Organizational Leader Quotes

Instead of waiting for a leader you can believe in, try this: Become a leader you can believe in.

Good leaders seize crises to remake organizational habits.

When you’re a manager, you work for your company. When you’re a leader, your company works for you.

True leaders live their values everywhere, not just in the workplace.

What first separates a leader from a normal human being? A leader knows who they are as a human being.

Business people need to understand the psychology of risk more than the mathematics of risk.

Psychological pseudoscience dies hard, especially when there are commercial interests at stake.

Leaders can create a high productivity level by providing the appropriate organizational structure and job design, and by acknowledging and appreciating hard work.

The worst thing in your own development as a leader is not to do it wrong. It’s to do it for the wrong reasons.

Leaders need to correct for cognitive biases the way a sharpshooter corrects for wind velocity or a yachtsman corrects for the tide.

Leaders need to sacrifice "power-over" to get "power-to".

there cannot be alignment deeper in the organization, even when employees want to cooperate, if the leaders at the top aren’t in lockstep with one another

The only way for the leader of a team to create a safe environment for his team members to be vulnerable is by stepping up and doing something that feels unsafe and uncomfortable first. By getting naked before anyone else, by taking the risk of making himself vulnerable with no guarantee that other members of the team will respond in kind, a leader demonstrates an extraordinary level of selflessness and dedication to the team. And that gives him the right, and the confidence, to ask others to do the same.

Employees come to us in a state of readiness to engage, and it is the behavior and decisions of managers and organizational leaders that can result in even the best employees becoming disengaged over time.

company leaders need to provide their company with a self-organizing and semi-autonomous immune system. Effective risk management isn't about a siloed approach focusing on isolated threats. We have to think more broadly. Effective risk management requires a holistic approach that transcends a siloed focus on isolated threats. In today's interconnected business landscape, risks are rarely confined to a single department or function. Instead, they often ripple across the organization, impacting multiple areas simultaneously.

Mindfulness requires being a beginner. Setting absurdly high-standards, and being unwilling to be a novice, are the joint enemies of personal progress and change. Nobody benchpresses 100 kilos the first time they enter a gym.

Ambiguity is not, today, a lack of data, but a deluge of data.

Too few leaders have the emotional fortitude to take responsibility for failure.

When business leaders talk about the next quarter, they ought to sometimes be talking about the next quarter century.

Strategic coherence is more important than strategic perfection.

The gap between thought and action, between belief and will, prevents us solving our most pressing individual and societal problems.

People who appear to be resisting change may simply be the victim of bad habits. Habit, like gravity, never takes a day off.

The best AI techniques are not the ones most talked about or the most sophisticated; the best AI techniques solve a problem with adherence to business needs and constraints.

When leaders in an organization have responsibility without authority, they're unable to direct progress and they're unable to achieve results. When we delegate responsibility, we need to delegate the appropriate authority to go along with that.

From the systems point of view, it is evident that one of the main obstacles to organizational change is the — largely unconscious — embrace by business leaders of the mechanistic approach to management.

Getting your ego out of the way has an even deeper organizational impact.

when leaders fail to tell employees that they’re doing a great job, they might as well be taking money out of their pockets and throwing it into a fire,

We have minds that are equipped for certainty, linearity and short-term decisions, that must instead make long-term decisions in a non-linear, probabilistic world.

leaders confuse the mere transfer of information to an audience with the audience’s ability to understand, internalize, and embrace the message that is being communicated.

Green light, STOP - if you want to see where you are taking the most risk, look where you are making the most money.

The best way to encourage out of the box thinking is to draw the box correctly in the first place.

Leadership must evolve into a “science-based craft”, like surgery.

Resistance to change should be a thing of the past if we could develop growth mindsets and create organizations with growth cultures.

Don't let Deepak Chopra manage your change program.

That which a team does not want to discuss, it most needs to discuss.

All of us are not always smarter than one of us, leaders need to distinguish between the wisdom of crowds and the madness of crowds.

The essence of extended rationality is to know when you are being irrational.

Just stamping out anti-science and bad science will eliminate an enormous amount of business waste

The most damaging cognitive bias is overconfidence (illusory superiority), making leaders use their “gut” when they should be more rational.

