Leadership Failure Quotes & Sayings

Nothing so undermines organizational change as the failure to think through the losses people face. — William Bridges

Leadership is understanding people and involving them to help you do a job. That takes all of the good characteristics, like integrity, dedication of purpose, selflessness, knowledge, skill, implacability, as well as determination not to accept failure. — Arleigh Burke

The day the soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership. — Colin Powell

I believe that the great tragedy of the church in our time has been its failure to recognize the importance of the spiritual gift of leadership. It appears to me that only a fraction of pastors worldwide are exercising the spiritual gift of leadership, organizing the church around it, and deploying church members through it. The results, in terms of church growth and worldwide spiritual impact, are staggering. — Bill Hybels

We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the disasters. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. — Paul Keating

Appreciating others can be the catalyst that unleashes their greatness. — Lolly Daskal

Those who envy the success of others are normally ignorant to the sacrifices, failures, and dedication that it took for them to get there. — Noel DeJesus

What happens when a leader misses his steps on the ladder is what happens when a train misses the rail. Be on track. — Israelmore Ayivor

Lack of power is a great excuse for failure, but sufficient power is never a necessary condition of leadership. There is never sufficient power. In fact, it is success in the absence of sufficient power that defines leadership. — Tom DeMarco

His failure to adapt to new techniques, to pander (his own word), probably made his supporters love him all the more, and probably also narrowed his political base. — David Halberstam

It is those who have the distinction of privilege who set the standards of disgust with failure. — Andy Hargreaves

Most people fail in leadership b/c they think when they should be working and work when they should be thinking. — Orrin Woodward

Our real problem is not the pervasiveness of the darkness but a failure of the light. Light always dispels darkness. The glorious light of the resurrection life of Jesus Christ is still sufficient and available to those who reject self-reliance and return to His plan for biblical leadership. This return can reignite the radiance of the Gospel in transforming power. — Daniel Henderson

The men who have done big things are those who were not afraid to attempt big things, who were not afraid to risk failure in order to gain success. — B.C. Forbes

When you get right down to it, one of the most important tasks of a leader is to eliminate his people's excuse for failure. — Robert Townsend

Sometimes we shrink from leadership because our pride makes us afraid of failure. That's not humility. — Francis Chan

Confidence believes you are able. Competence knows you are able. — Lolly Daskal

Stress builds character and failure breeds motivation. I guess I'm a Optimist. — Noel DeJesus

Letting go of the security of what is commonly understood requires a big leap of faith and a willingness to fall. — Henry Kimsey-House

If America loses World War III [the Cold War], it will be because of the failure of its leadership class. In particular, it will be because of the attention, the celebrity, and the legitimacy given to the 'trendies'--those over-glamorized dilettantes who posture in the latest idea, mount the fashionable protests, and are slobbered over by the news media, whose creation they essentially are. The attention given them and their 'causes' romanticizes the trivial and trivializes the serious. It reduces public discussion to the level of a cartoon strip. These trendies are ready with an opinion at the drop of a microphone, and their opinions are treated as news--not because they are authorities, but because they are celebrities. — Richard M. Nixon

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

Des felt a familiar feeling in the pit of his stomach. All soldiers felt the same thing going into battle, whether they admitted it or not: fear. Fear of failure, fear of dying, fear of watching their friends die, fear of being wounded and living out the rest of their days crippled or maimed. The fear was always there, and it would devour you if you let it.
Des knew how to turn that fear to his own advantage. Take what makes you weak and turn it into something that makes you strong. Transform the fear into anger and hate: hatred of the enemy; hatred of the Republic and the Jedi. The hate gave him strength, and the strength brought him victory.
For Des the transformation came easily once the fighting started. Thanks to his abusive father, he'd been turning fear into anger and hate ever since he was a child. Maybe that was why he was such a good soldier. Maybe that was why the others looked to him for leadership. — Drew Karpyshyn

Predestined to a destiny that only Christ can fulfill, all other leadership assures failure. — Jonah Books

Your life is a trajectory. Every choice you make alters that trajectory, in a positive or negative way. Will you categorize that dinner with friends as a business expense? Will you be honest with your daughter? Will you take more credit than you're due? These are just the small questions that we face every day, and little by little, the answers influence the trajectory of our lives and beings. — Donald Van De Mark

