Warren G. Bennis Quotes & Sayings

Leaders learn by leading, and they learn bestby leading in the face of obstacles. As weather shapes mountains, problems shape leaders. — Warren G. Bennis

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

Companies which get misled by their own success are sure to be blind sided. — Warren G. Bennis

Leadership (according to John Sculley) revolves around vision, ideas, direction, and has more to do with inspiring people as to direction and goals than with day-to-day implementation. A leader must be able to leverage more than his own capabilities. He must be capable of inspiring other people to do things without actually sitting on top of them with a checklist. — Warren G. Bennis

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

The new leader is one who commits people to action, who converts followers into leaders, and who may convert leaders into agents of change. — Warren G. Bennis

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

This is more than just having a vision. You can see the difference in the often-cited way in which Steve Jobs brought in John Sculley to take over Apple. 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

Recognize the skills and traits you don't possess, and hire the people who have them. — Warren G. Bennis

Innovation- any new idea-by definition will not be accepted at first. It takes repeated attempts, endless demonstrations, monotonous rehearsals before innovation can be accepted and internalized by an organization. This requires courageous patience. — Warren G. Bennis

You are your own raw material. When you know what you consist of and what you want to make of it, then you can invent yourself. — Warren G. Bennis

Successful leaders are great askers — Warren G. Bennis

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. — Warren G. Bennis

Perhaps the central task of the leader of leaders thus becomes the development of other leaders. — Warren G. Bennis

Emotional intelligence, more than any other factor, more than I.Q. or expertise, accounts for 85% to 90% of success at work ... I.Q. is a threshold competence. You need it, but it doesn't make you a star. Emotional intelligence can. — Warren G. Bennis

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

Coaching will become the model for leaders in the future ... I am certain that leadership can be learned and that terrific coaches ... facilitate learning. — Warren G. Bennis

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

The learning person looks forward to failure or mistakes. The worst problem in leadership is basically early success. — Warren G. Bennis

Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality. — Warren G. Bennis

In life, change is inevitable. In business, change is vital. — Warren G. Bennis

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

Learning to be an effective leader is no different than learning to be an effective person. And that's the hard part — Warren G. Bennis

Leadership is a function of knowing yourself, having a vision that is well communicated, building trust among colleagues, and taking effective action to realize your own leadership potential. — Warren G. Bennis

A promising junior executive of IBM was involved in a risky venture for the company and managed to lose over $10 million in the gamble. It was a disaster. When Watson called the nervous executive into his office, the young man blurted out, 'I guess you want my resignation?' Watson said, 'You can't be serious. We've just spent $10 million educating you! — Warren G. Bennis

Listening to the inner voice - trusting the inner voice - is one of the most important lessons of leadership. — Warren G. Bennis

The leaders I met, whatever walk of life they were from, whatever institutions they were presiding over, always referred back to the same failure something that happened to them that was personally difficult, even traumatic, 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

The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born-that there is a genetic factor to leadership. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders
are made rather than born. — Warren G. Bennis

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

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

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

Taking charge of your own learning is a part of taking charge of your life, which is the sine qua non in becoming an integrated person. — Warren G. Bennis

I'd always rather err on the side of openness. But there's a difference between optimum and maximum openness, and fixing that boundary is a judgment call. The art of leadership is knowing how much information you're going to pass on - to keep people motivated and to be as honest, as upfront, as you can. But, boy, there really are limits to that. — Warren G. Bennis

Successful leadership is not about being tough or soft, sensitive or assertive, but about a set of attributes. First and foremost is character — Warren G. Bennis

The manager does things right; the leader does the right thing. — Warren G. Bennis

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. Someone once wrote that the sound of surprise is jazz, and if there's any one thing that we must try to get used to in this world, it's surprise and the unexpected. Truly, we are living in world where the only thing that's constant is change. — Warren G. Bennis

