What is Leadership?
Leadership;
Leadership is the act of influencing /serving others to archive challenging Aims, Goals. In business is the capacity of a company’s management to set and achieve challenging goals, take fast and decisive action when needed, outperform the competition, and inspire others to perform at the highest level they can.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Leadership is setting and achieving goals, tackling the competition, and solving problems decisively and quickly.
- Leadership also refers to the tone a company’s management sets in terms of the corporate culture.
- Some people with strong leadership skills in the business world rise to become the CEO, COO, CFO, president, or chair of their companies.
Understanding Leadership
Leadership provides direction for a company and its workers. Employees need to know the direction in which the company is headed and who to follow to reach the destination. Leadership involves showing workers how to effectively perform their responsibilities and regularly supervising the completion of their tasks.
Leadership is also about setting a positive example for staff to follow, by being excited about the work, being motivated to learn new things, and helping out as needed in both individual and team activities.
How Leadership Works
Effective leadership includes exhibiting a strong character. Leaders exhibit honesty, integrity, trustworthiness, and ethics. Leaders act in line with how they speak and earn the right to be responsible for others’ success in the company.
Strong leadership involves clear communication skills. Leaders speak with and listen to staff members, respond to questions and concerns, and are empathetic. Leaders use effective communication skills for moving the company forward and achieving new levels of success.
True leadership sees where the company is headed and plans the steps needed to get there. Visualizing what is possible, following trends in the industry, and taking risks to grow the business are all required of leaders.
Productive leadership shows optimism and provides positive energy for staff. Good leaders are supportive and are truly concerned about the well-being of others. Leaders find answers to challenges and reassure and inspire workers when things go awry. Leaders find ways for staff to work together and achieve maximum results in an efficient and effective manner.
An Example of Leadership
Jack Welch exhibited leadership as chief executive officer (CEO) of General Electric Co. from 1981 to 2001. He played an integral part in 600 acquisitions in emerging markets and increased GE’s market value from $12 billion to $505 billion at the time of his retirement. Because the world is constantly changing, Welch insisted everyone at GE embrace change. To continue evolving company operations and producing greater output, managers and employees had to continuously reinvent themselves and their work.
Welch hired managers who shared his vision of GE, had endless amounts of energy and were able to encourage employees to stay engaged in their work. He sought managers who created, developed and refined ideas for the future and found ways to make them a reality. He also insisted that managers work side-by-side with employees as a way of understanding what they were doing and why.
As a result of Welch’s leadership style, managers and employees were more empowered, products gained higher quality, and customer satisfaction and profits increased dramatically.
It’s a difficult concept to define, perhaps because it means so many things to different people.
- Here are 100 of the best ways to define leadership–choose the ones that fits best for you.
1. “A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” –Lao Tzu
2. “A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit.” –Arnold Glasow
3. “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” –Martin Luther King Jr
4. “You don’t need a title to be a leader.” –Mark Sanborn
5. “It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership.” –Nelson Mandela
6. “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” –John F. Kennedy
7. “The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.” –Ronald Reagan
8. “Successful leadership is leading with the heart, not just the head. They possess qualities like empathy, compassion and courage.” –Bill George
9. “The task of leadership is not to put greatness into people, but to elicit it, for the greatness is there already.” –John Buchan
10. “A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together.”–Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
11. “When the leadership is right and the time is right, the people can always be counted upon to follow–to the end at all costs.” –Harold J. Seymour
12. “Leaders must be self-reliant individuals with great tenacity and stamina.”–Thomas E. Cronin
13. “Leadership: The capacity and will to rally people to a common purpose together with the character that inspires confidence and trust.” –Bernard Montgomery
14. “All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.” –John Kenneth Galbraith
15. “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” –Warren Bennis
16. “Leadership defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen, despite the obstacles.” –John Kotter
17. ” I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.” –Ralph Nader
18. “I think leadership comes from integrity–that you do whatever you ask others to do. I think there are non-obvious ways to lead. Just by providing a good example as a parent, a friend, a neighbor makes it possible for other people to see better ways to do things. Leadership does not need to be a dramatic, fist in the air and trumpets blaring, activity.” –Scott Berkun
19. “Leadership is the capacity to influence others through inspiration motivated by passion, generated by vision, produced by a conviction, ignited by a purpose.” –Myles Munroe
20. “Leadership is unlocking people’s potential to become better.” —Bill Bradley
21. “The art of leadership is saying no, not saying yes. It is very easy to say yes.” —-Tony Blair
22. “Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.” –Peter F. Drucker
23. “One measure of leadership is the caliber of people who choose to follow you.” –Dennis Peer
24. “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” –Steve Jobs
25. “Leadership is simply causing other people to do what the leaders want. Good leadership, whether formal or informal, is helping other people rise to their full potential while accomplishing the mission and goals of the organization. All members of an organization, who are responsible for the work of others, have the potential to be good leaders if properly developed.” –Bob Mason
26. “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it. “–Dwight Eisenhower
27. “The very essence of leadership is that you have to have a vision. It’s got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.” –Theodore Hesburgh
28. “Leadership is the art of mobilizing others to want to struggle for shared aspirations.” –James Kouzes and Barry Posner
29. “A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.” –Rosalynn Carter
30. “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” — John Quincy Adams
31. “Leadership is not a person or a position. It is a complex moral relationship between people, based on trust, obligation, commitment, emotion, and a shared vision of the good.” –Joanne Ciulla
