Some sit and pontificate about whether leaders are made or born. The true leader ignores such arguments and instead concentrates on developing the leadership qualities necessary for success. In this article, we are going to discuss five leadership traits or leadership qualities that people look for in a leader. If you are able to increase your skill in displaying these five quality characteristics, you will make it easier for people to want to follow you. The less time you have to spend on getting others to follow you, the more time you have to spend refining exactly where you want to go and how to get there.

The five leadership traits/leadership qualities are:

1. Honest 2. Forward-Looking 3. Competent 4. Inspiring 5. Intelligent

These five qualities come from Kouzes and Posner’s research into leadership that was done for the book The Leadership Challenge.

Your skill at exhibiting these five leadership qualities is strongly correlated with people’s desire to follow your lead. Exhibiting these traits will inspire confidence in your leadership. Not exhibiting these traits or exhibiting the opposite of these traits will decrease your leadership influence with those around you.

It is important to exhibit, model and display these traits. Simply possessing each trait is not enough; you have to display it in a way that people notice. People want to see that you actively demonstrate these leadership qualities and will not just assume that you have them. It isn’t enough to just be neutral. For example, just because you are not dishonest will not cause people to recognize that you are honest. Just avoiding displays of incompetence won’t inspire the same confidence as truly displaying competence.

The focus of each of these five traits needs to be on what people see you do–not just the things they don’t see you do. Being honest isn’t a matter of not lying–it is taking the extra effort to display honesty.

Honesty as a Leadership QualityPeople want to follow an honest leader. Years ago, many employees started out by assuming that their leadership was honest simply because the authority of their position. With modern scandals, this is no longer true.

When you start a leadership position, you need to assume that people will think you are a little dishonest. In order to be seen as an honest individual, you will have to go out of your way to display honesty. People will not assume you are honest simply because you have never been caught lying.

One of the most frequent places where leaders miss an opportunity to display honesty is in handling mistakes. Much of a leader’s job is to try new things and refine the ideas that don’t work. However, many leaders want to avoid failure to the extent that they don’t admit when something did not work.

There was a medium size organization that was attempting to move to a less centralized structure. Instead of one location serving an entire city, they wanted to put smaller offices throughout the entire metro area. At the same time, they were planning an expansion for headquarters to accommodate more customers at the main site. The smaller remote offices was heralded as a way to reach more customers at a lower cost and cover more demographic areas.

After spending a considerable amount of money on a satellite location, it became clear that the cost structure would not support a separate smaller office. As the construction completed on the expanded headquarters building, the smaller office was closed. This was good decision making. The smaller offices seemed like a good idea, but when the advantages didn’t materialize (due to poor management or incorrect assumptions) it made sense to abandon the model. This was a chance for the leadership to display honesty with the employees, be candid about why things didn’t work out as expected, learn from the mistakes an move on.

Unfortunately in this situation the leadership told employees that they had planned on closing the satellite location all along and it was just a temporary measure until construction was completed on the larger headquarters building. While this wasn’t necessarily true, it didn’t quite cross over into the area of lying. Within a few months the situation was mostly forgotten and everyone moved on. Few of the employees felt that leadership was being dishonest. However, they had passed up a marvelous opportunity to display the trait of honesty in admitting a mistake.

Opportunities to display honesty on a large scale may not happen every day. As a leader, showing people that you are honest even when it means admitting to a mistake, displays a key trait that people are looking for in their leaders. By demonstrating honesty with yourself, with your organization and with outside organizations, you will increase your leadership influence. People will trust someone who actively displays honesty–not just as an honest individual, but as someone who is worth following.

Forward-Looking as a Leadership TraitThe whole point of leadership is figuring out where to go from where you are now. While you may know where you want to go, people won’t see that unless you actively communicate it with them. Remember, these traits aren’t just things you need to have, they are things you need to actively display to those around you.

When people do not consider their leader forward-looking, that leader is usually suffering from one of two possible problems:

1. The leader doesn’t have a forward-looking vision. 2. The leader is unwilling or scared to share the vision with others.

When a leader doesn’t have a vision for the future, it usually because they are spending so much time on today, that they haven’t really thought about tomorrow. On a very simplistic level this can be solved simply by setting aside some time for planning, strategizing and thinking about the future.

Many times when a leader has no time to think and plan for the future, it is because they are doing a poor job of leading in the present. They have created an organization and systems that rely too much on the leader for input at every stage.

