Leadership Team Development Quotes

“Instead of waiting for a leader you can believe in, try this: Become a leader you can believe in.”
― Stan Slap

“You can’t sell it outside if you can’t sell it inside.”
― Stan Slap

“The purpose of leadership is to change the world around you in the name of your values, so you can live those values more fully.”
― Stan Slap

“When you’re a manager, you work for your company. When you’re a leader, your company works for you.”
― Stan Slap

“The first step to solving any problem is to accept one’s own accountability for creating it.”
― Stan Slap

“Profitability. Growth. Quality. Exceeding customer expectations. These are not examples of values. These are examples of corporate strategies being sold to you as values.”
― Stan Slap

“What first separates a leader from a normal human being? A leader knows who they are as a human being.”
― Stan Slap

“The first step out of the gate has to be knowing where you want to end up. What do you really want from your company?”
― Stan Slap

“When rewards come from an external source instead of an internal source, they’re unreliable, which means they’re dangerous if you grow to depend on them.”
― Stan Slap

“The worst thing in your own development as a leader is not to do it wrong. It’s to do it for the wrong reasons.”
― Stan Slap

“A company can’t buy true emotional commitment from managers no matter how much it’s willing to spend; this is something too valuable to have a price tag. And yet a company can’t afford not to have it.”
― Stan Slap

“The myth of management is that your personal values are irrelevant or inappropriate at work.”
― Stan Slap

“Try not to take this the wrong way, but your brain is smarter than you are.”
― Stan Slap

“Human behavior is only unpredictable and dangerous if you don’t start from humanity in the first place.”
― Stan Slap

“Here’s what you need to know most about leadership: Lead your own life first. The only thing in this world that will dependably happen from the top down is the digging of your grave.”
― Stan Slap

“You can stuff yourself with emotional fulfillment until it’s dribbling down your chin & your ego will quickly chomp it down and demand more.”
― Stan Slap

“The economy is in ruins! Bottom line? Good management will defeat a bad economy.”
― Stan Slap

“Being relevant to your customers only when you’re trying to sell something means choosing to be irrelevant to them for the rest of the time.”
― Stan Slap

“You don't have to fear your own company being perceived as human. You want it. People don't trust companies; they trust people.”
― Stan Slap

“There will be plenty of other problems in the future. This is as good a time as any to get ahead of them.”
― Stan Slap

“Emotional commitment means unchecked, unvarnished devotion to the company and its success; any legendary organizational performance is the result of emotionally committed managers.”
― Stan Slap

“What companies want most from their managers is what they most stop their managers from giving. What managers want most from their jobs is what they most stop themselves from getting.”
― Stan Slap

“Providing the ultimate solution to work/life balance: not escaping from work but living the way you want to at work.”
― Stan Slap

“The company may have captured their minds, their bodies and their pockets, but that doesn’t mean it’s captured their hearts.”
― Stan Slap

“Your dreams and the dreams of your company may be different, but they are in no way incompatible.”
― Stan Slap

“Your company really has to work for you before you’ll really work for your company.”
― Stan Slap

“Imagine a world where what you say synchs up, not sinks down.”
― Stan Slap

“Your company is its own competition and can deliver itself debilitating blows the competition only dreams of.”
― Stan Slap

“Leadership is about what’s right for the organization, not what feels right for the leader.”
― Liz Weber, Something Needs to Change Around Here

“Two things struck me about this strange group over which Tito presided with a kind of amused benevolence; first their complete devotion to the Old Man, as they called him, and secondly the fact that all of them... had been with him in the woods from the early days of the resistance, sharing with him hardships and dangers, setbacks and successes. This common experience had overcome all differences of class or race or temperament and forged between them lasting bonds of loyalty and affection.”
― Fitzroy MacLean, Eastern Approaches