Leadership Seminar Quotes

Okay, here’s a cheat I learned in a leadership seminar. It’s called active listening. Someone says something, a complaint, or a criticism, or they’re excited about something that happened to them. For a lot of us, our instinct is to offer a solution, or expand on an idea, to fix or offer something. The key is to think about how they’re feeling, be receptive to that, and parrot it back to them. They just got a new car, and they’re happy about it? A simple ‘that’s excellent’ or ‘you must be so proud’ works. It leaves room for them to keep talking, to know you’re listening. For your teammate who just lost someone she obviously cared about, just recognizing that she’s upset and she’s right to feel upset, that’s enough.

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.

No man's advice can change you unless you speak to yourself. Bible school or seminars can't change you, going to church can't change you except you decide to change. Psalm 139:23 - 24

The Head Scissor and CEO of a major corporation was once asked to give a seminar on the topic of innovation to a young and thriving startup company. After looking out upon the big-eyed crowd of young and inexperienced scissors standing there on their snippers, the aged guru opened and closed with a few thoughts that made every scissor look deep within themselves. She said, “The heart asks us to make incisions by following it along the path of intuition. Otherwise, we can be certain we’re just following behind someone else’s dotted lines. Every morning when I get out of the shower and look in the mirror, I say to myself, ‘You stand tall with long legs and bright eyes, but what good are you, if you can’t stay on the cutting edge of your self?’” After receiving a thunderous applause she gave a knowing smile and made her exit.

seminar on Intel strategy and operations. Resident professor: Dr. Andy Grove. In the space of an hour, Grove traced the company’s history, year by year. He summarized Intel’s core pursuits: a profit margin twice the industry norm, market leadership in any product line it entered, the creation of “challenging jobs” and “growth opportunities” for employees.* Fair enough, I thought, though I’d heard similar things at business school. Then he said something that left a lasting impression on me. He referenced his previous company, Fairchild, where he’d first met Noyce and Moore and went on to blaze a trail in silicon wafer research. Fairchild was the industry’s gold standard, but it had one great flaw: a lack of “achievement orientation.” “Expertise was very much valued there,” Andy explained. “That is why people got hired. That’s why people got promoted. Their effectiveness at translating that knowledge into actual results was kind of shrugged off.” At Intel, he went on, “we tend to be exactly the opposite. It almost doesn’t matter what you know. It’s what you can do with whatever you know or can acquire and actually accomplish [that] tends to be valued here.” Hence the company’s slogan: “Intel delivers.

There had always been battle lines drawn between the upper administration and the faculty. Even those who had once been faculty immediately began to view their former colleagues as troublesome children. She had once toyed seriously with the idea of university administration, and had even attended one of those academic leadership development seminars at Charles’s request and the university’s expense. But once she heard one of the speakers encourage the participants to consider boning up on child psychology and further suggested imagining one’s faculty colleagues as characters in Winnie the Pooh, she knew she could never cross over to the dark side, as the professorial wing of academe called the upper administration.

Several years ago, Debashish Chatterjee, a good friend and well-known author on leadership1 opened a seminar on leadership at MIT by saying, ‘I’ve been guided in my work by the notion that older is often better. If an idea has been around for a few thousand years, it’s been submitted to many tests—which is a good indicator that it might have some real merit. We’re fixated on newness, which often misleads us into elevating novelty over substance.

One of my seminars is “Leadership in the 20th century: How being a century behind still puts you ahead of all your competition still living in the 19th century.

We completed meetings with leaders from over a dozen ministries over a ten-day period. Toward the end of our journey, we asked our Sri Lankan host for his feedback. After about the fourth day, he had become convinced that we were actually there to listen, so his feedback was honest. He said (and I'm paraphrasing): Paul and Christie, you and your leadership training are welcome here in Sri Lanka. If you host your training in a nice Colombo (Sri Lanka's capital) hotel with a nice venue and a buffet lunch, we can get fifty to one hundred pastors and ministry leaders to come. They will come, and you can get some great pictures for your newsletter. Then, after the seminar, they will take your manual home with them and put it on the shelf with [U.S. megachurch pastor's] training manual and [another U.S. megachurch pastor's] training manual and [a well-known U.S. leadership trainer's] training manual, and they will go about their own ministry in their own way.

Who better to teach than the most capable among us? And I’m not just talking about seminars or formal settings. Our actions and behaviors, for better or worse, teach those who admire and look up to us how to govern their own lives. Are we thoughtful about how people learn and grow? As leaders, we should think of ourselves as teachers and try to create companies in which teaching is seen as a valued way to contribute to the success of the whole. Do we think of most activities as teaching opportunities and experiences as ways of learning? One of the most crucial responsibilities of leadership is creating a culture that rewards those who lift not just our stock prices but our aspirations as well.

One of the reasons you can’t learn everything you need to know about leadership from a seminar or a book is that leadership is, ultimately, an art.

You can do as much leadership development programmes, seminars or workshops, if you don't like people, if you don't love your team, you will not enjoy being leader. Leading is about people and their wellbeing the first foundation to the organisations wellbeing.

People who are high maintenance when it comes to their development is good for business. Encourage and indulge them in any training, workshops or seminars. People who want to grow will help grow your organization.

In February 2017, a month after Donald J. Trump’s inauguration, Christopher Caldwell, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, delivered a speech about Putin at the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Phoenix, Arizona.

Leadership training, when effectively implemented, holds the potential to transform both organizations and industries. However, for it to have lasting impact, it cannot be limited to isolated workshops or seminars. Instead, it should become an integral part of an organization's culture—strengthened through mentorship, capacity-building initiatives, and broad institutional reforms that foster an environment where leadership can genuinely flourish.