Some leaders have a clear vision, but don’t wish to share it with others. Most of the time they are concerned that they will lose credibility if they share a vision of the future that doesn’t come about. This is a legitimate concern. However, people need to know that a leader has a strong vision for the future and a strong plan for going forward. Leaders run into trouble sharing their vision of the future when they start making promises to individuals. This goes back to the trait of honesty. If a leader tells someone that “next year I’m going to make you manager of your own division”, that may be a promise they can’t keep. The leader is probably basing this promotion on the organization meeting financial goals, but the individual will only hear the personal promise.

An organization I was working with was floundering. It seemed like everyone had a different idea about what they were trying to achieve. Each department head was headed in a different direction and there was very little synergy as small fiefdoms and internal politics took their toll.

Eventually a consulting firm was called in to help fix the problem. They analyzed the situation, talked to customers, talked to employees and set up a meeting with the CEO. They were going to ask him about his vision for the future. The employees were excited that finally there would be a report stating the direction for the organization.

After the meeting, the consultants came out shaking their heads. The employees asked how the important question had gone to which the consultants replied, “we asked him, but you aren’t going to like the answer”. The CEO had told the consultant that, while he had a vision and plan for the future, he wasn’t going to share it with anyone because he didn’t want there to be any disappointment if the goals were not reached.

Leaders can communicate their goals and vision for the future without making promises that they may not be able to keep. If a leader needs to make a promise to an individual, it should be tied to certain measurable objectives being met. The CEO in the example didn’t realize how much damage he was doing by not demonstrating the trait of being forward-looking by communicating his vision with the organization.

The CEO was forward-looking. He had a plan and a vision and he spent a lot of time thinking about where the organization was headed. However, his fear of communicating these things to the rest of the organization hampered his leadership potential.

Competency as a Leadership Quality

People want to follow someone who is competent. This doesn’t mean a leader needs to be the foremost expert on every area of the entire organization, but they need to be able to demonstrate competency.

For a leader to demonstrate that they are competent, it isn’t enough to just avoid displaying incompetency. Some people will assume you are competent because of your leadership position, but most will have to see demonstrations before deciding that you are competent.

When people under your leadership look at some action you have taken and think, “that just goes to show why he is the one in charge”, you are demonstrating competency. If these moments are infrequent, it is likely that some demonstrations of competency will help boost your leadership influence.

Like the other traits, it isn’t enough for a leader to be competent. They must demonstrate competency in a way that people notice. This can be a delicate balance. There is a danger of drawing too much attention to yourself in a way that makes the leader seem arrogant. Another potential danger is that of minimizing others contributions and appearing to take credit for the work of others.

As a leader, one of the safest ways to “toot you own horn without blowing it”, is to celebrate and bring attention to team achievements. In this way you indirectly point out your competency as a leader. For example: “Last year I set a goal of reaching $12 million in sales and, thanks to everyone’s hard word, as of today, we have reached $13.5 million.”

Inspiration as a Leadership TraitPeople want to be inspired. In fact, there is a whole class of people who will follow an inspiring leader–even when the leader has no other qualities. If you have developed the other traits in this article, being inspiring is usually just a matter of communicating clearly and with passion. Being inspiring means telling people how your organization is going to change the world.

A great example of inspiration is when Steve Jobs stole the CEO from Pepsi by asking him, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?” Being inspiring means showing people the big picture and helping them see beyond a narrow focus and understand how their part fits into the big picture.

One technique to develop your ability to inspire is telling stories. Stories can be examples from your customers, fictitious examples from your customers, or even historical fables and myths. Stories can help you vividly illustrate what you are trying to communicate. Stories that communicate on an emotional level help communicate deeper than words and leave an imprint much stronger than anything you can achieve through a simple stating of the facts.

Learning to be inspiring is not easy–particularly for individuals lacking in charisma. It can be learned. Take note of people who inspire you and analyze the way they communicate. Look for ways to passionately express your vision. While there will always be room for improvement, a

small investment in effort and awareness will give you a significant improvement in this leadership trait.

Intelligence as a Leadership TraitIntelligence is something that can be difficult to develop. The road toward becoming more intelligent is difficult, long and can’t be completed without investing considerable time. Developing intelligence is a lifestyle choice. Your college graduation was the beginning of your education, not the end. In fact, much of what is taught in college functions merely as a foundational language for lifelong educational experiences.

To develop intelligence you need to commit to continual learning–both formally and informally. With modern advances in distance, education it is easy to take a class or two each year from well respected professors in the evening at your computer.