Compared to ecosystems and some species, corporations are very fragile entities indeed.

The key to behavioral change is to pass behavioral control to the environment.

There was nothing scientific about Scientific Management (Taylorism), and neither was it good management.

Occasionally we hear the story of an organizational leader who, having given powerful leadership to an institution, comes toward the end of his working life and keeps holding on to leadership long after he should have let it pass into the hands of someone in a younger generation. Or he ensures that the leadership passes into the hands of a son or a daughter so that he can maintain his influence.

Control, we discovered, only works with a competent workforce that understands the organization’s purpose. Hence, as control is divested, both technical competence and organizational clarity need to be strengthened

Many of the cataclysmic leadership failures were failures of rationality. The pendulum of leadership development needs to swing back toward the rational: strategy, creativity, foresight, decision-making, and analytics.

The only way for people to embrace a message is to hear it over a period of time, in a variety of different situations, and preferably from different people. That’s why great leaders see themselves as Chief Reminding Officers as much as anything else. Their top two priorities are to set the direction of the organization and then to ensure that people are reminded of it on a regular basis.

Authentic leaders inspire us to engage with each other in powerful dreams that make the impossible possible. We are called on to persevere despite failure and pursue a purpose beyond the paycheck. This is at the core of innovation. It requires aligning the dreams of each individual to the broader dream of the organization.

All those leaders seized the possibilities created by a crisis. During turmoil, organizational habits become malleable enough to both assign responsibility and create a more equitable balance of power. Crises are so valuable, in fact, that sometimes it’s worth stirring up a sense of looming catastrophe rather than letting it die down.

Being an open system means, basically, that you are not arrogant enough to think that you have all the answers, or that your organization has all the answers, or even that you should. You know that there is experience and energy outside of what you bring that can add to your personal and organizational infrastructure, and you open yourself up to it.

Independent thinking alone is not suited to interdependent reality. Independent people who do not have the maturity to think and act interdependently may be good individual producers, but they won’t be good leaders or team players. They’re not coming from the paradigm of interdependence necessary to succeed in marriage, family, or organizational reality.

Managers not just make 90% organizational decisions, they influence the rest 10% decisions as well.

people in a healthy organization, beginning with the leaders, learn from one another, identify critical issues, and recover quickly from mistakes.

Leaders are people who know exactly who they are. They know exactly where they want to go. They’re hell-bent on getting there.

Leaders make a lot of mistakes but they admit those mistakes to themselves and change because of them.

a leader’s first priority is to create an environment where others can do these things and that cannot happen if they are not having effective meetings.

The problem is not lack of competence, it is confidence without competence.

Creating change-agile businesses will eliminate the need for what we today call change management.

The human side of analytics is the biggest challenge to implementing big data.

Most businesses would profit greatly from just applying Change Management 101 well.

Behaviorism was a busted flush, but neo-behaviorist theories, especially choice architecture, achieve behavioral change without coercion or the downsides of carrots and sticks.

Mindfulness promises a great number of desirable benefits, and is based on much more solid research than many competing ideas on how to change people.

Humanity can not afford to have 21st Century businesses run on 20th Century science, and (worse) pseudoscience.

Most change strategy models are not very strategic – change strategy is an important lynchpin between business strategy and change tactics.

The notion of "business as usual" is a harmful myth.

Malcolm Gladwell puts the "pop" in pop psychology, and although revered in lay circles, is roundly dismissed by experts - even by the researchers he makes famous.

Yesterday’s decision-making strategies are ill-equipped to deal with petabyte information flows.

We need leadership books that offer information as well as inspiration. Pop leadership is one of the most destructive forces today.

At any organizational level people are leaders not because of what they do, but because of who they are.

The psychological theories that inform day-to-day business practices are comprised mostly of folk-psychology, fads, and myths.

It is time to euthanize change management.

The change "grief cycle", for some people, may be excitement, enthusiasm, engagement, effort, and excellence.

Business is the most important institution on the planet for furthering human flourishing.

few groups of leaders actually work like a team, at least not the kind that is required to lead a healthy organization.

it is far more natural, and common, for leaders to avoid holding people accountable.

