leadership is getting people to work for you when they are not obligated.” —Fred W. Smith

It takes humility to seek feedback. It takes wisdom to understand it, analyze it and appropriately act on it.” —Stephen Covey

Trust is the foundation of real teamwork.

Few things will pay you bigger dividends in life than the time and trouble you take to understand people and build relationships. As

The greatest problem with communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.

Almost every man wastes part of his life in attempts to display qualities he does not possess.

A team is a group of people who may not be equal in experience, talent, or education but in commitment.

God, when I am wrong, make me willing to change. When I am right, make me easy to live with. So strengthen me that the power of my example will far exceed the authority of my rank.

H. Nelson Jackson said, “I do not believe you can do today’s job with yesterday’s methods and be in business tomorrow.

Each day is an unrepeatable miracle. Today will never happen again, so we must make it count.

Director recruitment and selection is a critical process in shaping the composition and effectiveness of a board, laying the foundation for ethical governance and responsible leadership.

If you lead a team, start asking questions and really listening. Start valuing the contributions of your teammates ahead of your own. And remember that when the best idea wins, so does the entire team.

When I quit my university, people in my neighborhood quite literally began to gossip about me being insane, while others pitied me as a lost soul. But mark this my friend, it's the lost souls that lay the foundation for a better tomorrow, because those beings are not afraid to be lost, they are not afraid to fail, in the pursuit of something greater, something grander, than to just survive no different than the dogs do on the streets.

Whom to Invite to Your Table As you bring people to your table to share ideas, be selective about whom you pick. Choose people who Understand the value of questions Desire the success of others Add value to others’ thoughts Are not threatened by others’ strengths Can emotionally handle quick changes in the conversation Understand their place of value at the table Bring out the best thinking in the people around them Have experienced success in the area under discussion Leave the table with a “we” attitude, not a “me” attitude

I am LIMITLESS not bent by the foundations of my own mind.I can create endless possibilities with the world as my canvas

This is the foundation of the law of listening: You have to listen to understand.

Emotional intelligence is the foundation of leadership. It balances flexibility with toughness, vision with passion, compassion with justice.

Profit provides the financial foundation for businesses to invest in CSR initiatives, such as sustainable practices, employee well-being programs, and community development projects.

When man is finally able to see himself and the world around him with clear cognition, he finds a picture far more pleasant. Visible in unmistakable clarity and devastating detail is man’s failure to be what he might be and his misuse of his world. This revelation causes him to leap out in search of a way of life and system of values which will enable him to be more than he has been. He seeks a foundation of self-respect, which will have value system rooted in knowledge and cosmic reality where he expresses himself so that all others, all beings can continue to exist. His values now are of a different order from those at previous levels: They arise not from selfish interest but from the recognition of the magnificence of existence and the desire that it shall continue to be.

People who lead for selfish reasons seek… Power: They love control and will continue to add value to themselves by reducing the value of others. Position: Titles are their ego food. They continually make sure that others feel their authority and know their rights as a leader. Money: They will use people and sell themselves for financial gain. Prestige: Their looking good is more important to them than their being and doing good.

The first grand federalist design...was that of the Bible, most particularly the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament... Biblical thought is federal (from the Latin foedus, covenant) from first to last--from God's covenant with Noah establishing the biblical equivalent of what philosophers were later to term Natural Law to the Jews' reaffirmation of the Sinai covenant under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah, thereby adopting the Torah as the constitution of their second commonwealth. The covenant motif is central to the biblical world view, the basis of all relationships, the mechanism for defining and allocating authority, and the foundation of the biblical political teaching.

Trust is the foundation of real teamwork. And so the first dysfunction is a failure on the part of team members to understand and open up to one another.

Business leaders should prioritize employee well-being, as their value is the foundation of the organization's success.

While personal maturity may mean being able to see beyond yourself, leadership maturity means considering others before yourself.

Without the wise counsel and insightful answers I’ve received to questions over those decades, I wonder where I would be today.

If you want to be the best leader you can possibly be, no matter how much or how little natural leadership talent you possess, you need to become a serving leader.

Before you attempt to set things right, make sure you see things right.

