Team Leaders Quotes & Sayings

... some leaders don't want to celebrate with their team because they are afraid - yes, afraid that if they celebrate, people will quit working hard and lower the standards. I say don't let your fear take you out. — Lee Ellis

We now live in a time when PEOPLE and profits must become equally valuable in the corporate leaders Mindset.
Rethink your Leadership Culture to become a conscious, high performance organisation — Tony Dovale

In getting good results team leaders become conductor rather than driver, enabling others to play the right music, not by hands-on domination of all decisions and execution, but by providing inspiration, motivation and stimulus. — Robert Heller

They sent out notices to all the tribal leaders, and they told us we could have whatever we wanted: Prairie Niggers, if the New Jersey team did not object, Redskins, Savages, Warriors, Heathens, Braves, Bucks - and of course the cheerleaders would be the Squaws, unless we wanted to modernize the language and just call them the Cunts. But — MariJo Moore

Great leaders focus on equipping their team. It is unfair to expect what you did not equip. — Chris Hogan

Being a leader requires being confident enough in your own decisions and those of your team to own them when they fail. The very best leaders take the blame but share the credit. — Travis Bradberry

For a team to succeed, responsibility must go down deep into the organization, down to the roots. Getting that to happen requires a leader who will delegate responsibility and authority to the team. Stephen Covey remarked, "People and organizations don't grow much without delegation and completed staff work, because they are confined to the capacities of the boss and reflect both personal strengths and weaknesses." Good leaders seldom restrict their teams; they release them. — John C. Maxwell

One of the primary mistakes that leaders today make, when called to lead, is spending most of their time and energy trying to improve things at the organizational level before ensuring that they have adequately addressed their own credibility at individual, one-on-one, or team leadership levels. — Kenneth H. Blanchard

If you really want to be a successful leader, you must develop other leaders around you. You must establish a team. — John C. Maxwell

Some leaders expect the team to read their minds on priorities, so they never provide the written and verbal guidance that we all need to feel we are contributing. Others can be heard shouting new priorities on an hourly basis. Both habits are very demotivating. — Martin Zwilling

Leaders #1 job is to help their people, teams, leadership, and culture, to be #FutureFit...by supporting People, Planet & Profits, in a Consciously Constructive Revolutionary Workplace... today. — Tony Dovale

Senior pastors cannot be those who think they can do everything but are willing to let a few people help them. Rather, they are those who know they can't do everything, don't want to do everything, and are not willing to do everything; they welcome others to come along-side with their gifts in order to form a powerful team for Christ. — Sue Mallory

To be a good boss, you must be transparent. Theres a correlation between worker happiness and workplace transparency. Leaders and managers who offer transparency will earn the respect and devotion of their team. — David Niu

Authoritarian managers use power, often in the form of fear, to get people to do something their way. Leaders depend for the most part on influence rather than power, and influence derives from respect rather than fear. Respect, in turn, is based on qualities such as integrity, ability, fairness, truthfulness - in short, on character. Leaders are part of the team, and although they are given organizational authority, their real authority isn't delegated top-down but earned bottom-up. From the outside, a managed team and a led team can look the same, but from the inside they feel very different. — Jim Highsmith

You need a lot of leaders, but a hockey team needs a voice, not only in the community, but more importantly between the coaching staff and the players. There are always ups and downs in a season; the captain is the guy players look to in those situations. — Joe Sakic

The book is actually called 'A Mentor Leader, a Different Way to Lead.' It really talks about my experience in the way I tried lead our football team, things that I learned from, basically, the coaches that I played for and my parents about leadership. And it is a little bit different, counter to maybe what society says about great leaders. — Tony Dungy

Over time, one of this engine's most potent impacts is in prioritizing investments for customer-driven growth by shifting the annual planning process. Instead of starting with the silos, leaders start with the customers' lives, identify priorities, and then determine collectively the investments to improve them to earn the right to growth. Without alignment among your executive team to regularly review the customer journey that this engine affords, investments are not fully optimized. Tactical actions are budgeted and implemented by silo, but complete customer experiences that drive growth are not improved. Rinse and repeat. — Jeanne Bliss

You can pick captains, but you can't pick leaders. Whoever controls the locker room controls the team — Don Meyer

Leaders approach conflict with an eye for resolution. When handled effectively, successful confrontations raise team performance. To manage conflict effectively, you must begin by recognizing there are three sides to every story:
Yours / Theirs / The Truth — Angie Morgan

