John C. Maxwell Quotes

The very exercise of leadership fosters capacity for it.

I learned hard lessons, and I've taken that lesson and it's helped me become a better business person and a better leader.

Leadership is a journey - you never arrive.

I began my journey as a captain when I was just 21-22 and leading the Indian side for so many years has helped me also grow as a person. My growth as a person pretty much has happened on the ground along with teammates.

One quality of leaders and high achievers in every area seems to be a commitment to ongoing personal and professional development.

Every new level of growth we hope to experience as leaders calls for a new level of change. You cannot have one without the other. If you want to be a better leader, get ready to make some trades.

Realizing your potential as a leader is your responsibility.

Great leadership is by definition relentlessly developmental.

If you’re a serious minded leader, you will read. You will read all you can. You will read when you feel like it, and you will read when you don’t. You will do whatever you have to do to increase your leadership input, because you know as well as I do that it will make you better.

Great leaders encourage leadership development. By openly developing themselves

A great coach can lead you to a place where you don't need him any more.

Not everyone will become a great leader, but everyone can become a better leader.

My best investment, as cliched as this sounds, is the money I've spent developing myself, via books, workshops and coaching. Leadership begins within, and to have a better career, start by building a better you.

This whole thing's about development. Not only are we trying to develop players, we're trying to develop ourselves.

I vividly remember a conversation I had many years ago in 1974, which marked a turning point in my leadership journey. I was sitting at a Holiday Inn with my friend, Kurt Campmeyer, when he asked me if I had a personal growth plan. I didn't. In fact, I didn't even know you were supposed to have one.

A good part of my leadership skills is crafted from learning from experiences early in my career that were not positive experiences.

More than once in the history of Whole Foods Market, the company was unable to collectively evolve until I myself was able to evolve - in other words, I was holding the company back. My personal growth enabled the company to evolve.

I don't plan in terms of career ambitions. The only career ambition I have is to work with people who are going to bring you up and elevate your performance. They'll let you know things that you didn't know already and bring you places that you might not have gotten to otherwise.

No matter how good you think you are as a leader, my goodness, the people around you will have all kinds of ideas for how you can get better. So for me, the most fundamental thing about leadership is to have the humility to continue to get feedback and to try to get better - because your job is to try to help everybody else get better.

I want to cultivate the seed that was placed in me until the last small twig has grown.

I would assert that highly effective leaders are made more than they're born. Every leader I know who's been highly effective has worked hard at it, and they've been students of it. The more you're a student of leadership, the more you figure out what works for you and the more effective you're going to be.

It's important for a leader to hear about his blind spots on a regular basis so working on them is periodically top of mind.

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.

You always want to improve, learn from the veterans on the team.

What you learn from my life is, first of all, that anybody can be a leader. You can be a leader. I wasn't born that way - I developed it, I worked at it. And also that the grassroots can organize and take on all the powers that be and defeat them. That is the lesson.