21st century leaders will be growers, not knowers.

Becoming a healthy organization takes a little time. Unfortunately, many of the leaders I’ve worked with suffer from a chronic case of adrenaline addiction, seemingly hooked on the daily rush of activity and firefighting within their organizations. It’s as though they’re afraid to slow down and deal with issues that are critical but don’t seem particularly urgent.

Why is it that we reward programmers who work all night to remove the errors they put into their programs, or managers who make drastic organizational changes to resolve the crises their poor management has created? Why not reward the programmers who design so well that they don’t have dramatic errors, and managers whose organizations stay out of crisis mode? Organizing

It is entirely proper for senior leaders to say, in effect, “This is the mountain we will climb. Not that one, this one. Although many aspects of our collective endeavor are open for discussion, choice of mountain is not among them.” And those who lead teams within an organization have a responsibility that extends far beyond merely accepting the direction set by more senior organizational leaders.

The leader steps into an organization in its darkest hour and says, “Friends, you only thought this was your darkest hour. In fact, this is your greatest opportunity. Let me show you why that’s true.” Note

Pop leadership abuts pop psychology, and is very destructive. In no other serious domain of human endeavor (surgery, playing the violin) is the subject distilled down to nice-sounding aphorisms that mean nothing.

In advanced societies it is not the race politicians or the "rights" leaders who create the new ideas and the new images of life and man. That role belongs to the artists and intellectuals of each generation. Let the race politicians, if they will, create political, economic or organizational forms of leadership; but it is the artists and the creative minds who will, and must, furnish the all important content. And in this role, they must not be subordinated to the whims and desires of politicians, race leaders and civil rights entrepreneurs whether they come from the Left, Right, or Center, or whether they are peaceful, reform, violent, non-violent or laissez-faire. Which means to say, in advanced societies the cultural front is a special one that requires special techniques not perceived, understood, or appreciated by political philistines.

On a cohesive team, leaders are not there simply to represent the departments that they lead and manage but rather to solve problems that stand in the way of achieving success for the whole organization. That means they’ll readily offer up their departments’ resources when it serves the greater good of the team, and they’ll take an active interest in the thematic goal regardless of how closely related it is to their functional area.

Destructive organizational habits can be found within hundreds of industries and at thousands of firms. And almost always, they are the products of thoughtlessness, of leaders who avoid thinking about the culture and so let it develop without guidance. There are no organizations without institutional habits. There are only places where they are deliberately designed, and places where they are created without forethought, so they often grow from rivalries or fear.

A well-known study out of UC Berkeley by organizational behavior professor Philip Tetlock found that television pundits—that is, people who earn their livings by holding forth confidently on the basis of limited information—make worse predictions about political and economic trends than they would by random chance. And the very worst prognosticators tend to be the most famous and the most confident—the very ones who would be considered natural leaders in an HBS classroom.

In the center of the movement, as the motor that swings it onto motion, sits the Leader. He is separated from the elite formation by an inner circle of the initiated who spread around him an aura of impenetrable mystery which corresponds to his “intangible preponderance.” His position within this intimate circle depends upon his ability to spin intrigues among its members and upon his skill in constantly changing its personnel. He owes his rise to leadership to an extreme ability to handle inner-party struggles for power rather than to demagogic or bureaucratic-organizational qualities. He is distinguished from earlier types of dictators in that he hardly wins through simple violence. Hitler needed neither the SA nor the SS to secure his position as leader of the Nazi movement; on the contrary, Röhm, the chief of the SA and able to count upon its loyalty to his own person, was one of Hitler’s inner-party enemies. Stalin won against Trotsky, who not only had a far greater mass appeal but, as chief of the Red Army, held in his hands the greatest power potential in Soviet Russia at the time. Not Stalin, but Trotsky, moreover, was the greatest organizational talent, the ablest bureaucrat of the Russian Revolution. On the other hand, both Hitler and Stalin were masters of detail and devoted themselves in the early stages of their careers almost entirely to questions of personnel, so that after a few years hardly any man of importance remained who did not owe his position to them.

