Reflections on Leadership: What Leaders Say About Leadership

Foreword

Many great things have been said about leadership, yet there are a lot of people who do not know what it is or what it looks like. There are different styles and theories. Some of us worked in authoritarian environments where workers were treated the way W.C. Fields treated children, that is, seen and not heard. Many managers and business owners felt that workers should be happy just to have a job.

The sum total of leadership theory could be summed up as Do as you are told.

Slowly, that theory has been falling out of fashion. In the modern era, B. F. Skinner was one of the first psychologists to suggest that positive reinforcement may be a better way to get the most out of your staff.

Fred Fielder then came on the scene with his contingency model that suggested leaders should change their style depending on the situation.

Many other thought leaders have since stepped forward with their own theories on leadership.

As a student of leadership and leader for over twelve years, I have my own theories and thoughts on this topic. As a student, I am always interested in what others have said about leadership, so I began looking at leadership quotes. What began as an exercise in learning from modern leaders expanded to a search for the wisdom of leadership through the ages. I have found many from modern thinkers and ancient thinkers, such as Socrates, Lao Tzu, and others. Even though these people lived centuries ago, their thoughts are applicable today.

On the pages that follow, I have assembled a collection of quotes that I found profound and applied to modern thoughts.

I also provide my own commentaries about what I believe the leader is saying and how you can learn from it. One of the lessons I learned is that even though these leaders come from vastly different times, locations, and cultures, there are common themes to their wisdom.

Now it may be that I chose these quotes simply because I consciously or subconsciously recognized these threads and picked them out, so of course they share some common themes.

What it boils down to is that these are great ideas, no matter when or why they originated. Great leadership has helped our species survive for thousands of years. The reason there are some common themes is because we had to learn the lesson of survival again and again. Thus is the nature of man.

There are several ways to read this book. The first, of course, is to just read it like any other book: Start at the beginning and read to the end.

You can also pick and choose based on the originator of the quote. If you like Colin Powell or Eleanor Roosevelt, you can click the links to their quotes.

If you want to use the book as a daily devotional to leadership, then read one quote a day and my reflection. Most of my thoughts are about 400 words or about two minutes to read. This is perfect for people who want to begin or end their day thinking about leadership or looking for lessons in their own journey.

Some of the leaders are well known and will hardly need an introduction. Others are less well known, and I have included a brief biographical sketch and information about how they influenced their life and times.

I hope you enjoy reading along as much as I enjoyed compiling and examining these quotes.

Table of Contents

Foreword

John Taffer

John Maxwell

Colin Powell

Ken Blanchard

Lao Tzu

Simon Sinek

Colin Powell

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Sam Walton

Arnold H. Glasow

Steve Largent

J. Paul Getty

Mark Goulston

Jim Rohn

James Humes

Bob Chapman

Kurt Vonnegut

Eleanor Roosevelt

Max De Pree

Harvey S. Firestone

Marcus Aurelius

William Arthur Ward

Brian Tracy

Colin Powell

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Bill Gates

George S. Patton Jr.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Martin Luther King, Jr

Abraham Lincoln

Theodore Roosevelt

John C. Maxwell

Henry Ford

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Sam J. Ervin, Jr.

General John J. Pershing

Admiral Hyman G. Rickover

Harry Gordon Selfridge

Warren G. Bennis

Diogenes of Sinope

John Zenger

Colin Powell

David Marquet

Colin Powell

Will Rogers

George Addair

George Washington

Socrates

Julius Caesar

Epictetus

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Michael Jordan

Klaus Balkenhol

Beth Revis

Patrick Lencioni

Reed Markham

Rebecca Aguilar

Winston Churchill

Ben Franklin

George C. Marshall

General Eisenhower

Claudius

David Hackworth

General Mark Welsh

Angela Ahrendts

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Robert Townsend

Mary Barra

Seth Berkley

Vince Lombardi

Walter Lippmann

Carrie Gilstrap

Acknowledgements

About the Author

This is a sentiment echoed in many ways by modern entrepreneurs and business leaders. It taps into our desire to grow and be more than simply a nameless worker in a machine. It recognizes that people want to grow and contribute to society. We are, after all, social animals. We want to help each other, and we feel rewarded when we feel that we have contributed to our society. Leaders who recognize this do well to engage their staff and provide them the opportunity for growth and development.

Let’s remember that this approach also benefits leaders. One of the first rules of leadership and business management is planning for succession. If you are not developing your future leaders, then who will lead when you are not there?

Recently I was traveling with a manager who works for the same organization as I do, but in a different division. I knew this manager, but not well. This car trip was our first opportunity to get to know each other.

For the first several hours of the trip, we had a good discussion about management and leadership. Our thoughts were very similar about how people in our care should be treated. After a few hours, she held up her work phone and said, You are good luck. Usually this thing rings all the time.

I’d say that it’s more a testimony to how well you have trained your staff. They can function for a whole day without you.

She took the compliment with humility and explained that she knew that she was going to be traveling for training, so she had spent time with one of her staff, preparing him to fill in while she was away.

Either way, she was preparing her staff to be successful. She went on to confide that currently her office is experiencing a large amount of turnover.

As I said, we work in the same organization, but different divisions. In my division, we are also experiencing turnover, with much of the turnover due to staff moving on to other organizations. It turns out that most of the turnover in her office is due to promotions within her division.

She is training her staff to be successful, so successful that those staff are able to move on from her office. She is becoming the feeder for other offices in her division.

For her, it means that she is continually hiring and training new staff. She is unbothered by this; in fact, she was humble about it. She accepted that being a leader means wanting her staff to be successful. Successful staff will move on to other opportunities, that being the definition of success.

