What do you need to know as a leader to succeed? This is a loaded question. Different situations and jobs require specific leadership and coaching tactics. All good leaders can learn from others. While there are many great leadership quotes to share, this top ten list of leadership quotes gives you food for thought on key leadership principles from those who were leaders. Digest these, what is each telling you about successful leadership?

Top 10 Leadership Quotes

1. Be team focused not self-focused: “I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?” Benjamin Disraeli
2. Praise and recognize your team: ” A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worse when they despise him. But of a good leader who talks little when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, we did it ourselves. ” Lao Tzu
3. Set high expectations and goals: “Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.” Peter Drucker
4. Treat your team with respect and care: “You can build a throne with bayonets, but you can’t sit on it for long.” Boris Yeltsin
5. Share your priorities and be consistent in execution: ” Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.” Steven Covey
6. Keep learning, and keep training your team: “Leaders aren’t born; they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that’s the price we’ll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.” Vince Lombardi
7. Communicate, communicate, communicate: “I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.” Mahatma Gandhi
8. Engage your team and they will be inspired: “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” Dwight D. Eisenhower
9. Do what’s right, not what’s expedient: “He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander.” Aristotle
10. Believe in your vision and your team: “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” John Quincy Adams

The key question is what can you learn from these quotes? If as a leader, you want your team to be better, you have to be a better leader. Keep learning how to communicate with, coach and inspire others to the potential greatness they have within. Here’s a bonus quote, “Good leaders make people feel that they’re at the very heart of things, not at the periphery. Everyone feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the organization. When that happens people feel centered and that gives their work meaning.” Warren Bennis

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By the way, do you want to learn more about employee engagement and motivation? If so, I suggest you check out this complimentary How to Motivate eBook on motivation and employee engagement.

Perhaps you have lots of change going on at work, check out this Changing Change Management Guide.