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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.

Warren G. Bennis

Leaders wonder about everything, want to learn as much as they can, are willing to take risks, experiment, try new things. They do not worry about failure but embrace errors, knowing they will learn from them.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Errors Knowing Worry
Leadership has become a heavy industry. Concern and interest about leadership development is no longer an American phenomenon. It is truly global. Though I will probably be in less demand, I wanted to move on.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Demand Development Moving
People in great groups have blinders on. Their work is all they see. They value failures as learning opportunities. They are optimistic, not realistic, as they proceed from one challenge and crisis to the next.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Opportunity Optimistic People
What makes a good follower? The single most important characteristic may well be a willingness to tell the truth. In a world of growing complexity leaders are increasingly dependent on their subordinates for good information, whether the leaders want to hear it or not.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Characteristics Important Leader Truth Willingness
Those who take risks walk the high wire with no fear of falling.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Fall Risk Wire
Listening to the inner voice – trusting the inner voice – is one of the most important lessons of leadership.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Important Listening Voice
That’s nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Future Leader Leadership Opposites
Failing organizations are usually over-managed and under-led.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Business Failure Leadership
Every great group is an island… but an island with a bridge to the mainland.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Bridges Groups Islands
At the time, Sculley was destined to be the head of Pepsico. The clincher came when Jobs asked him, “How many more years of your life do you want to spend making colored water when you can have an opportunity to come here and change the world?”
WARREN G. BENNIS

Colored Sculley Time Water
The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born – that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That’s nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Inspirational Motivational Success
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.”
WARREN G. BENNIS

Create Enemy Team War
Don’t over-react to the trouble makers.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Makers Over React Trouble
Success in management requires learning as fast as the world is changing.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Management World
Vision animates, inspires, transforms purpose into action.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Inspire Purpose Vision
Leaders are people who do the right thing: managers are people who do things right. Both roles are crucial, but they differ profoundly. I often observe people in top positions doing wrong things well.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Leaders People Roles
Leaders do not avoid, repress, or deny conflict, but rather see it as an opportunity
WARREN G. BENNIS

Conflict Leadership Opportunity
Something that made them feel that desperate sense of hitting bottom-as something they thought was almost a necessity. It’s as if at that moment the iron entered their soul; that moment created the resilience that leaders need.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Created Iron Moment Necessity Something
The manager does things right; the leader does the right thing.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Boss Inspirational Leadership
Encourage reflective backtalk: Leaders know the importance of having someone in their lives who will unfailingly and fearlessly tell them the truth.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Importance Knows Leader
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.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Hospitality Leadership Vision
Organizations should try to find out if their learning programs actually work.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Organization Program Trying
It is the capacity to develop and improve their skills that distinguishes leaders from followers.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Follower Leadership Skills
Judgment without character is expediency… or worse.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Character Expediency Judgment
Think of a crucible as an occasion for real magic, the creation of something more valuable than an alchemist could possibly imagine. In it, the individual is transformed, changed, created anew. He or she grows in ways that change his or her definition of self.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Individual Possibly Real Self Something Thinking
Power is the basic energy needed to initiate and sustain action or, to put it another way, the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it. Leadership is the wise use of this power: Transformative leadership.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Initiate Leadership Power Translation Wise
The leader…is rarely the brightest person in the group. Rather they have extraordinary taste, which makes them more curators than creators. They are appreciators of talent and nurturers of talent and they have the ability to recognize valuable ideas.
WARREN G. BENNIS

Creators Ideas Inspirational Leader

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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