32. “The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly.” –Jim Rohn
33. “Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.” –Peter Drucker
34. “Leadership is an opportunity to serve. It is not a trumpet call to self-importance.” –J. Donald Walters
35. “Leadership is a matter of having people look at you and gain confidence, seeing how you react. If you’re in control, they’re in control.” –Tom Landry
36. “A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” –John Maxwell
37. “Leadership is the process of persuasion or example by which an individual (or leadership team) induces a group to pursue objectives held by the leader or shared by the leader and his or her followers.”–John W. Gardner
38. “My definition of a leader… is a man who can persuade people to do what they don’t want to do, or do what they’re too lazy to do, and like it.” –Harry S. Truman
39. “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” –Warren Bennis
40. “A leader is a dealer in hope.” –Napoleon Bonaparte
41. Leadership is the collective action of everyone you influence. Your behavior–your actions and your words–determines how you influence. Our job as leaders is to energize whatever marshals action within others. –David Caullo
42. “A leader has to be somebody who’s getting people to do things which don’t seem to make sense to them or are not in their best interest–like convincing people that they should work 14 hours a day so that someone else can make more money.” –Scott Adams
43. “Leadership is the ability to guide others without force into a direction or decision that leaves them still feeling empowered and accomplished.” –Lisa Cash Hanson
44. “The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.” –Henry Kissinger
45. “Leadership is about service to others and a commitment to developing more servants as leaders. It involves co-creation of a commitment to a mission.” –Robert Greenleaf
46. “Leadership is working with and through others to achieve objectives.” –Paul Hersey
47. “Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.” –Tom Peters
48. “Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy.” –Norman Schwarzkopf
49. “A leader’s role is to raise people’s aspirations for what they can become and to release their energies so they will try to get there.” –David R. Gergen
50. “Leadership is unlocking people’s potential to become better.” –Bill Bradley
51. “Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.” –Stephen Covey
52. “Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.” –Colin Powell
53. “Leadership is the key to 99 percent of all successful efforts.” –Erskine Bowles
54. “Leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do it.” –Frances Hesselbein
55. “Leadership is the ability to establish standards and manage a creative climate where people are self-motivated toward the mastery of long-term constructive goals, in a participatory environment of mutual respect, compatible with personal values.” –Mike Vance
56. “Leadership is getting people to work for you when they are not obligated.” — Fred Smith
57. “One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency.” –Arnold Glasow
58. “Leadership is the art of influencing others to their maximum performance to accomplish any task, objective or project.” –W.A. Cohen
59. “A good leader is a caring leader — he not only cares about his people, he actively takes care of them.” –Harald Anderson
60. “There are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are persons who have attempted to define the concept.” –Ralph Stogdill
62. “Keep your fears to yourself, but share your inspiration with others.” –Robert Louis Stevenson
63. “Without passion, a person will have very little influence as a leader.” –Michele Payn-Knoper
64. “Leadership is an intangible quality with no clear definition. That’s probably a good thing, because if the people who were being led knew the definition, they would hunt down their leaders and kill them.” –Scott Adams.
65. “Leadership is doing what is right when no one is watching.” –George Van Valkenburg
66. “Leadership is someone who demonstrates what’s possible.” –Mark Yarnell
67. “Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions.”–Harold Geneen
68. “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” –George Smith Patton
69. “Leadership by example is the only kind of real leadership. Everything else is dictatorship.” –Albert Emerson
70. “The leader is one who mobilizes others toward a goal shared by leaders and followers. … Leaders, followers and goals make up the three equally necessary supports for leadership.” –Gary Wills
71. “The leader must know, must know that he knows, and must be able to make it abundantly clear to those around him that he knows.” –Clarence Randall
72. “Leadership is about taking responsibility and not making excuses.” –Mitt Romney
73. “Leadership is difficult but it is not complex.” –Michael McKinney
75. “Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal.” –P.G. Northouse
76. “Followers are the gem cutters of leadership coaxing out its full brilliance.” –Ira Chaleff
77. “A leader cannot lead until he knows where he is going.” –Anonymous
78. “Leaders aren’t born, they are made.” ―Vince Lombardi
79. “The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men, the conviction and the will to carry on.” –Walter Lippmann
80. “The function of a leader within any institution: to provide that regulation through his or her non-anxious, self-defined presence.” –Edwin H. Friedman
82. “The leadership instinct you are born with is the backbone. You develop the funny bone and the wishbone that go with it.” –Elaine Agather
83. “The best way to lead people into the future is to connect with them deeply in the present.” –James Kouzes and Barry Posner
84. “Leadership consists of picking good men and helping them do their best.” — Chester W. Nimitz
85. “To get others to come into our ways of thinking, we must go over to theirs; and it is necessary to follow, in order to lead.” –William Hazlitt
86. “Leadership requires using power to influence the thoughts and actions of other people.” –A. Zalenik
87. “The mark of a great man is one who knows when to set aside the important things in order to accomplish the vital ones.” –Brandon Sanderson
89. “Successful leaders see the opportunities in every difficulty rather than the difficulty in every opportunity.” –Reed Markham
90. “The most important thing about a commander is his effect on morale.” –Viscount Slim
91. “While a good leader sustains momentum, a great leader increases it.” –John C. Maxwell
92. “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” –William Arthur Ward
93. “He who cannot be a good follower cannot be a good leader.” ―Aristotle
95. “That is what leadership is all about: staking your ground ahead of where opinion is and convincing people, not simply following the popular opinion of the moment.”–Doris Kearns Goodwin
96. “The way I would measure leadership is this: of the people that are working with me, how many wake up in the morning thinking that the company is theirs?” –David M. Kelley
97. “You don’t lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case.” –Ken Kesey
98. “Not the cry, but the flight of a wild duck, leads the flock to fly and follow.” –Chinese Proverb
99. “To command is to serve, nothing more and nothing less.” –Andre Malraux
100. “Leadership is leading people with your whole heart.” – Lolly Daskal
About Author
