What is Leadership?

• Leadership is personal leadership extended to empower a group toward a vision.
• Leadership is authentic self expression that creates value.
• Leadership is vision manifest through challenge, encouragement and inspiring others to action.
• Leadership is vision, inspiration, courage, relationships and profound knowledge.
• Leadership is giving people a purpose and pushing the boundaries with a well articulated vision.
• Leadership is a relationship - selecting, motivating, coaching and building trust.
• Leadership is motivating and guiding a group of people to reach a shared goal.
• Leadership is impeccable integrity, total honesty and being big enough to say you were wrong.
• Leadership is having a message, living that message and serving your followers.
• Leadership is a process of getting things done through people.
• Leadership means responsibility. It's adventure and often fun, but it always means responsibility.
• Leadership is enabling a group to achieve something that they did not think they could do, and having fun doing it.
• Leadership is a person involved in a process of influencing and developing a group of people to accomplish a purpose.
• Leadership is The process of influencing people while operating to meet organizational requirements and improving the organization through change.

What Leadership is not

• Leadership is not magic that comes out of a leader's head. It is a learned skill.
• Leadership is not the same as management.
• Leadership is not just being the boss.
• Leadership is not ownership.
• Leadership is not done the same by everyone. There are many different leadership styles.

Leadership Quotes and Proverbs

"Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they come to see it in themselves."
Stephen Covey's definition of leadership from 8th Habit

"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."
Theodore Hesburgh, President of the University of Notre Dame

If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.
- Admiral Grace Hopper

The most important quality in a leader is that of being acknowledged as such.
- Andre Maurois

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

The real leader has no need to lead - he is content to point the way.
- Henry Miller

Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character; it requires moral rather than athletic or intellectual effort, and it imposes on both leader and follower alike the burdens of self-restraint.
- Lewis H. Lapham

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.
- Dwight Eisenhower

People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. . . . The leader works in the open, and the boss in covert. The leader leads, and the boss drives.
- Theodore Roosevelt

The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on. . . . The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.
- Walter Lippmann

If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.
- Katharine Hepbur

Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely.
- Karen Kaiser Clark

Don't be afraid to take a big step when one is indicated. You can't cross a chasm in two small steps.
- David Loyd George

Excellence is not an accomplishment. It is a spirit, a never-ending process.
- Lawrence M. Miller

You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.
- Colette

Every organization must be prepared to abandon everything it does to survive in the future.
- Peter Drucker

A friend of mine characterizes leaders simply like this: "Leaders don't inflict pain. They bear pain."
- Max DePree

Ah well! I am their leader, I really ought to follow them!
- Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin

Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.
- Winston Churchill

One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.
- Helen Keller