However you celebrate Valentine’s Day, remember to carry the meaning and feeling behind it with you all year long. For me that means leading with a servant heart and putting others first. It also means having compassion, empathy and active listening skills everyday.
Here are 10 of my favourite Leadership quotes to help inspire, motivate and hopefully help you feel the spirit of Valentine’s Day all year long!
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.
~John Quincy Adams
The task of leadership is not to put greatness into people, but to elicit it, for the greatness is there already.
~John Buchan
Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy.
~Norman Schwarzkopf
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
You cannot be a leader, and ask other people to follow you, unless you know how to follow, too.
~Sam Rayburn
Leadership is not magnetic personality, that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not “making friends and influencing people”, that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.
~Peter F. Drucker
Leadership is not so much about technique and methods as it is about opening the heart. Leadership is about inspiration—of oneself and of others. Great leadership is about human experiences, not processes. Leadership is not a formula or a program, it is a human activity that comes from the heart and considers the hearts of others. It is an attitude, not a routine.
~Lance Secretan
Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.
~Jack Welch
The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.
~Ralph Nader
Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions.
~Harold S. Geneen
What are some of your favorite quotes that you would add to this list?
One of my favorite quotes:
“In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.” ~Buddha
Love this post! Thank you Chantal
Thank you Hoda! That is a beautiful quote!
Nice post.
The best leaders are vulnerable. They’re not afraid to show who they are or what they care about. Especially caring for their people.
You’ve listed a number of great quotations.
My leadership coaching stems from The Leadership Challenge. Here’s two quotes from that book:
“You must love those who lead before you can be an effective leader. You can certainly command without that sense of commitment, but you cannot lead without it . . .” General Eric Shinseki
“Love ’em and lead ’em.” Jim Kouzes
Thanks Steve! I have yet to read that book. It’s on my reading wish list. Those are 2 great quotes as well. Thanks for sharing them.