The ability to ask the right question is more than half the battle of finding the answer.

A Culture of clear consistent communication and connection is the foundation of a high performance team that thrives and flourishes.

Love for others is the foundation of leadership. Simplicity is the language of leadership. Authenticity is the true character of leadership.

Listening was the most important thing I accomplished each day because it would build the foundation of my leadership for years to come.

The foundation and cornerstone of state leadership is power of the people.

Trust is the foundation of great leadership.

ReThink culture, because it is the foundation of all strategic success.

The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.” That can happen only when the leader is willing to hear and face the truth.

You cannot harvest life’s rewards without first planting seeds. Yet

Nothing of significance was ever achieved without people working together.

The beauty of trust is that it erases worry and frees you to get on with other matters. Trust means confidence.

People who think they’re leading but have no one following them are only taking a walk.

To be successful is to be helpful, caring, and constructive, to make everything and everyone you touch a little bit better. The best thing you have to give is yourself.” If

Former US president Woodrow Wilson said, “If you want to make enemies, change something.

Goethe recommended, “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them become what they are capable of becoming.

Reward only finished work: It’s good to praise effort, but you should never reward it. Give

A team is a group of people who may not be equal in experience, talent, or education but in commitment.” A

As a leader, you should not be trying to carry everything yourself. To be successful, you must share the load. But you must have highly capable people to hand things off to.

Life’s greatest rewards come from your inner self, from the choices you make, from how you decide to live under whatever circumstances you find yourself in.

People don’t expect their leaders to be perfect, but they do expect them to be honest. If

People who make growth their goal—instead of a title, position, salary, or other external target—always have a future.

restructuring the organization to embrace more agile and adaptive models is a critical step in building resilience. By moving beyond traditional hierarchies, designing effective information flows, empowering employees, and cultivating a culture of experimentation and learning, organizations can create the foundation for long-term success in a dynamic and unpredictable environment.

I began looking for these four: Smart. It doesn’t mean high IQ (although that’s great), it means disposed toward learning. If there’s a best practice anywhere, adopt it. We want to turn as much as possible into a routine so we can focus on the few things that require human intelligence and creativity. A good interview question for this is: “Tell me about the last significant thing you learned about how to do your job better.” Or you might ask a candidate: “What’s something that you’ve automated? What’s a process you’ve had to tear down at a company?” Humble. I don’t mean meek or unambitious, I mean being humble in the way that Steph Curry is humble. If you’re humble, people want you to succeed. If you’re selfish, they want you to fail. It also gives you the capacity for self-awareness, so you can actually learn and be smart. Humility is foundational like that. It is also essential for the kind of collaboration we want at Slack. Hardworking. It does not mean long hours. You can go home and take care of your family, but when you’re here, you’re disciplined, professional, and focused. You should also be competitive, determined, resourceful, resilient, and gritty. Take this job as an opportunity to do the best work of your life. Collaborative. It’s not submissive, not deferential—in fact it’s kind of the opposite. In our culture, being collaborative means providing leadership from everywhere. I’m taking responsibility for the health of this meeting. If there’s a lack of trust, I’m going to address that. If the goals are unclear, I’m going to deal with that. We’re all interested in getting better and everyone should take responsibility for that. If everyone’s collaborative in that sense, the responsibility for team performance is shared. Collaborative people know that success is limited by the worst performers, so they are either going to elevate them or have a serious conversation. This one is easy to corroborate with references, and in an interview you can ask, “Tell me about a situation in your last company where something was substandard and you helped to fix it.

As Charles de Gaulle observed in his meditation on leadership, The Edge of the Sword (1932), the artist ‘does not renounce the use of his intelligence’ – which is, after all, the source of ‘lessons, methods, and knowledge’. Instead, the artist adds to these foundations ‘a certain instinctive faculty which we call inspiration’, which alone can provide the ‘direct contact with nature from which the vital spark must leap’.

Authentic Leaders are not afraid to show emotion and vulnerability as they share in the challenges with their team. Developing a solid foundation of trust with open and honest communication is critical to authentic leadership.

When your leadership and legacy are built on love, obstacles are overcome through love’s fruit of optimism, foundations are built solid and secure in love’s values, and success is achieved through the strength found in love’s endurance.