Good teams are committed to the team mission and to each other personally. Good leaders inspire and build this commitment and trust. — Lee Ellis

Leaders goal: Avoid building around only ONE person's ministry gifting. Longevity is in a team, not an individual! — Brian Houston

Leaders have to search for the heart on a team, because the person who has it can bring out the best in everybody else. — Mike Krzyzewski

It's a special honor to be one of the leaders of this football team. But I said it once, I'll say it again, no one person wins a game by themselves. Individually, it's top of the mountain, my sport, my profession. It's what you dream about as a kid. — Aaron Rodgers

Ironically, for peer-to-peer accountability to become a part of a team's culture, it has to be modeled by the leader. That's right. Even though I said earlier that the best kind of accountability is peer-to-peer, the key to making it stick is the willingness of the team leader to do something I call "enter the danger" whenever someone needs to be called on their behavior or performance. That means being willing to step right into the middle of a difficult issue and remind individual team members of their responsibility, both in terms of behavior and results. But most leaders I know have a far easier time holding people accountable for their results than they do for behavioral issues. This is a problem because behavioral problems almost always precede results. That means team members have to be willing to call each other on behavioral issues, as uncomfortable as that might be, and if they see their leader balk at doing this, then they aren't going to do it themselves. — Patrick Lencioni

A hallmark of high performance leaders is the ability to influence others through all levels and types of communication, from simple interactions to difficult conversations and more complex conflicts, in order to achieve greater team and organizational alignment. High performing leaders are able to unite diverse team members by building common goals and even shared emotions by engaging in powerful and effective dialogue. — George Kohlrieser

Teams Triumph When Today's Tribe Leaders Transform Their Mindset. — Tony Dovale

Given the challenges and adversity we face in business and life today, Jon Gordon provides a clear road map to navigate the negativity and pitfalls that too often sabotage individual and team success as he shines a light on the truths that define great leaders, great teams, and great energy. I especially loved the part about leading with purpose. I consider this a valuable book for anyone looking to bring out the best in themselves and their team. — Tom Gegax

When things are not going right, where are the leaders to pull this team together? That leadership sometimes, you just can't find it. If one of your leaders is the guy who throws five interceptions [in one game], you have an issue. — Marshall Faulk

Leaders relentlessly upgrade their team, using every encounter as an opportunity to evaluate, coach, and build self-confidence. — Jack Welch

when organizations adopt Agile practices, it is imperative that team leaders and development managers learn a better approach to leading and managing their teams. — Jurgen Appelo

Great leaders build trust from their team because the leader is willing to put his/her people "first." Once the team believes that, they will put their leader, and the company, first as well. — Beth Ramsay

Effective team leaders adjust their style to provide what the group can't provide for itself. — Ken Blanchard

Develop your leaders into a competitive advantage. Reconnect your leader-power to success. — Gene Morton

My job is not to micromanage my team, but to craft a vision based on the business goals of the company and encourage the HR leaders who report to me to be brave, innovative, and proactive in pursuit of that common vision. — Patrick M. Wright

I've had very good meetings with Unionist leaders, Democratic Unionist Party, Ian Paisley and his team. — Peter Hain

The greatest way to ensure your company's failure is to appoint leaders who see a divide between themselves and the team; who are more fixated on their elevated role than on the act of leading. — Steve Maraboli

You always need something to complain about. And if you can't come up with anything better, you come along with team leaders. I don't believe in this chitchat. — Zlatan Ibrahimovic

In (hyper-loyal) cultures, loyalty is so highly prized that it covers a multitude of leadership sins. I've seen numerous bad leaders cover their ineptitude by stressing the importance of loyalty over competence. They teach that loyalty is more important than excellence and they use that idea to distract the team from their own inability to perform. — Phil Cooke

It's getting better and better. You know, guys are feeling more comfortable and they are not afraid to speak up and be a leader. I mean, our team, we have 25 players, we have about 25 leaders, too. So whatever someone says, people listen. — Johnny Damon

The umbrella assertion made by Team B - and the most inflammatory - was that the previous National Intelligence Estimates "substantially misperceived the motivations behind Soviet strategic programs, and thereby tended consistently to underestimate their intensity, scope, and implicit threat." Soviet military leaders weren't simply trying to defend their territory and their people; they were readying a First Strike option, and the US intelligence community had missed it. What led to this "grave and dangerous flaw" in threat assessment, according to Team B, was an overreliance on hard technical facts, and a lamentable tendency to downplay "the large body of soft data." This "soft" data, the ideological leader of Team B, Richard Pipes, would later say, included "his deep knowledge of the Russian soul. — Rachel Maddow