Difficult missions will bring difficult challenges which may sometimes produce temporary setbacks. The test of a human being is in accepting the failure and going on trying until he or she succeeds. Managing failure is the essence of leadership. — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Trust is equal parts character and competence ... You can look at any leadership failure, and it's always a failure of one or the other. — Stephen Covey

The tiny cost of failure ... is dwarfed by the huge cost of not trying. — Seth Godin

The more we can embrace failure, the more we will be able to open to it and the more confident and resilient we will become. — Karen Kimsey-House

By exchanging quality time for 'turn-up' times, what many of today's wayward youngsters have become - men and women of the village have failed them. — T.F. Hodge

Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally . Leadership means that 'the buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. — Barack Obama

The course you take determines your greatness or failure — Ikechukwu Joseph

What matters more than where you are is the direction you are heading. — Cameron C. Taylor

You must not end your life because you failed an examination. Failing an examination or making a mistake does not make you a failure at life. The context of life is broader than that. — Archibald Marwizi

With automobile accidents, mechanical failure is seldom the cause; and most often, operator error. I find the same to be true with corporate failings ... . the people are rarely the issue ... the shortcoming is most often found in the leadership. — Steve Maraboli

The most serious failure of leadership is the failure to foresee — Robert K. Greenleaf

Whoever convinces himself that he is not worthy of first position has doomed himself to failure from the very beginning. — Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum

A true leader is responsible for his followers who have reposed their faith in his leadership. If an ordinary man fails, it is a personal failure. But when a leader fails, he shatters the entire ideologies, principles and morale of all those who followed him. The impact is much bigger and stakes are higher. — Awdhesh Singh

I think that failure is just as important as success. In a way, failure is a kind of success if you can look at it in the right way, if you can accept it and enjoy it in the right way. — Margaret Cho

One highly successful venture capitalist who is regularly pitched by young entrepreneurs told me how frustrated he is by his colleagues' failure to distinguish between good presentation skills and true leadership ability. "I worry that there are people who are put in positions of authority because they're good talkers, but they don't have good ideas," he said. "It's so easy to confuse schmoozing ability with talent. — Susan Cain

Failure is the ultimate motivator, the supreme teacher, and the definitive guarantee of life. Failure is what makes success so addictive. — Noel DeJesus

Too few leaders have the emotional fortitude to take responsibility for failure. — Paul Gibbons

Mindful leaders know how to repeat success patterns and overcome failure patterns. — Amit Ray

Under [Tim] Cook, Apple has a new product line with the Apple Watch, but it hasn't generated the kind of excitement that the iPod, iPhone or iPad did. Still, Cook can't be called a failure. Under his leadership, the company released a larger version of the iPhone to record sales. — Laura Sydell

The greatest act of leadership is mentoring. No matter how much you may learn, achieve, accumulate, or accomplish, if it all dies with you, then you are a generational failure. — Myles Munroe

A bold attitude is what true leaders use to crash down failure before they venture with their visions! — Israelmore Ayivor

Leaders are made through discipline, training, experience, failure, and the desire to continually improve. — Bradford Winters

Relax your fears, let your ambition take the wheel for a while; it'll take you somewhere exciting that you've never been. — Noel DeJesus

Jeremy [Corbyn] earned the right to take up the leadership of the party with a big majority. But he has failed and he has no right or mandate to stay in office despite his failure and take the party down with him. — Harriet Harman

The failure of a person is wrapped in his ignorance about his strengths. — Israelmore Ayivor

There's no disgrace in failure, the disgrace is not to try. — Cathy Rigby

Why fear feedback? Why stigmatize failure in the workplace when it's bringing you closer to achieving your organizational goals. — Kevin Kelly

If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond. I wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Leaders succeed or fail depending on whether or not they clarify role expectations and keep their promises. — Bob Anderson

No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence. — Babara Tuchman

How does one undermine the framework of racial reasoning? By dismantling each pillar slowly and systematically. The fundamental aim of this undermining and dismantling is to replace racial reasoning with moral reasoning, to understand the black freedom struggle not as an affair of skin pigmentation and racial phenotype but rather as a matter of ethical principles and wise politics, and to combat the black nationalist attempt to subordinate the issues and interests of black women by linking mature black self-love and self-respect to egalitarian relations within and outside black communities. The failure of nerve of black leadership is its refusal to undermine and dismantle the framework of racial reasoning. — Cornel West