All the land surface of Trantor, 75,000,000 square miles in extent, was a single city. The population, at its height, was well in excess of forty billions. This enormous population was devoted almost entirely to the administrative necessities of Empire, and found themselves all too few for the complications of the task. (It is to be remembered that the impossibility of proper administration of the Galactic Empire under the uninspired leadership of the later Emperors was a considerable factor in the Fall.)

Soon thereafter, daily drills began, and during the winter of 1778, von Steuben wrote the Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States—a document that has been the foundation for the American military since it was first published.

We ask people to say, “I am a commitment to …” instead of “I’m committed to …” as a reminder that we are the commitment, we strive to embody its value and contribution, and we’re fully accountable for its outcome. The commitment lives inside us and moves out from our center.

I will choose and display the right attitudes. I will determine and act upon important priorities. I will know and follow healthy guidelines. I will communicate with and care for my family. I will practice and develop good thinking. I will make and keep proper commitments. I will earn and properly manage finances. I will deepen and live out my faith. I will accept and show responsibility. I will initiate and invest in solid relationships. I will plan for and model generosity. I will embrace and practice good values. I will seek and experience improvements.

Paul embodied principles of leadership that he also described in his letters. He certainly thought the life of individual believers and churches ought to resemble a solid foundation on Christ (see 1 Corinthians 3:9-17). Looking at Paul's life, we can see leadership all the more clearly.

Trust is the foundation of real teamwork. And so the first dysfunction is a failure on the part of team members to understand and open up to one another. And if that sounds touchy-feely, let me explain, because there is nothing soft about it. It is an absolutely critical part of building a team. In fact, it’s probably the most critical.

One of the most important things you can do as a leader is make sure you and your organization are delivering what you promised. The question I ask to make an assessment of this is “Did we exceed expectations?” This ensures my future success and that of my organization. The future is dim professionally for anyone who doesn’t exceed the expectations of customers or clients.

People are the foundation of any company’s success. The primary job of each manager is to help people be more effective in their job and to grow and develop. We have great people who want to do well, are capable of doing great things, and come to work fired up to do them. Great people flourish in an environment that liberates and amplifies that energy. Managers create this environment through support, respect, and trust. Support means giving people the tools, information, training, and coaching they need to succeed. It means continuous effort to develop people’s skills. Great managers help people excel and grow. Respect means understanding people’s unique career goals and being sensitive to their life choices. It means helping people achieve these career goals in a way that’s consistent with the needs of the company. Trust means freeing people to do their jobs and to make decisions. It means knowing people want to do well and believing that they will.

The point is, education in its truest form, is the foundation of all human endeavors. It is the most noble of all the civilized elements of human consciousness. Education enables the humans to achieve their fullest mental and physical potential in both personal and social life. The ability of being educated is what distinguishes humans from animals. You can teach a cockatoo to repeat a bunch of vocabularies, but you cannot teach it to construct a space shuttle and go to the moon.

A documentary about Ernest Shackleton’s early twentieth-century exposition to the South Pole shows the classified ad Shackleton put in a London newspaper:   “Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.” Ernest Shackleton.2 Men responded to Shackleton’s advertisement in droves. Why? Because the mission was clear. The cost and potential loss both drew the right men and made sure the wrong men didn’t sign up. God’s mission, similarly, is not for the faint of heart. Even becoming a Christian, according to Jesus, should be weighed heavily. Luke says, “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish”’ (Luke 14:28-30).

One of the ways Coach Wooden used to do that was to ask his players to acknowledge the skills and contributions of others. He told each player that if a teammate made a great pass or set a pick that allowed him to score, he should acknowledge the teammate on the way back down the court. One time a player asked, “Coach, if we do that, what if the teammate that made the assist isn’t looking?” Coach Wooden replied, “He will always be looking.” Coach knew that people look for and thrive on acknowledgment and appreciation.

In his essay on Clemenceau in Great Contemporaries, Churchill had commended the way the Frenchman was ‘fighting, fighting all the way’ through life.254 Over the next five months Churchill had to fight the Government whips, the Prime Minister, the press (especially The Times), Conservative Central Office, his backbench colleagues, the Security Services and his own constituency association. In some parliamentary divisions he led a party of three, and sometimes two. Yet in that same desolate period he showed the greatest moral courage of his life, and laid the foundations of his future wartime leadership.