Independent people who do not have the maturity to think and actinterdependently may be good individual producers, but they won't be good leaders or team players — Stephen R. Covey

Great leaders are paradoxical. They catalyze, rather control, the work of their teams. They have an overarching vision for the team but are not autocratic in the realization of this vision. Their eyes are open to whatever results occur-not just planned goals, because serendipity is a great innovator. — Guy Kawasaki

When leaders become focused on the fruit instead of the root and worry about the outcome instead of the process of developing team members, they may survive in the short run, but they will not thrive in the long run. — Jon Gordon

One remarkable part of the SnapTax story is what the team leaders said when I asked them to account for their unlikely success. Did they hire superstar entrepreneurs from outside the company? No, they assembled a team from within Intuit. Did they face constant meddling from senior management, which is the bane of innovation teams in many companies? No, their executive sponsors created an "island of freedom" where they could experiment as necessary. Did they have a huge team, a large budget, and lots of marketing dollars? Nope, they started with a team of five. What allowed the SnapTax team to innovate was not their genes, destiny, or astrological signs but a process deliberately facilitated by Intuit's senior management. — Eric Ries

When I came into the CEO office, I basically changed the entire management team. We knew that we had to change the company, so we needed a new set of leaders. — Hans Vestberg

A lot of people, when a guy scores a lot of goals, think, 'He's a great player', because a goal is very important, but a great player is a player who can do everything on the field. He can do assists, encourage his colleagues, give them confidence to go forward. It is someone who, when a team does not do well, becomes one of the leaders. — Pele

Leaders come in two flavors, expanders and containers. The best leadership teams have a mix of both. — Barbara Corcoran

A great football team is the right balance and the right mixture of players. Good leaders, good communicators and good technicians. You need people that are strategically astute. People need passion, desire and most importantly, a willingness to keep learning. — Hope Powell

Just as Rolland and I know that together with our team, God has given us the nation of Mozambique, our dear friends Brian and Pamela Jourden know that the Lord has a great revival to birth in Zimbabwe and across Africa. Many prophetic words have been released over their lives, and financial miracles grow their ministry. When they started Generation Won/Iris Zimbabwe in 2008, Zimbabwe had gone from being one of the most prosperous nations in Africa, called the "breadbasket of Africa," to being the poorest nation in the world. God spoke to them that Zimbabwe, which means house of stones, was like the stone the builders rejected, Jesus, but it would become a cornerstone nation, just as Jesus is the chief cornerstone, and a house of prayer for all nations. They have over twenty churches among three tribes, and they have seen HIV/AIDS and cancer miraculously healed as they preach the gospel. God is also opening doors with national leaders. — Heidi Baker

A strong team consists of people who know how to follow a leader. — Sunday Adelaja

The challenge for us is to make the gospel the center of our lives not just on Sunday mornings but on Monday mornings. This means ending distinctions between "full-timers," "part-timers," and people with secular employment in our team and leadership structures. We need non-full-time leaders who can model whole-life, gospel-centered, missional living. It means thinking of our workplaces, homes, and neighborhoods as the location of mission. We need to plan and pray for gospel relationships. This means creating church cultures in which we see normal, celebrating day-to-day gospel living in the secular world and discussions of how we can use our daily routines for the gospel. — Tim Chester

If you have a plan, we want to hear it. Tell your community leaders, your local officials, your governor, and your team in Washington. Believe me, your ideas count. An individual can make a difference. — George H. W. Bush

I've been able to dine with presidents, with leaders of corporations, traveled for 14 years with (financier and philanthropist) Michael Milken, who has taught me so much about life. Hanging around with them, it's nothing I could have believed in grade school. I could be with all of them? Milton Berle, Don Rickles, Dean Martin ... this former third-string pitcher from the Norristown High baseball team and the son of an Italian immigrant? I really am in awe when I think that has happened to me. What a life. — Tommy Lasorda

All companies of any size have to continue to push to make sure you get the right leaders, the right team, the right people to be fast acting, and fast moving in the marketplace. We've got great leaders, and we continue to attract and promote great new leaders. — Steve Ballmer

There is nothing better than to have a highly motivated team of leaders focused on than reaching those far from Christ. And yet statistics and our experience reveal that evangelism entropy can creep deep inside a new church within months of its first public service. The longer we are around new churches the more amazed we are at how quickly these mission-focused, vibrant new churches become old. — Gary Rohrmayer