The failure of women to have reached positions of leadership has been due in large part to social and professional discrimination. — Rosalyn S. Yalow

Being an American is more than a birthright. It is something we must prove worthy everyday, failure to do so insults those who have sacrificed all on our behalf. — Mark W. Boyer

Inability to make decisions is one of the principal reasons executives fail. Deficiency in decision-making ranks much higher than lack of specific knowledge or technical know-how as an indicator of leadership failure. — John C. Maxwell

You don't become the person you wish to become; you become the person you choose to become. True leadership does not come true wishes; it comes by choices! — Israelmore Ayivor

Failure is a natural part of learning and developing, and it teaches us to be resolute and steadfast in our endeavors. — Henry Kimsey-House

The disaster at the Chernobyl plant, along with the war in Afghanistan and the cruise-missile question, is generally seen today as the start of the decline of the Soviet Union. Just as the great famine of 1891 had mercilessly laid bare the failure of czarism, almost a century later Chernobyl clearly showed how divided, rigid and rotten the Soviet regime had become. The principal policy instruments, secrecy and repression, no longer worked in a modern world with its accompanying means of communication. The credibility of the party leadership sank to the point at which it could sink no further. In the early hours of 26 April, 1986, two explosions took place in one of the four reactors at the giant nuclear complex. It was an accident of the kind scientists and environmental activists had been warning about for years, particularly because of its effects: a monstrous emission of iodine-131 and caesium-137. Huge radioactive clouds drifted across half of Europe: — Geert Mak

Leaders fail when they begin to fall in love with negative mindsets of other people! — Israelmore Ayivor

People fail 2 ways: 1) don't know what to do 2) don't do what they know; therefore, great leaders must educate and inspire. — Orrin Woodward

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I, therefore, intend to oppose the effort to increase America's debt. — Barack Obama

The road to success is full of pit stops, pitfalls, and self pity; my advice is simply don't stop! — Noel DeJesus

If you plan for failure, then you are expecting to fail. If you plan for success, you'll be successful. Once you start making a 'Plan B', you distract from 'Plan A', and the moment you start believing there are other options, you start settling for less. — A.J. Darkholme

People don't become leaders because they never fail. They become leaders because of the way they respond to failure. — Gerald M. Weinberg

Plan for the sustainability of your success so that you do not drift back to failure and mediocrity. — Archibald Marwizi

Great leaders inspire greatness in others. — Lolly Daskal

To take risk and fail is not a failure. Real failure is to fear taking any risk — Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum

The successes and failures of yesterday are gone, today is a new day. — Noel DeJesus

The ostrich-approach of burying your head in the sand, when confronting your areas of weakness, becomes a self-set trigger for failure. — Archibald Marwizi

You are the only person who can label what you do a failure. Failure is subjective. — John C. Maxwell

Lead yourself whenever your boss' leadership deteriorates. When your boss doesn't praise what you do, praise yourself. When your boss doesn't make you big, make yourself big. Remember, if you have done your best, failure does not count. — Mario Teguh

People are training for success when they should be training for failure. — John C. Maxwell

Authentic leaders inspire us to engage with each other in powerful dreams that make the impossible possible. We are called on to persevere despite failure and pursue a purpose beyond the paycheck. This is at the core of innovation. It requires aligning the dreams of each individual to the broader dream of the organization. — Henna Inam

People are not afraid of failure, they're afraid of blame. — Seth Godin

The punch line is 'knock the morale of an employee and organizational productivity is punctured'. — Henrietta Newton Martin

In collaborative cultures, failure and uncertainty are not protected but shared and discussed to gain support. — Andy Hargreaves

Too often we don't call out a wrong or expect ourselves or others to act with routine integrity, excellence, or love. There has been a worldwide failure in leadership, birthing an apathetic populace, unjustifiable poverty, unconscionable greed, and a globe ravaged and booby-trapped by war. — Brendon Burchard

You can predict with nearly 90 percent accuracy which projects will fail - months or years in advance. And now back to our premise. The predictor of success or failure was whether people could hold five specific crucial conversations. For example, could they speak up if they thought the scope and schedule were unrealistic? Or did they go silent when a cross-functional team member began sloughing off? Or even more tricky - what should they do when an executive failed to provide leadership for the effort? — Kerry Patterson