Informally, you can develop a great deal of intelligence in any field simply by investing a reasonable amount of time to reading on a daily basis. The fact is that most people won’t make a regular investment in their education. Spending 30 minutes of focused reading every day will give you 182 hours of study time each year.

For the most part, people will notice if you are intelligent by observing your behavior and attitude. Trying to display your intelligence is likely to be counterproductive. One of the greatest signs of someone who is truly intelligent is humility. The greater your education, the greater your understanding of how little we really understand.

You can demonstrate your intelligence by gently leading people toward understanding–even when you know the answer. Your focus needs to be on helping others learn–not demonstrating how smart you are. Arrogance will put you in a position where people are secretly hopeful that you’ll make a mistake and appear foolish.

As unintuitive as it may seem, one of the best ways to exhibit intelligence is by asking questions. Learning from the people you lead by asking intelligent thoughtful questions will do more to enhance your intelligence credibility than just about anything. Of course this means you need to be capable of asking intelligent questions.

Everyone considers themselves intelligent. If you ask them to explain parts of their area of expertise and spend the time to really understand (as demonstrated by asking questions), their opinion of your intelligence will go up. After all, you now know more about what makes them so intelligent, so you must be smart as well. Your ability to demonstrate respect for the intellect of others will probably do more to influence the perception of your intellect than your actual intelligence.

Summary of the Five Leadership Qualities

By consciously making an effort to exhibit these traits, people will be more likely to follow you. These are the most important traits that people look for in their leaders. By exhibiting them on a regular basis, you will be able to grow your influence to its potential as a leader.

Terms referencing this article:

leadership qualities leadership traits leadership leadership characteristics QUALITIES OF LEADERSHIP traits of a leader traits of leadership characteristics of a leader leadership quality leader qualities

I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people. Mohandas Gandhi

Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other. John F. Kennedy

We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK. That's not leadership. That's not going to happen. Barack Obama

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

A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better. Jim Rohn

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. Peter Drucker

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

Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out. Stephen Covey

Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall. Stephen Covey

Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes. Peter Drucker

Five Essential Qualities of LeadershipAuthor: Angelo Valenti

Angelo Valenti, Ph.D., co-creator of the Fearless Leadership System™, leads a consulting practice known as “The Company Psychologist,” which provides psychological consulting services for clients in a wide variety of industries. 

Leaders and leadership are top-of-the-mind subjects among businesspeople, coaches, athletes, politicians, clergy, and individuals in all walks of life.  We demand more from our leaders every day but do little to prepare people for the leadership roles they take on during their lives.  To paraphrase Shakespeare, some people are born leaders, some achieve leadership, and others have leadership thrust upon them.  By whatever means a person attains a leadership position, there are five essential qualities that he or she must possess to be successful as a leader over time.

1. Above all else, a leader must have COURAGE.  The majority of people fail to achieve the quality of life they seek because they are shackled by their own fears.  Thoreau said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”  It’s not that the courageous leader is not afraid.  Everyone is afraid at one time or another.  Courage is the will to press on, to do what is necessary and what is right, to overcome obstacles even when afraid.  It isn’t courage if you’re not afraid.  The only antidote for fear is courage.

2. Fear has a partner in crime – self-doubt.  Self-doubt is that little voice in your head that says, “You can’t get that promotion, you’ll never make the team, you aren’t attractive enough, or you just can’t cut it.”  Fortunately, there is an antidote for self-doubt as well: CONFIDENCE.  Confidence is the unshakable belief in yourself that you can make happen what you want to happen.  It’s not the self-doubt that limits you; it’s your reaction to that self-doubt.  Confidence allows you to keep trying until you get better, to seek help and advice, to ignore the well-meaning spectators who are ready at your first misstep to tell you that it can’t do it right, you never were good enough, and you never will be.  Confidence is infectious.  If you believe in yourself, others will believe in you.

3. Even if a leader is courageous and confident, if he or she does not have the capacity for intense CONCENTRATION, that leader is likely to drift off course.  Concentration has two parts.  The first is persistence, the most important determining factor in an individual’s success.  Persistence is the unwillingness to quit until the goal is achieved.  Persistence does not require talent, only determination.  The second component of concentration is focus, or the ability to stay on track, organize oneself, and reduce debilitating distractions.  Great leaders have the ability to separate what is immediately pressing from what is truly important.