The first dysfunction is an absence of trust among team members. Essentially, this stems from their unwillingness to be vulnerable within the group. Team members who are not genuinely open with one another about their mistakes and weaknesses make it impossible to build a foundation for trust. This failure to build trust is damaging because it sets the tone for the second dysfunction: fear of conflict. Teams that lack trust are incapable of engaging in unfiltered and passionate debate of ideas. Instead, they resort to veiled discussions and guarded comments. A lack of healthy conflict is a problem because it ensures the third dysfunction of a team: lack of commitment. Without having aired their opinions in the course of passionate and open debate, team members rarely, if ever, buy in and commit to decisions, though they may feign agreement during meetings. Because of this lack of real commitment and buy-in, team members develop an avoidance of accountability, the fourth dysfunction. Without committing to a clear plan of action, even the most focused and driven people often hesitate to call their peers on actions and behaviors that seem counterproductive to the good of the team. Failure to hold one another accountable creates an environment where the fifth dysfunction can thrive. Inattention to results occurs when team members put their individual needs (such as ego, career development, or recognition) or even the needs of their divisions above the collective goals of the team.

...The happy Warrior... 'tis he whose law is reason; who depends upon that law as on the best of friends; whence, in a state where men are tempted still to evil for a guard against worse ill, and what in quality or act is best doth seldom on a right foundation rest, he labors good on good to fix, and owes to virtue every triumph that he knows: who, if he rise to station of command, rises by open means; and there will stand on honorable terms, or else retire, and in himself possess his own desire; who comprehends his trust, and to the same keeps faithful with a singleness of aim; and therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait for wealth, or honors, or for worldly state; whom they must follow; on whose head must fall, like showers of manna, if they come at all:

Leaders nourish and uphold the culture of an organization. They make choices that inevitably limit the size and scope of activities that the organization undertakes. A good leader will only work in a firm where there is clear and effective governance to protect the culture, philosophy and investment discipline of the firm. The most effective leaders create a non-hierarchical environment in which idea sharing is encouraged, and diligent execution is rewarded. They also establish a solid foundation, a durable framework, and processes for successfully managing an organization that can maintain these qualities. And last, a great investment leader has a zero tolerance policy for breaches of integrity. By integrity, we mean not only honesty and fulfillment of fiduciary obligation, but process integrity.

Everything we do and say will either underline or undermine our discipleship process. As long as there is one unsaved person on my campus or in my city, then my church is not big enough. One of the underlying principles of our discipleship strategy is that every believer can and should make disciples. When a discipleship process fails, many times the fatal flaw is that the definition of discipleship is either unclear, unbiblical, or not commonly shared by the leadership team. Write down what you love to do most, and then go do it with unbelievers. Whatever you love to do, turn it into an outreach. You have to formulate a system that is appropriate for your cultural setting. Writing your own program for making disciples takes time, prayer, and some trial and error—just as it did with us. Learn and incorporate ideas from other churches around the world, but only after modification to make sure the strategies make sense in our culture and community. Culture is changing so quickly that staying relevant requires our constant attention. If we allow ourselves to be distracted by focusing on the mechanics of our own efforts rather than our culture, we will become irrelevant almost overnight. The easiest and most common way to fail at discipleship is to import a model or copy a method that worked somewhere else without first understanding the values that create a healthy discipleship culture. Principles and process are much more important than material, models, and methods. The church is an organization that exists for its nonmembers. Christianity does not promise a storm-free life. However, if we build our lives on biblical foundations, the storms of life will not destroy us. We cannot have lives that are storm-free, but we can become storm-proof. Just as we have to figure out the most effective way to engage our community for Christ, we also have to figure out the most effective way to establish spiritual foundations in each unique context. There is really only one biblical foundation we can build our lives on, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. Pastors, teachers, and church staff believe their primary role is to serve as mentors. Their task is to equip every believer for the work of the ministry. It is not to do all the ministry, but to equip all the people to do it. Their top priority is to equip disciples to do ministry and to make disciples. Do you spend more time ministering to people or preparing people to minister? No matter what your church responsibilities are, you can prepare others for the same ministry. Insecurity in leadership is a deadly thing that will destroy any organization. It drives pastors and presidents to defensive positions, protecting their authority or exercising it simply to show who is the boss. Disciple-making is a process that systematically moves people toward Christ and spiritual maturity; it is not a bunch of randomly disconnected church activities. In the context of church leadership, one of the greatest and most important applications of faith is to trust the Holy Spirit to work in and through those you are leading. Without confidence that the Holy Spirit is in control, there is no empowering, no shared leadership, and, as a consequence, no multiplication.