The future has no shelf life — Warren G. Bennis

Trust resides squarely between faith and doubt. — Warren G. Bennis

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

People who know what they want and why they want it, and have the skills to communicate that to others in a way that gains support — Warren G. Bennis

In order to serve its purpose, a vision has to be a shared vision. — Warren G. Bennis

A passion for continual learning, a refined, discerning ear for the moral and ethical consequences of their actions, and an understanding of the purposes of work and human organisations — Warren G. Bennis

Government is like an onion. To understand it, you have to peel through many different layers. Most outsiders never get beyond the first or second layer. — Warren G. Bennis

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

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

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

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

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. — Warren G. Bennis

Managers do things right. Leaders do the right thing. — Warren G. Bennis

The basis of leadership is the capacity of the leader to change the mindset, the framework of the other person. — Warren G. Bennis

If I were to give off-the-cuff advice to anyone trying to institute change, I would say, "How clear is the metaphor?" — Warren G. Bennis

Once you recognize, or admit, that your primary goal is to fully express yourself, you will find the means to achieve the rest of your goals ... — Warren G. Bennis

Silence - not dissent - is the one answer that leaders should refuse to accept. — Warren G. Bennis

Leadership is the wise use of power. Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it. — Warren G. Bennis

Followers who tell the truth, and leaders who listen to it, are an unbeatable combination. — Warren G. Bennis

In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists. — Warren G. Bennis

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

Make sure you have someone in your life from whom you can get reflective feedback. — Warren G. Bennis

If knowing yourself and being yourself were as easy to do as to talk about, there wouldn't be nearly so many people walking around in borrowed postures, spouting secondhand ideas, trying desperately to fit in rather than to stand out. — Warren G. Bennis

The ideal boss for a growing leader is probably a good boss with major flaws, so that one can learn all the complex lessons of what to do and what not to do simultaneously. — Warren G. Bennis

I am reminded how hollow the label of leadership sometimes is and how heroic followership can be. — Warren G. Bennis

Trust is the emotional glue that binds followers and leaders together. — Warren G. Bennis

Who succeeds in forming and leading a Great Group? He or she is almost always a pragmatic dreamer. They are people who get things done, but they are people with immortal longings. Often, they are scientifically minded people with poetry in their souls. — Warren G. Bennis

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

Too many companies believe people are interchangeable. Truly gifted people never are. They have unique talents. Such people cannot be forced into roles they are not suited for, nor should they be. Effective leaders allow great people to do the work they were born to do. — Warren G. Bennis

We have more information now than we can use, and less knowledge and understanding than we need. Indeed, we seem to collect information because we have the ability to do so, but we are so busy collecting it that we haven't devised a means of using it. The true measure of any society is not what it knows but what it does with what it knows. — Warren G. Bennis

The leader has a clear idea of what he wants to do professionally and personally,
and the strength to persist in the face of setbacks, even failures — Warren G. Bennis

A new leader has to be able to change an organization that is dreamless, soulless and visionless ... someone's got to make a wake up call. — Warren G. Bennis

Unlike top management at Enron, exemplary leaders reward dissent. They encourage it. They understand that, whatever momentary discomfort they experience as a result of being told they might be wrong, it is more than offset by the fact that the information will help them make better decisions. — Warren G. Bennis

Leaders do not avoid, repress, or deny conflict, but rather see it as an opportunity — Warren G. Bennis

Servant leadership teaches us that you have to lay your cards on the table. — Warren G. Bennis

Don't over-react to the trouble makers. — Warren G. Bennis

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. — Warren G. Bennis

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

Growing other leaders from the ranks isn't just the duty of the leader, it's an obligation. — Warren G. Bennis

The manager administers; the leader innovates. — Warren G. Bennis

The organizations of the future will increasingly depend on the creativity of their members to survive. Great Groups offer a new model in which the leader is an equal among Titans. In a truly creative collaboration, work is pleasure, and the only rules and procedures are those that advance the common cause. — Warren G. Bennis