4. Why are leaders able to inspire others?  It’s because they have PASSION for what they do and what they believe in.  They are consistently enthusiastic, upbeat, and optimistic.  They bring a genuine joy to whatever they do.  Even when things are not going well, they can instill in others the belief that together they can make the situation better.   Great leaders are also committed to whatever they undertake.  Commitment means throwing yourself into whatever you do with everything you have.  It has been said that some people drink from the fountain of knowledge while others only gargle.  Leaders don’t gargle.

5. Finally, leaders must have a strong sense of VALUES if they are to succeed in the long term.  Values are enduring standards of behavior.  They are the stuff upon which our reputations are built.  They help us determine whom we can count on, how people will react in given situations, and whom we want as friends. The chances are good that if you follow the golden rule, do the right thing when nobody is looking, and live your life the way your grandmother told you to you will be demonstrating a sense of values that others will readily respect and follow.

To find out more about the Fearless Leadership System™, go to www.fearlessleadership.com. Or alternatively contact them at info@fearlessleadership.com

Strategic leadership refers to a manger’s potential to express a strategic vision for the organization, or a part of the organization, and to motivate and persuade others to acquire that vision. Strategic leadership can also be defined as utilizing strategy in the management of employees. It is the potential to influence organizational members and to execute organizational change. Strategic leaders create organizational structure, allocate resources and express strategic vision. Strategic leaders work in an ambiguous environment on very difficult issues that influence and are influenced by occasions and organizations external to their own.

The main objective of strategic leadership is strategic productivity. Another aim of strategic leadership is to develop an environment in which employees forecast the organization’s needs in context of their own job. Strategic leaders encourage the employees in an organization to follow their own ideas. Strategic leaders make greater use of reward and incentive system for encouraging productive and quality employees to show much better performance for their organization. Functional strategic leadership is about inventiveness, perception, and planning to assist an individual in realizing his objectives and goals.

Strategic leadership requires the potential to foresee and comprehend the work environment. It requires objectivity and potential to look at the broader picture.

A few main traits / characteristics / features / qualities of effective strategic leaders that do lead to superior performance are as follows:

Loyalty- Powerful and effective leaders demonstrate their loyalty to their vision by their words and actions.

Keeping them updated- Efficient and effective leaders keep themselves updated about what is happening within their organization. They have various formal and informal sources of information in the organization.

Judicious use of power- Strategic leaders makes a very wise use of their power. They must play the power game skillfully and try to develop consent for their ideas rather than forcing their ideas upon others. They must push their ideas gradually.

Have wider perspective/outlook- Strategic leaders just don’t have skills in their narrow specialty but they have a little knowledge about a lot of things.

Motivation- Strategic leaders must have a zeal for work that goes beyond money and power and also they should have an inclination to achieve goals with energy and determination.

Compassion- Strategic leaders must understand the views and feelings of their subordinates, and make decisions after considering them.

Self-control- Strategic leaders must have the potential to control distracting/disturbing moods and desires, i.e., they must think before acting.

Social skills- Strategic leaders must be friendly and social.

Self-awareness- Strategic leaders must have the potential to understand their own moods and emotions, as well as their impact on others.

Readiness to delegate and authorize- Effective leaders are proficient at delegation. They are well aware of the fact that delegation will avoid overloading of responsibilities on the leaders. They also recognize the fact that authorizing the subordinates to make decisions will motivate them a lot.

Articulacy- Strong leaders are articulate enough to communicate the vision(vision of where the organization should head) to the organizational members in terms that boost those members.

Constancy/ Reliability- Strategic leaders constantly convey their vision until it becomes a component of organizational culture.

To conclude, Strategic leaders can create vision, express vision, passionately possess vision and persistently drive it to accomplishment.

Ethical Leadership

Definition:  Ethical leadership is knowing your core values and having the courage to live them in all parts of your life in service of the common good.

Below are some reflections questions to ask on your personal journey toward ethical leadership:

Will you be the same person at work? At home? In the community? Will you have the courage to live out your values when there is pressure to compromise or

rationalize? How do your values contribute to the common good?

The 4-V ModelThe 4-V Model of Ethical Leadership is a framework that aligns the internal (beliefs and values) with the external (behaviors and actions) for the purpose of advancing the common good. The model was created by Center founder Dr. Bill Grace based on his formal leadership research and personal passions around faith and ethics.