Organisations are innovating quicker than ever. Your members need to excel from being a team player to a team builder. — Janna Cachola

I believe that leaders and leadership teams working together in a proper design will run the business more effectively than by hierarchical, command-and-control managing. But I can't prove that. And there are no models. — Marvin Bower

The downside of attending to the emotional life of groups is that it can swamp the ability to get anything done; a group can become more concerned with satisfying its members than with achieving its goals. Bion identified several ways that groups can slide into pure emotion - they can become "groups for pairing off," in which members are mainly interested in forming romantic couples or discussing those who form them; they can become dedicated to venerating something, continually praising the object of their affection (fan groups often have this characteristic, be they Harry Potter readers or followers of the Arsenal soccer team), or they can focus too much on real or perceived external threats. Bion trenchantly observed that because external enemies are such spurs to group solidarity, some groups will anoint paranoid leaders because such people are expert at identifying external threats, thus generating pleasurable group solidarity even when the threats aren't real. — Clay Shirky

Serving Leaders work hard to get obstacles out of the way so others can make progress. — John Stahl-Wert

You need experience around you when you are a young player. You need to know how to run a team, to lead a team and to play as a team which means, your team has leaders but you still function as a team. — Berti Vogts

Good leaders set vision, missions, and goals. Great leaders inspire every follower at every level to internalize their purpose, and to understand that their purpose goes far beyond the mere details of their job. When everyone is united in purpose, a positive purpose that serves not only the organization but also, hopefully, the world beyond it, you have a winning team. — Colin Powell

In addition, there are huge benefits to communal effort in and of itself. By definition, all organizations consist of people working together. Focusing on the team leads to better results for the simple reason that well-functioning groups are stronger than individuals. Teams that work together well outperform those that don't. And success feels better when it's shared with others. So perhaps one positive result of having more women at the top is that our leaders will have been trained to care more about the well-being of others. My hope, of course, is that we won't have to play by these archaic rules forever and that eventually we can all just be ourselves. We — Sheryl Sandberg

Find ways for people to shape their work and the company In addition to stripping leaders of the traditional tools of power and relying on facts to make decisions, we give Googlers uncommon freedom in shaping their own work and the company. Google isn't the first to do so. For over sixty-five years, 3M has offered its employees 15 percent of their time to explore: "A core belief of 3M is that creativity needs freedom. That's why, since about 1948, we've encouraged our employees to spend 15% of their working time on their own projects. To take our resources, to build up a unique team, and to follow their own insights in pursuit of problem-solving."103 Post-it Notes famously came out of this program, as did a clever abrasive material, Trizact, which somehow sharpens itself as it's used. — Anonymous

[A rife platoon's] members must care for one another. Its leaders must cherish the men in very fire team and squad. For a rifleman, a leader's misjudgment, ignorance or inexperience can be fatal - no second chances. No rerunning the exercise until you get it right. When the word 'go' is given, there is no turning back from the consequences. It is the monstrous burden of command..."
-Bernard "Mick" Trainor — James Brady

The capability of self-organizing teams lies in collaboration. When two engineers scratch out a design on a whiteboard, they are collaborating. When team members meet to brainstorm a design, they are collaborating. When team leaders meet to decide whether a product is ready to ship, they are collaborating. The result of any collaboration can be categorized as a tangible deliverable, a decision, or shared knowledge. — Jim Highsmith

Agile project leaders help their team balance at the edge of chaos - some structure, but not too much; adequate documentation, but not too much; some up-front architecture work, but not too much. Finding these balance points is the "art" of agile leadership. — Jim Highsmith

A call to duty, a call for service. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say "I." And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say "I." They don't think "I." They think "we"; they think "team." They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but "we" gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done. — Peter F. Drucker

few groups of leaders actually work like a team, at least not the kind that is required to lead a healthy organization. — Patrick Lencioni

Good leaders need to be able to connect to all of those around them. This is especially true at Whole Foods, where we have a very team-oriented culture. — John Mackey

To build a strong team we need to become strong leaders first. — Sunday Adelaja

I was employed as an investigator and my particular team, we were investigating the role of the business community in the genocide and we identified a bunch of leaders of the business community and I investigated two people. — Tony Greig

Work with enthusiasm. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Leaders must see the dream in their mind before they will accomplish the dream with their team. — Orrin Woodward

I know I touch a lot of people. I don't call myself a role model. But I am a leader. Leaders are always watched by team members & outsiders — Spoken Reasons