To her, it is the right thing to do. She is a leader, so training staff is her job. She’d be training them if they were new to her office or had been there for years. If she trains them so well that other managers want hire them away, then she has done her job.

As social animals, we benefit when others in our society succeed, so shouldn’t leaders be invested in the success of their followers?

Action Steps

As a leader, you need to hold one-to-ones with your followers to build an effective rapport. Part of your one-to-ones includes conversations about your follower’s goals, but this need not take long. Take a few minutes to figure out what skills and abilities your follower needs to build, and together brainstorm a dozen resources for the follower. Narrow the list to two or three resources (books, training, seminars, etc.). Set a short deadline (a week or two) to achieve the goal (attend training, read all or part of the book). Have the follower report back, then reevaluate and start again.

Most of the work is done by the follower; you are there to assist and guide.

John Maxwell is one of the modern thought leaders I spoke about above. He is well known to many, and some of you probably have read one or more of his books.

In this day and age, the word value is becoming one of those buzz words that people sprinkle into their sentences to make them sound smart. In terms of this quote, though, that’s a disservice to the word.

The current business use of the word value means to give something of worth or utility. Human capital comes to mind. (Another of those words or phrases that are almost meaningless from overuse.)

To Maxwell, leaders want their followers to be so well trained that they can be successful without the leader. Human capital is the sum total of the skills, abilities, and knowledge of an individual, so any training the leader provides adds to that human capital.

If you have ever mentored someone, you know the thrill of watching that person grow and develop. You know that rush of dopamine your brain releases into your system as you see your mentee overcome a challenge they once thought insurmountable. You feel that rush because you are invested in that person; you have provided them with knowledge, wisdom, and guidance.

As a mentor, why do you do that? You don’t invest in people you don’t care about, right? In other words, you don’t invest in people you don’t value.

Would you experience the same rush of dopamine, of achievement, if you did not value the person? Probably not.

But valuing does not simply mean that you like being around someone; there’s more to it than that. When we value a company, we have assessed what the company has to offer. We have run various tests. We know its revenue, its sales, and sales forecasts. We have looked at profits and losses. We know everything about its taxes and its assets.

In Maxwell’s terms, we have done the same with the person, though less clinically. We may enjoy spending time with them, and we may value their company, but we also value their skills and abilities. We value what they offer. We value their potential, even if the person does not recognize that value, that potential, themselves.

Being a leader, you have to know what your followers are capable of and how to bring those capabilities out.

Action Steps

Letting your followers know that you value them and their work means you have to know how to deliver feedback. Feedback, negative and positive, must be delivered as closely to the behavior you want to correct or encourage as possible. Waiting diminishes the impact. Delivering feedback days or even hours after the event distances the follower from the work and does not provide them with the appropriate connection to the event. Time makes the event less real and more nebulous. At the end of the work day, how clearly do you recall the events at the beginning of the work day?

When giving feedback, describe behaviors. Link the behavior to the desired outcome, then ask the follower how they can continue the desired behavior or discontinue the undesirable one. Specificity helps. Simply saying that a follower gave a good presentation is not enough; they need to know what you liked about the presentation.

At the close of a presentation you liked, give the follower specific feedback about the project. Your conversation might look like this:

Steve, you did a really good job of keeping your team informed about changes during the project. That helps in completing the project on time and gives me confidence in giving you larger projects in the future. What can you do keep turning in good work?

Describe the positive outcome. Engage the follower’s cognitive abilities by asking for their opinion, which also makes them part of the success.

To provide negative feedback, simply flip the script:

Steve, when you do not turn you projects in on deadline, it sets back several other projects, and we turn in our product late to the customer. This creates distrust between us and the customer. All of this makes me hesitant to give you other projects. What can we do to help complete you projects on time?

Again, tie the desired behavior to the feedback. Describe the negative outcome. Engage their cognitive abilities by asking for assistance and making them part of the solution.

Deliver both messages in a neutral tone. Resist the urge to add anything else. Let it be. If the follower wants to argue with the negative feedback, do not escalate and do not engage. End the conversation with something like, no worries, or it’s all right, and walk away.

Engaging with the follower runs the risk of both of you becoming escalated. You entered the conversation with good intent. Do not allow their reaction to drag you into an argument. Your goal is to change behavior, not to get into an argument.

Your follower’s goal is to reframe conversation. If they argue, they want to distract from their behavior. At best, they are trying to excuse the behavior. They want a reason to keep engaging in the behavior, rather than find a way to change the behavior.

At worst, they are trying to bait you into an argument. At the end of the argument, they can walk away secure in the belief that you are the bad guy.

If the direct report is responsive, there is no harm in expanding, but keep it short. The purpose of this conversation, whether positive or negative feedback, is to talk about behaviors.

Experts agree that workers need more positive feedback than negative feedback. The research varies from a 3:1 ratio to 5:1 and even 6:1. Whichever is the most accurate, it is clear that you should be using the positive feedback model more often than the negative model.

This book contains quotes from many military leaders and several from Colin Powell. This particular quote is becoming one of my favorites.

Colin Powell first came to the attention of many Americans during Desert Shield and Desert Storm when he served as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 2001, he served as the Secretary of State for President George W. Bush.

This quote contains several gems. The first sentence would be enough to sum up leadership: Leadership is about solving problems. That’s why we have leaders: They solve the problem of disorganization. Leadership solves the problem of lack of vision and lack of training.

Any problem in your organization can be solved with the proper application of leadership.

Powell is not done. He tells you a way to recognize when you have stopped leading: when soldiers stop bringing you their problems. I’m sure I do not need to tell you that this is true whether