At the Center for Ethical Leadership we have found that people who want to become leaders who make a difference need to embrace an inner journey of integrity and make an outer commitment to the common good. Our leadership development approach begins with this inner journey. Individuals discover and claim their core values, develop a vision for how the world could be different, find their personal voice for expressing their vision.

They then move to an outer commitment of living and behaving in ways that serve the community and advance the common good. They ask, “leadership for what purpose?” The ultimate purpose of leadership is to shape a future that is visionary,inclusive, and enables all members of society to fulfill their needs, dreams and potentials.

Values. Ethical leadership begins with an understanding of and commitment to our individual core values. By first discovering the values at the core of our identities, we begin the process of integrating our unique values with our choice-making on all levels of our personal and civic lives.

Vision. Vision is the ability to frame our actions – particularly in service to others – within a real picture of what ought to be.

Voice. Claiming our voice is the process of articulating our vision to others in an authentic and convincing way that animates and motivates them to action.

Virtue. Understanding that we become what we practice, we foster virtue by practicing virtuous behavior – striving to do what is right and good. In this way, we develop the character of virtue. In particular, virtue stands for the common good. Ethical leaders ask, “How are my values, vision and voice in keeping with the common good?”

Dr. Grace identified three additional elements that are key to the development of ethical leadership.

Service.  Service connects Vision to Values, indicating that when our values are tested and tried through service to others, the latent vision within them is often revealed.

Polis.  “Polis” is the Greek word for city, and the root of the English word, “politics.”  As we learn to give voice to our vision in the context of a public act, we are engaged in the art of politics.

Renewal.  As Voice returns to Values, the territory of our work changes to renewal.  As we express our voice in multiple ways, we need to break from the action on a regular basis to consider if our actions are congruent with our values and vision. 

10 Good Traits and Characteristics of a Successful Manager100rate or flag this page Tweet this

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You have a business and you are interested in hiring a manager who will be able to assist you in growing that business from the ground up. When you put out an ad for this position, you receive hundreds of resumes. Even if you narrow this bunch down to just the people who seem most qualified for the job, you're going to have to do quite a few interviews to make sure that you select the manager who is going to be most capable of growing your business. How do you know who that person is?

Here are ten of the most important traits to look for in a manager for your business:

1. Self-Motivation. The person that you hire for the job has to be capable of doing the job without needing you to look over her shoulder all of the time. This individual needs to be capable of understanding the basic goals of the business and developing her own strategies for achieving those goals. She needs to be committed to putting her all into the job every day without the close supervision of a boss.

2. Great Customer Service Skills. No matter what type of business you are in, you can benefit from having a manager who is excellent in dealing with customers and clients. Ultimately this may not be a large percentage of the manager's job since the daily tasks of customer service will fall to other employees. However, when problems arise with customers, the manager is the one who has the potential to diffuse the situation or to exacerbate it. You want to hire a manager who is going to be capable of making even the most difficult customers happy so that you can retain customers and the business can grow.

3. Integrity and Trustworthiness. You want to hire a manager who is going to be someone that you think that you can trust. Of course, it's hard to tell this off the bat at an interview but asking the right questions can give you a general sense of the individual's basic integrity. By hiring someone that you believe is trustworthy, you will reduce the stress of placing the growth of your business in the hands of someone else.

4. Being a Team Player. The manager has to be someone who is committed to working with a team of people for the improvement of the whole business. This means that the manager isn't in the business solely for the selfish reasons of "getting ahead". Instead, he is interested in growing the business because it is going to be to his benefit as well as to the benefit of the other people working with him in the company. A manager is a middle-man who has to work with both the upper-level bosses and the lower-level employees so it's highly important that this person is really a team player.

5. Conflict-Resolution Abilities. Serving as this type of middle-man is also going to put the manager into the position of having to act as a liaison between people in the company. He will be the liaison between the lower-level and upper-level employees. He will also serve as the mediator for disputes between lower-level employees. In order to be able to do this position well, the manager that you hire is going to have to be capable of handling conflicts in the office

place. He needs to be someone who can spot problems as they form and nip them in bud as well as someone who can deal with bigger conflicts when they do arise.

6. Knowledge of the industry. The manager is going to have to be someone who is capable of answering the questions of customers, clients and staff members. This means that she better know what she is talking about. Although you can certainly provide training in the industry to a good manager, the ideal person for the job is going to be someone who already has advanced or specialized experience in this industry. A thirst for more knowledge about the business is a plus.

