Collaborative Leadership Quotes

A leader is best when people barely know that he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him. Fail to honor people, They fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say, "We did this ourselves.

Leadership does not mean domination

There are brilliant minds at the University. My job is not to exercise power over them but to free them. By being in charge and not exercising power I actually empower my colleagues.

Leaders lead. They don't divide; they don't create a climate that is poisonous.

I have a great team who has helped me build Biocon, I was very fortunate to be able to share my vision with a group of people who really were as excited about challenges as I was.

Most people think leadership is about being in charge. Most people think leadership is about having all the answers and being the most intelligent person or the most qualified person in the room. The irony is that it is the complete opposite. Leadership is about empowering others to achieve things they did not think possible. Leadership is about pointing in the direction, articulating a vision of the world that does not yet exist. Then asking help from others to insure that vision happens.

We think leadership is about rank and power, but better to think of leadership as the responsibility for other human beings. That leadership and rank may not go together. So it manifests in this remarkable way.

One of the things I realised as I learned to manage a rehearsal room is that the best idea always has to win, and it doesn't matter where the idea comes from.

I campaigned on being a collaborative leader.

I think a lot of people, when the word leadership is used, they think of it as quite forceful and quite a rigid thing. I think people think I am like that. But people can lead in different ways.

Leadership does not mean domination. The world is always well supplied with people who wish to rule and dominate others.

Democracy is a daring concept - a hope that we'll be best governed if all of us participate in the act of government. It is meant to be a conversation, a place where the intelligence and local knowledge of the electorate sums together to arrive at actions that reflect the participation of the largest possible number of people.

Leadership is a concept we often resist. It seems immodest, even self-aggrandizing, to think of ourselves as leaders. But if it is true that we are part of a community, then leadership is everyone's vocation, and it can be an evasion to insist that it is not. When we live in the close-knit ecosystem called community, everyone follows and everyone leads.

At a school in Massachusetts where I once worked, we managed early on through consensus. Which sounds wonderful, but it was just a very, very difficult way to sort of manage anything, because convincing everybody to do one particular thing, especially if it was hard, was almost impossible.

We need to move from the leader as hero, to the leader as host.

Americans must reconcile themselves to limited objectives and work in congress with others, for an essential part of American power is the ability to evoke support from others---an ability quite as important as the capacity to compel.

This perception that a good captain is someone who beats his chest and roars like a lion and gives big Churchillian speeches, that's just not what leadership is about for me.

… leadership is not a one man show.

A leader is someone who steps back from the entire system and tries to build a more collaborative, more innovative system that will work over the long term.

I am very comfortable not being the expert and actually putting people who work for me forward. I don't need to know all the answers, and I don't need to be the one who's out there up front.

Business is usually a team sport. There isn't one great person sitting there directing things. You can't run an effective business like that.

There is no more great men; there is only great committees.

Bosses push, Leaders pull. Real leadership is servant leadership.

If leadership is something that is in-your-face, then that is a different type of leadership.

Great groups give the lie to the remarkably persistent but incorrect notion that successful organizations are the lengthened shadow of a great woman or man. However, each great group has a strong leader. In fact, great groups and great leaders create each other.