When it comes to busines...I mean your business. Always remember you are the leader of your businesnot the Manager. You are the inspiration of your organization, you are the core that moves your business forward..... and this is your added value as a business owner.

If Clausewitz is right, no one should develop a strategy without taking into account the effects of organizational friction. Yet we continue to be surprised and frustrated when it manifests itself. We tend to think everything has gone wrong when in fact everything has gone normally.

In your position as leader, your actions are amplified; it’s as if you are talking through a bullhorn every time you communicate with your employees. They hear your criticism more loudly than you mean it, and they hear your praise and thanks more loudly than it sounds to you. Use your bullhorn wisely.

For mindful leaders, cultivating such organizational health requires first and foremost a mastery of organizational conduct—a fluency in nine basic competencies: Eliminate toxicity. Appreciate health. Build trust. Send clear messages. Embrace resistance. Understand blindness. Accept invitations. Heal wounds. Be realistic.

We are committed to involving as many people as possible, as young as possible, as soon as possible. Sometimes too young and too soon! But we intentionally err on the side of too fast rather than too slow. We don’t wait until people feel “prepared” or “fully equipped.” Seriously, when is anyone ever completely prepared for ministry? Ministry makes people’s faith bigger. If you want to increase someone’s confidence in God, put him in a ministry position before he feels fully equipped. The messages your environments communicate have the potential to trump your primary message. If you don’t see a mess, if you aren’t bothered by clutter, you need to make sure there is someone around you who does see it and is bothered by it. An uncomfortable or distracting setting can derail ministry before it begins. The sermon begins in the parking lot. Assign responsibility, not tasks. At the end of the day, it’s application that makes all the difference. Truth isn’t helpful if no one understands or remembers it. If you want a church full of biblically educated believers, just teach what the Bible says. If you want to make a difference in your community and possibly the world, give people handles, next steps, and specific applications. Challenge them to do something. As we’ve all seen, it’s not safe to assume that people automatically know what to do with what they’ve been taught. They need specific direction. This is hard. This requires an extra step in preparation. But this is how you grow people. Your current template is perfectly designed to produce the results you are currently getting. We must remove every possible obstacle from the path of the disinterested, suspicious, here-against-my-will, would-rather-be-somewhere-else, unchurched guests. The parking lot, hallways, auditorium, and stage must be obstacle-free zones. As a preacher, it’s my responsibility to offend people with the gospel. That’s one reason we work so hard not to offend them in the parking lot, the hallway, at check-in, or in the early portions of our service. We want people to come back the following week for another round of offending! Present the gospel in uncompromising terms, preach hard against sin, and tackle the most emotionally charged topics in culture, while providing an environment where unchurched people feel comfortable. The approach a church chooses trumps its purpose every time. Nothing says hypocrite faster than Christians expecting non-Christians to behave like Christians when half the Christians don’t act like it half the time. When you give non-Christians an out, they respond by leaning in. Especially if you invite them rather than expect them. There’s a big difference between being expected to do something and being invited to try something. There is an inexorable link between an organization’s vision and its appetite for improvement. Vision exposes what has yet to be accomplished. In this way, vision has the power to create a healthy sense of organizational discontent. A leader who continually keeps the vision out in front of his or her staff creates a thirst for improvement. Vision-centric churches expect change. Change is a means to an end. Change is critical to making what could and should be a reality. Write your vision in ink; everything else should be penciled in. Plans change. Vision remains the same. It is natural to assume that what worked in the past will always work. But, of course, that way of thinking is lethal. And the longer it goes unchallenged, the more difficult it is to identify and eradicate. Every innovation has an expiration date. The primary reason churches cling to outdated models and programs is that they lack leadership.

Becoming a healthy organization takes a little time. Unfortunately, many of the leaders I’ve worked with suffer from a chronic case of adrenaline addiction, seemingly hooked on the daily rush of activity and firefighting within their organizations. It’s as though they’re afraid to slow down and deal with issues that are critical but don’t seem particularly urgent. As

If your whole team consists of novice programmers, your expertise will give you considerable power; but if the other team members are also experts, they will attach less importance to your technical expertise. In that case, they’ll pay more attention to organizational power, like the power to acquire extra hardware, to extend the schedule, or to capture a more interesting assignment.