In the incongruous role of the insurgent party-builder, he made crystal clear the whole host of inferences we have drawn from the experiences of Monroe and Polk: that innovation, however orthodox, is inherently destabilizing; that the purely constructive leadership project is an illusion; that the affiliated leader cannot assume independent ground without ultimately embracing the role of the heretic; that the only way ever to be president in your own right is to become yourself a great repudiator and set yourself directly against the bulwark of received power; that political disruption parallels presidential significance. Roosevelt's insight was not simply that new achievements do not rest securely on old foundations, but that to save the handiwork of his presidency he would have to reconstruct its political base.

The Islamic revolution in Iran is a positive development. At the same time, the Islamic revolution of Afghanistan, sprung exclusively from spiritual roots, dealt a heavy blow to the communist regime in the former Soviet Union. In face of that revolution, the red Soviet empire had to concede that it is incapable, in spite of its military superiority, to defeat the Mujaheddin, whose main weapons were their right and their spiritual strength. Another quite new situation appeared as a consequence of the Islamic revolution in Iran, that destroyed the Zionist rule in that country and shook its foundations in that part of the world. Khomeini's letter to Gorbachev, in which he was inviting the latter to convert to Islam, had great symbolic power! What is new again is the movement of Islamic rebirth and the continuous decay of the strength of the colonial government bodies directed from afar by Israel in many Islamic countries." "The Islamic system has remained stable in Iran even after the death of Khomeini and the change in the person of the leader and of the leadership group the only one to remain stable in the entire Islamic world. On the contrary, the demise of the Shah meant at the same time the collapse of his regime, his artificial form of government, and his army. All that went to the dust-bin of history. The same fate awaits the other regimes that prevail in the muslim world. Israel knows that very well. She tries desperately to cause the wheel of history to stand still. However, any strike against Iran or against the growing Islamic movements, will cause the anger of the muslim masses to grow, and the fire of the Islamic revolution to ignite. Nobody will be able to suppress that revolution.

Clark cast Yale’s new admissions standards as “a statement, really, about what leadership was going to be in the country and where leaders were going to come from.” The old elite understood this and tried to fight back. Yale’s admissions officers received frosty receptions at prep schools that had once embraced them. Alumni grumbled—as in William F. Buckley’s complaint that the new standards would prefer “a Mexican-American from El Paso High . . . [over] . . . Jonathan Edwards the Sixteenth from Saint Paul’s School.” A rump of Yale’s corporation resisted: when Clark made a presentation to the corporation about constructing a new American elite based on merit rather than birth, one member interjected, “You’re talking about Jews and public school graduates as leaders. Look around you at this table. These are America’s leaders. There are no Jews here. There are no public school graduates here.

Death had brushed hard against him, and beneath the calculations of a public relations machine, he was struggling mightily within himself. Johnson’s New Deal friend Jim Rowe had sent him a recently published biography on Lincoln, which detailed the profound change Lincoln had undergone during a waiting time when he was out of politics. This was Johnson’s waiting time, a time of gathering strength and direction. When Lincoln had suffered his deep depression he had asked himself: What if I died now? What would I be remembered for? Coming back from “the brink of death,” Johnson asked himself a similar set of questions. He had laid the foundation of a substantial fortune, but what purpose did that serve? He had learned to manipulate the legislative machine of the Senate with a deftness and technical expertise without parallel in American history. But to what end did one accumulate such power? Regardless of one’s impressive title, power without purpose and without vision was not the same thing as leadership.