The only meaningful measure for a leader is whether the team succeeds or fails. For all the definitions, descriptions, and characterizations of leaders, there are only two that matter: effective and ineffective. Effective leaders lead successful teams that accomplish their mission and win. Ineffective leaders do not. — Jocko Willink

You must put all your heart into everything you do. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Leaders can change the tenor of the workplace and create harmony in motion toward a favorable result. So every time you say to your team, "Let's rock and roll," make sure you have already set up the stage to where they can actually perform like rock stars. — Thomas Huynh

You see, team," Dan said passionately, "our problem is negativity, and we have no one to blame but ourselves. I believe where there is a void, negativity will fill it. And, unfortunately, within every organization you get voids in communication between leaders and their employees and between different teams and team members. It happens everywhere: with sports teams, work teams, family teams. Within these voids, negativity starts to breed and grow and, eventually, like a cancer it will spread if you don't address it. As an executive team it's up to us to do everything we can to prevent these voids from occurring and when they do occur, we must quickly fill them with positive communication and positive energy. People don't just want to be seen and heard. They want to hear and see, and if they don't feel like they are part of the company then they will assume the worst and act accordingly. — Jon Gordon

Any Idiot can point out a problem ... A leader is willing to do something about it! Leaders solve problems! — Tony Robbins

Team leaders have to connect with their team and themselves. If they don't know their team's strengths and weaknesses, they cannot hand off responsibilities to the team. And if they don't know their own strengths and weaknesses, they will not hand off responsibilities to the team. — John C. Maxwell

As a leader, it's your job to get everyone to share what they know. — Jane Ripley

Leaders who carry unresolved guilt are forced to hide a part of themselves from those to whom they are closest. They have a secret. They are forced to expend time and energy to ensure that no one finds them out. They know they are not completely trustworthy. Often they assume no one else is either. Guilty leaders have a difficult time trusting. Consequently, guilty leaders have a difficult time building teams. — Andy Stanley

Micromanaging erodes people's confidence, making them overly dependennt on their leaders. Well-meaning leaders inadvertently sabotage their teams by rushing to the rescue and offering too much help. A leader needs to balance assistance with wu wei, backing off long enough to let people learn from their mistakes and develop competence. — Diane Dreher

We have to work and serve humanity while we have the grace. — Lailah Gifty Akita

A skilled Transition Team leader will set the general goals for a Transition, and then confer on the other team leaders working with him the power to implement those goals. — Richard V. Allen

In high-performance teams, "the leaders managed the principles, and the principles managed the team. — Jim Highsmith

The heart of service is grace of belonging. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Good leaders don't tell people what to do, they give teams capability and inspiration. — Jeffrey R. Immelt

On a cohesive team, leaders are not there simply to represent the departments that they lead and manage but rather to solve problems that stand in the way of achieving success for the whole organization. That means they'll readily offer up their departments' resources when it serves the greater good of the team, and they'll take an active interest in the thematic goal regardless of how closely related it is to their functional area. — Patrick Lencioni

However, if the key to a values-based organization is really the people, then leaders need to spend a lot more time developing the team than analyzing the numbers. After all, the numbers aren't going to generate themselves. You need to have the right people in place in order to reach the performance targets. — Harry M. Kraemer

Leaders strengthen credibility by demonstrating that they are not in it for themselves, instead they have the interests of the institution, department, or team and its constituents at heart. Being a servant may not be what many leaders had in mind when they chose to take responsibility for the vision and direction of their organization or team - but serving others is the most glorious and rewarding of all leadership tasks. — James M. Kouzes

True leaders don't look at just the outward appearances in the selection of team members, they look at one's core values and heart. — Farshad Asl

A leader's words matter, but actions ultimately do more to reinforce or undermine the implementation of a team of teams. Instead of exploiting technology to monitor employee performance at levels that would have warmed Frederick Taylor's heart, the leader must allow team members to monitor him. More than directing, leaders must exhibit personal transparency. This is the new ideal. — Stanley McChrystal

Leaders, true leaders, take responsibility for the success of the team and understand that they must also take responsibility for the failure. — Donald J. Trump

A true leader is one who creates a favourable environment to bring out the energy and ability of his team. A great leader creates more great leaders, and does not reduce the institution to a single person. — Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum

Effective leaders are able to manage the tensions of these two objectives and ensure that the team regularly addresses its processes. They understand that processes are the best vehicle through which the team both works together and thinks together, and the team cannot perform any better than its processes will allow it to. — Pat MacMillan