Being a leader doesn’t mean you have people reporting to you on an organizational chart—leadership is about inspiring and motivating those around you. A good leader affects a team’s ability to deliver code, architect good systems, and apply Lean principles to how the team manages its work and develops products. All of these have a measurable impact on an organization’s profitability, productivity, and market share.

Much of the ability to help other people arises from personal power, but it would be naive to assert that nothing else is required. In large organizations, there are many resources available to a leader—money to pay for training, support staff, office space, tools to make work more efficient, access to helpful people. Such resources are not evenly distributed, and one of the requirements for becoming a problem-solving leader is to acquire organizational power so as to obtain resources for other innovators. Most

Authoritarian managers use power, often in the form of fear, to get people to do something their way. Leaders depend for the most part on influence rather than power, and influence derives from respect rather than fear. Respect, in turn, is based on qualities such as integrity, ability, fairness, truthfulness—in short, on character. Leaders are part of the team, and although they are given organizational authority, their real authority isn't delegated top-down but earned bottom-up. From the outside, a managed team and a led team can look the same, but from the inside they feel very different.

I’m a bottom-up manager who subscribes to the concept of “servant leadership,” as articulated by the late Robert Greenleaf. He believed that organizations are at their most effective when leaders encourage collaboration, trust, foresight, listening, and empowerment. In any hierarchy, it’s clear that the ultimate boss (in my case, me) holds the most power. But a wonderful thing happens when you flip the traditional organizational chart upside down so that it looks like a V with the boss on the bottom. My job is to serve and support the next layer “above” me so that the people on that layer can then serve and support the next layer “above” them, and so on.

Gut Feel Versus Structure Many leaders, especially those who run smaller organizations, believe that they have the natural skills they need to choose good people without any real process. They look back at their careers and remember the good employees they’ve hired and give themselves credit for having recognized those people’s potential. However, they seem to block out the memories of the unsuccessful hires they’ve made, or they justify those mistakes based on the hidden behavioral deficiencies in the people they later had to fire. Whatever the case, they persist in the belief that they know a good person when they see one and that they can go about the hiring process without much structure.

Where to stash your organizational risk? Lately, I’m increasingly hearing folks reference the idea of organizational debt. This is the organizational sibling of technical debt, and it represents things like biased interview processes and inequitable compensation mechanisms. These are systemic problems that are preventing your organization from reaching its potential. Like technical debt, these risks linger because they are never the most pressing problem. Until that one fateful moment when they are. Within organizational debt, there is a volatile subset most likely to come abruptly due, and I call that subset organizational risk. Some good examples might be a toxic team culture, a toilsome fire drill, or a struggling leader. These problems bubble up from your peers, skip-level one-on-ones,16 and organizational health surveys. If you care and are listening, these are hard to miss. But they are slow to fix. And, oh, do they accumulate! The larger and older your organization is, the more you’ll find perched on your capable shoulders. How you respond to this is, in my opinion, the core challenge of leading a large organization. How do you continue to remain emotionally engaged with the challenges faced by individuals you’re responsible to help, when their problem is low in your problems queue? In that moment, do you shrug off the responsibility, either by changing roles or picking powerlessness? Hide in indifference? Become so hard on yourself that you collapse inward? I’ve tried all of these! They weren’t very satisfying. What I’ve found most successful is to identify a few areas to improve, ensure you’re making progress on those, and give yourself permission to do the rest poorly. Work with your manager to write this up as an explicit plan and agree on what reasonable progress looks like. These issues are still stored with your other bags of risk and responsibility, but you’ve agreed on expectations. Now you have a set of organizational risks that you’re pretty confident will get fixed, and then you have all the others: known problems, likely to go sideways, that you don’t believe you’re able to address quickly. What do you do about those? I like to keep them close. Typically, my organizational philosophy is to stabilize team-by-team and organization-by-organization. Ensuring any given area is well on the path to health before moving my focus. I try not to push risks onto teams that are functioning well. You do need to delegate some risks, but generally I think it’s best to only delegate solvable risk. If something simply isn’t likely to go well, I think it’s best to hold the bag yourself. You may be the best suited to manage the risk, but you’re almost certainly the best positioned to take responsibility. As an organizational leader, you’ll always have a portfolio of risk, and you’ll always be doing very badly at some things that are important to you. That’s not only okay, it’s unavoidable.

