Warren G. Bennis Quotes

In order to serve its purpose, a vision has to be a shared vision.

While great leaders may be as rare as great runners, great actors, or great painters, everyone has leadership potential, just as everyone has some ability at running, acting, and painting.

The future has no shelf life

Keep reminding people of what's important and that their fates are correlated.

I used to think that running an organization was equivalent to conducting a symphony orchestra. But I don't think that's quite it; it's more like jazz. There is more improvisation.

Almost without exception, members of great groups see themselves as winning underdogs, as a feisty David hurling fresh ideas at a big, backward-looking Goliath. They always have an "enemy."

Our tendency to create heroes rarely jibes with the reality that most nontrivial problems require collective solutions.

What job is worth the enormous psychic cost of following a leader who values loyalty in the narrowest sense.

Leaders know the importance of having someone in their lives who will unfailingly and fearlessly tell them the truth.

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

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."

To be authentic is literally to be your own author... to discover your own native energies and desires, and then to find your own way of acting on them.

You need people who can walk their companies into the future rather than back them into the future.

Leaders are people who believe so passionately that they can seduce other people into sharing their dream.

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

Without a terrific leader, you're not going to have a Great Group. But it is also true that you're not going to have a great leader without a Great Group.

Every great group is an island... but an island with a bridge to the mainland.

Listening to the inner voice - trusting the inner voice - is one of the most important lessons of leadership.

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

Great Groups need to know that the person at the top will fight like a tiger for them.

The opposite of hope is despair, and when we despair, it is because we feel there are no choices.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Some of the strongest resistance to necessary change is the result of what Jim O'Toole has so aptly characterized as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom."

One of the worst mistakes is to do nothing.

Successful leaders are great askers

Understand the "Pygmalion Effect": Leaders should always expect the very best of those around them. They know that people can change and grow.

Organizations should try to find out if their learning programs actually work.

Around the world, the generals are being ousted, and the poets are taking charge.

Effective leaders make a full commitment to be a learner, to keep increasing and nourishing their knowledge and wisdom.

If I had to reduce the responsibilities of a good follower to a single rule, it would be to speak truth to power.

Expect the best from your people and they will usually deliver but your expectations must be realistic.

Encourage reflective backtalk: Leaders know the importance of having someone in their lives who will unfailingly and fearlessly tell them the truth.

Great groups deliver great results. And for everyone involved in a great group, great work is its own reward.

Think of successful creative collaborations are dreams with deadlines.

In great groups, the right people always have the right job.

All great leaders constantly seek new information and new ways of thinking.

Servant leadership teaches us that you have to lay your cards on the table.

All claims deserve consideration but some claims are more important than others.

That's important to remember: it's not just a collection of great individuals but a group of people who enjoy playing in the sandbox, thoroughly enjoying collaborative problem solving.

Great leaders love talent and know where to find it. They surround themselves with talented people who can work effectively together.

Trust is difficult to define, but we know when it's present and when it's not.

Leaders should always expect the very best of those around them. They know that people can change and grow.

Ineffective leaders often act on the advice and counsel of the last person they talked to.

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

Perhaps the central task of the leader of leaders thus becomes the development of other leaders.