Top 136 Quotes & Sayings by Warren G. Bennis

Walt Disney, of all people, did a good job of describing his own netony. "People who have worked with me say I am 'innocence in action,'" he wrote. "They say I have the innocence and unselfconsciousness of a child. Maybe I have. I still look at the world with uncontaminated wonder."

Government is like an onion. To understand it, you have to peel through many different layers. Most outsiders never get beyond the first or second layer.

Followers who tell the truth, and leaders who listen to it, are an unbeatable combination.

Recognize the skills and traits you don't possess, and hire the people who have them.

Trust is the emotional glue that binds followers and leaders together.

Leaders learn by leading, and they learn bestby leading in the face of obstacles. As weather shapes mountains, problems shape leaders.

It is the capacity to develop and improve their skills that distinguishes leaders from followers.

The failure to find the right niche for people - or to let them find their own perfect niches - is a major reason that so many workplaces are mediocre, even toxic, in spite of the presence of talent. Leaders of great groups give them whatever they need and free them from everything else.

The manager does things right; the leader does the right thing.

The leader has a clear idea of what he wants to do professionally and personally, and the strength to persist in the face of setbacks, even failures

Learning to be an effective leader is no different than learning to be an effective person. And that's the hard part

You are your own raw material. When you know what you consist of and what you want to make of it, then you can invent yourself.

The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born - that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.

The learning person looks forward to failure or mistakes. The worst problem in leadership is basically early success.

Embrace error: Create an atmosphere in which prudent risk taking is strongly encouraged.

Encourage dissent: Leaders should have associates who have contrary views, who are devil's advocates, "variance sensors" who can tell them the difference between what is expected and what is really happening, between what they want to hear and what they need to hear. There are too many naked emperors running around today.

What makes a good follower? The single most important characteristic may well be a willingness to tell the truth. In a world of growing complexity leaders are increasingly dependent on their subordinates for good information, whether the leaders want to hear it or not. Followers who tell the truth and leaders who listen to it are an unbeatable combination.

Great things are achieved by talented people who are absolutely convinced that they not only can but will achieve them.

The first job of a leader is to define a vision for the organization...the capacity to translate vision into reality.

Manage the dream: Create a compelling vision, one that takes people to a new place, and then translate that vision into a reality.

A new leader has to be able to change an organization that is dreamless, soulless and visionless... someone's got to make a wake up call.

If great teams don't have an "enemy," they create one for themselves because, as former Coca-Cola CEO Roberto Goizueta pointed out, "you can't have a war without one."

Leadership is a function of knowing yourself, having a vision that is well communicated, building trust among colleagues, and taking effective action to realize your own leadership potential.

Make sure you have someone in your life from whom you can get reflective feedback.

All of great leaders evidence four basic qualities that are central to their ability to lead: adaptive capacity, the ability to engage others through shared meaning, a distinctive voice, and unshakeable integrity. These four qualities mark all exemplary leaders, whatever their age, gender, ethnicity, or race.

The manager administers; the leader innovates. The manager has a short-range view; the leader has a long-range perspective. The manager asks how and when; the leader asks what and why. The manager has his eye on the bottom line; the leader has his eye on the horizon. The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it.

To become a leader, then, you must become yourself, become the maker of your own life

Leaders do not avoid, repress, or deny conflict, but rather see it as an opportunity

The new leader is one who commits people to action, who converts followers into leaders, and who may convert leaders into agents of change.

Who succeeds in forming and leading a Great Group? He or she is almost always a pragmatic dreamer. They are people who get things done, but they are people with immortal longings. Often, they are scientifically minded people with poetry in their souls.

The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born.

One of the qualities that all the leaders have is a voracious appetite to learn whatever they do not as yet know and understand, coupled with an openness to new experiences.

The ability to plan for what has not yet happened, for a future that has only been imagined, is one of the hallmarks of leadership.

Growing other leaders from the ranks isn't just the duty of the leader, it's an obligation.

Vision animates, inspires, transforms purpose into action.

Leaders wonder about everything, want to learn as much as they can, are willing to take risks, experiment, try new things. They do not worry about failure but embrace errors, knowing they will learn from them.