The various ways of creating a culture of innovation that we’ve talked about so far are greatly influenced by the leaders at the top. Leaders can’t dictate culture, but they can nurture it. They can generate the right conditions for creativity and innovation. Metaphorically, they can provide the heat and light and moisture and nutrients for a creative culture to blossom and grow. They can focus the best efforts of talented individuals to build innovative, successful groups. In our work at IDEO, we have been lucky enough to meet frequently with CEOs and visionary leaders from both the private and public sectors. Each has his or her own unique style, of course, but the best all have an ability to identify and activate the capabilities of people on their teams. This trait goes far beyond mere charisma or even intelligence. Certain leaders have a knack for nurturing people around them in a way that enables them to be at their best. One way to describe those leaders is to say they are “multipliers,” a term we picked up from talking to author and executive advisor Liz Wiseman. Drawing on a background in organizational behavior and years of experience as a global human resources executive at Oracle Corporation, Liz interviewed more than 150 leaders on four continents to research her book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. Liz observes that all leaders lie somewhere on a continuum between diminishers, who exercise tight control in a way that underutilizes their team’s creative talents, and multipliers, who set challenging goals and then help employees achieve the kind of extraordinary results that they themselves may not have known they were capable of.

Performance measure. Throughout this book, the term performance measure refers to an indicator used by management to measure, report, and improve performance. Performance measures are classed as key result indicators, result indicators, performance indicators, or key performance indicators. Critical success factors (CSFs). CSFs are the list of issues or aspects of organizational performance that determine ongoing health, vitality, and wellbeing. Normally there are between five and eight CSFs in any organization. Success factors. A list of 30 or so issues or aspects of organizational performance that management knows are important in order to perform well in any given sector/ industry. Some of these success factors are much more important; these are known as critical success factors. Balanced scorecard. A term first introduced by Kaplan and Norton describing how you need to measure performance in a more holistic way. You need to see an organization’s performance in a number of different perspectives. For the purposes of this book, there are six perspectives in a balanced scorecard (see Exhibit 1.7). Oracles and young guns. In an organization, oracles are those gray-haired individuals who have seen it all before. They are often considered to be slow, ponderous, and, quite frankly, a nuisance by the new management. Often they are retired early or made redundant only to be rehired as contractors at twice their previous salary when management realizes they have lost too much institutional knowledge. Their considered pace is often a reflection that they can see that an exercise is futile because it has failed twice before. The young guns are fearless and precocious leaders of the future who are not afraid to go where angels fear to tread. These staff members have not yet achieved management positions. The mixing of the oracles and young guns during a KPI project benefits both parties and the organization. The young guns learn much and the oracles rediscover their energy being around these live wires. Empowerment. For the purposes of this book, empowerment is an outcome of a process that matches competencies, skills, and motivations with the required level of autonomy and responsibility in the workplace. Senior management team (SMT). The team comprised of the CEO and all direct reports. Better practice. The efficient and effective way management and staff undertake business activities in all key processes: leadership, planning, customers, suppliers, community relations, production and supply of products and services, employee wellbeing, and so forth. Best practice. A commonly misused term, especially because what is best practice for one organization may not be best practice for another, albeit they are in the same sector. Best practice is where better practices, when effectively linked together, lead to sustainable world-class outcomes in quality, customer service, flexibility, timeliness, innovation, cost, and competitiveness. Best-practice organizations commonly use the latest time-saving technologies, always focus on the 80/20, are members of quality management and continuous improvement professional bodies, and utilize benchmarking. Exhibit 1.10 shows the contents of the toolkit used by best-practice organizations to achieve world-class performance. EXHIBIT 1.10 Best-Practice Toolkit Benchmarking. An ongoing, systematic process to search for international better practices, compare against them, and then introduce them, modified where necessary, into your organization. Benchmarking may be focused on products, services, business practices, and processes of recognized leading organizations.