Advice? Fail constantly. Because the word doesn't mean what you think it means, especially when you're an artist. I use the word artist to mean everything from songwriting to writing a novel to even writing video games. Anything that tells a story, which is almost any medium. Gotta take risks, you gotta go through multiple drafts which means you have to FAIL, a lot. So you won't always get the reaction you always want from every single person, so when you lose that fear of failure, when you stop even thinking of it as failure, and you push yourself farther, you'll take bigger risks, and eventually, after about six or seven hundred rejections, you'll find success. And you'll find a way of conveying what you really want to say, in the best manner. — Victor Giannini

Here's a memonic device that I feel teaches how we can properly cope with failure. Forget about your failures; don't dwell on past mistakes Anticipate failure; realize that we all make mistakes. Intensity in everything you do; never be a failure for lack of effort. Learn from your mistakes; don't repeat previous errors. Understand why you failed; diagnose your mistakes so as to not repeat them. Respond, don't react to errors; responding corrects mistakes while reacting magnifies them. Elevate your self-concept. It's OK to fail, everyone does; now how are you going to deal with the failure — Steve Largent

The key to leadership is having a vision, and being strong enough to say no and not try to please everybody. Thats a recipe for failure. Leadership is practiced through attitude and actions, rather than words and memos. — Matt Mickiewicz

Preferring steady progress, slow and imperfect, is a good philosophy for the defeated. — Fred Lowe Soper

Stagnation floods the mind with thoughts of failure and slowly drowns the will to succeed; always move forward. — Noel DeJesus

The aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output, and simultaneously to bring pride of workmanship to people. Put in a negative way, the aim of leadership is not merely to find and record failures of men, but to remove the causes of failure: to help people to do a better job with less effort. — W. Edwards Deming

A leader should have higher endurance and ability to accept and embrace failure. — Jack Ma

The history of the failure of war can almost be summed up in two words: too late. — Douglas MacArthur

The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership. — Chinua Achebe

general staff and the divisions there exists usually only a single radio wire; between the divisions and the regiments and battalions, there are only messengers. The failure of the Russian radio service came home to them bitterly, and the defeat of the Red leadership can be primarily attributed to it. — Christine Alexander

The tragedy of life is not found in failure but complacency. Not in you doing too much, but doing too little. Not in you living above your means, but below your capacity. It's not failure but aiming too low, that is life's greatest tragedy. — Benjamin E. Mays

The time it takes to fall from the top of a mountain to the floor it shorter than what it takes to climb from the floor to the top. Only leaders with character can maintain their trusts. — Israelmore Ayivor

Jeremy Corbyn had shown a catastrophic failure of leadership and must step down to make way for someone with the backbone to confront racism and anti-Semitism. — Ruth Smeeth

Those who do not appreciate the value of time are celebrity failures. Success is time management. — Moutasem Algharati

Believe you can and you will be halfway there. — Lolly Daskal

It's instructive to consider the more spectacular and well-known falls from grace of leaders in the public eye ... In the main, the issues behind these falls could be grouped under a lack of competence, a lack of support or loyalty from those they sought to lead, and a lack of failure of integrity. Of all these the last is the most egregious, the most fatal. We so much want our leaders to be unfailingly decent that an obvious or perceived flaw in integrity can be the toxin which kills them off. — Peter Cosgrove

As a leader, I am there to make the best decisions possible with the evidence at hand and to be able to justify that decision. If it goes wrong, we add to the evidence for making the next decision, but there is no reason for regretting failure, as failure is just the production of evidence. — Michael A. Wood Jr.

I've written about the giving of trust as though it were a simple formula for building loyalty. But it isn't simple at all. The talent that is an essential ingredient of leadership tells the leader whom to trust and how much to trust and when to trust. The rule is (as with children) that trust be given slightly in advance of demonstrated trustworthiness. But not too much in advance. You have to have an unerring sense of how much the person is ready for. Setting people up for failure doesn't make them loyal to you; you have to set them up for success. Each time you give trust in advance of demonstrated performance, you flirt with danger. If you're risk-averse, you won't do it. And that's a shame, because the most effective way to gain the trust and loyalty of those beneath you is to give the same in equal measure. — Tom DeMarco

In all forms of leadership, whether you are a coach, a CEO, or a parent, there are four words that, when said, can bring out the best in your team, your employees, and your family. I BELIEVE IN YOU. Those four words can mean the difference between a fear of failure and the courage to try. — Mike Krzyzewski