Every one of the geezers who continues to play a leadership role has one quality of overriding importance: neotony. The dictionary definition is that neotony, a zoological term, involves "the retention of youthful qualities throughout old age." It is more than merely retaining a youthful appearance, although that is often part of it. Neotony is the retention of all those wonderful qualities that we associate with youth: curiosity, playfulness, eagerness, fearlessness, warmth, energy.

The leaders I met, whatever walk of life they were from, whatever institutions they were presiding over, always referred back to the same failure something that happened to them that was personally difficult, even traumatic, something that made them feel that desperate sense of hitting bottom-as something they thought was almost a necessity. It's as if at that moment the iron entered their soul; that moment created the resilience that leaders need.

Innovation- any new idea-by definition will not be accepted at first. It takes repeated attempts, endless demonstrations, monotonous rehearsals before innovation can be accepted and internalized by an organization. This requires courageous patience.

Too many companies believe people are interchangeable. Truly gifted people never are. They have unique talents. Such people cannot be forced into roles they are not suited for, nor should they be. Effective leaders allow great people to do the work they were born to do.

Charisma is the result of effective leadership, not the other way around.

A leader is someone whose actions have the most profound consequences on other people's lives, for better or worse, sometime forever and ever.

Trust resides squarely between faith and doubt.

In life, change is inevitable. In business, change is vital.

Emotional intelligence, more than any other factor, more than I.Q. or expertise, accounts for 85% to 90% of success at work... I.Q. is a threshold competence. You need it, but it doesn't make you a star. Emotional intelligence can.

Without character, there is no credibility; and without credibility, there is no trust.

Just as no great painting has ever been created by a committee, no great vision has ever emerged from the herd.

More leaders have been made by accident, circumstance, sheer grit, or will than have been made by all the leadership courses put together.

Recognize and respect mutual self-interests, then build creative collaborations to serve them.

Leadership is like beauty - it's hard to define but you know it when you see it.

In the face of ambiguity, uncertainty, and conflicting demands, often under great time pressure, leaders must make decisions and take effective actions to assure the survival and success of their organizations. This is how leaders add value to their organizations. They lead them to success by exercising good judgment, by making smart calls when especially difficult and complicated decisions simply must be made, and then ensuring that they are well executed.

We have more information now than we can use, and less knowledge and understanding than we need. Indeed, we seem to collect information because we have the ability to do so, but we are so busy collecting it that we haven't devised a means of using it. The true measure of any society is not what it knows but what it does with what it knows.

We must move from ... the primacy of technology toward considerations of social justice and equity, from the dictates of organizational convenience toward the aspirations ofself realization and learning, from authoritarianism and dogmatism toward more participation, from uniformity and centralization toward diversity and pluralism, from the concept of work as hard and unavoidable, from life as nasty, brutish, and short toward work as purpose and self~fulfillment, a recognition of leisure as a valid activity in itself.

If you're the leader, you've got to give up your omniscient and omnipotent fantasies - that you know and must do everything. Learn how to abandon your ego to the talents of others.

Coaching will become the model for leaders in the future... I am certain that leadership can be learned and that terrific coaches... facilitate learning.

Good leaders make people feel that they're at the very heart of things, not at the periphery. Everyone feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the organization. When that happens people feel centered and that gives their work meaning.

Leading with character gives the wise leader clear-cut advantages. They are easier to trust and follow; they honor commitments and promises; their words and behavior match; they are always engaged in and by the world; they are open to "reflective backtalk": they can speak with conviction because they believe in what they are saying...and everyone else knows that. They are comfortable in their own skin. They feel at ease in the spotlight and they enjoy it there. They tend to be more receptive to opportunity and risk.

I am reminded how hollow the label of leadership sometimes is and how heroic followership can be.

The leader...is rarely the brightest person in the group. Rather they have extraordinary taste, which makes them more curators than creators. They are appreciators of talent and nurturers of talent and they have the ability to recognize valuable ideas.

Power is the basic energy needed to initiate and sustain action or, to put it another way, the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it. Leadership is the wise use of this power: Transformative leadership.