7. Dependability. When it comes right down to it, you're going to need to have a manager that you can count on. A dependable manager is someone who always shows up to work on time, doesn't slack off on the job and is capable of being counted on to stay late when there are times at the office that require him to do so. You want to be able to ask this person to do something for you and know for sure that he is going to just go ahead and do it.

8. Ability to Remain Calm. The role of being a manager can be a tough position to be in. There is a lot of stress involved in the daily tasks of management. A number of problems will arise throughout the course of any given day and the manager is responsible for handling those things well. You want to hire a manager who is going to be able to remain calm more often than not. A calm manager will keep the entire office calm which will lead to increased productivity and a better workplace overall. This will ultimately grow your business.

9. Optimistic Attitude. You don't want a manager who is calm but indifferent. You want a manager who is going to approach each project and each work day with an optimistic attitude. You want a manager who will come in smiling and who will express genuinely good feelings about the work that she is doing with her team. This will help to keep morale in the business high which leads to satisfied employees, low turnover rates, higher rates of productivity and growth of the business.

10. Leadership Skills . Beyond all of the other things that you need to see in a manager, you need to immediately be able to see that he has strong leadership skills. He needs to be confident in his ability to lead a team. He needs to be a good public speaker, someone who can delegate tasks appropriately and a person that people will feel comfortable taking directions from. If you see these things in someone at an interview, it's a safe bet to guess that this person will probably make a good manager for your business.

The Definition of Leadership

As part of one's process of leadership development, one needs to define leadership. Coming up with a leadership definition is surprisingly difficult. There is even a fair amount of confusion in the business schools where we see many professors act as though leader and manager are the same role.

A Dictionary Definition

Function: noun 1 : the office or position of a leader; 2 : capacity to lead 3 : the act or an instance of leading — Source: Merriam-Webster On-line

Leadership Definition 1

"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, 1884-1972, Thirty-third President of the United States, Miller, More Plan Speaking

Leadership Definition 2

"You cannot manage men into battle. You manage things; you lead people." — Grace Hopper, Admiral, U. S. Navy (retired), Nova ( PBS TV), 1986

Leadership Definition 3

"The superior leader gets things done with very little motion. He imparts instruction not through many words but through a few deeds. He keeps informed about everything but interferes hardly at all. He is a catalyst, and though things would not get done well if he weren't’t there, when they succeed he takes no credit. And because he takes no credit, credit never leaves him." — Lao Tse, Tao Te Ching

Leadership Definition 4

"Leadership occurs when one person induces others to work toward some predetermined objectives." — Massie

Leadership Definition 5

"Leadership is the ability of a superior to influence the behavior of a subordinate or group and persuade them to follow a particular course of action." — Chester Bernard

Leadership Definition 6

"Leadership is the art to of influencing and directing people in such a way that will win their obedience, confidence, respect and loyal cooperation in achieving common objectives." — U. S. Air Force

Leadership Definition 7

"The feminine leadership style emphasizes cooperation over competition; intuition as well as rational thinking in problem solving, team structures where power and influence are shared within the group . . . interpersonal competence; and participative decision making." — Marilyn Loden, Founder and president, Loden Associates, Management Review, December 1987

Leadership Definition 8

"The first job of a leader is to define a vision for the organization.... Leadership of the capacity to translate vision into reality." — Warren Bennis, President, University of Cincinnati, University of Maryland symposium, January 21, 1988

Leadership Definition 9

"The ultimate test of practical leadership is the realization of intended, real change that meets people’s enduring needs." — James MacGregor Burns

Leadership Definition 10

"Managers have subordinates—leaders have followers." — Murray Johannsen

Leadership Definition 11

"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." — John Quincy Adams quotes (American 6th US President (1825-29), eldest son of John Adams, 2nd US president. 1767-1848)

Leadership Definition 12

"I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can't be done." — Henry Ford

Leadership Definition 13

"Leadership is a two-way street, loyalty up and loyalty down. Respect for one's superiors; care for one's crew." — Grace Hopper, Admiral, U. S. Navy (retired), Speech, Washington, D. C., February 1987

Leadership Definition 14

"As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence. The next best, the people honor and praise. The next, the people fear; the next, the people hate." — Lao Tse, 604-531 B. C., Chinese philosopher and founder of Taoism, Tao Te Ching

Leadership Definition 15

"A manager takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go but ought to."  — Rosalyn Carter

A Final Word . . .

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those timid souls who know neither victory or defeat." — Theodore Roosevelt, American President