Inspiration
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The distinctive role of leadership at the outset is that leaders take the initiative. They address their creative insights to potential followers, seize their attention, spark further interaction. The first act is decisive because it breaks up a static situation and establishes a relationship. It is, in every sense, a /creative/ act.
— James MacGregor Burns, 2003
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Five qualities are particularly vital in order to promote effective leadership: confidence, integrity, connection, resilience and aspiration. Confidence creates the essential sense of self-worth and self- efficacy that is needed to put oneself forward in order to lead and to sustain oneself in a leadership role. Integrity helps leaders to be consistent and allows them to be clear about what they stand for and believe in. Connection is the ability to translate those values through a genuine and authentic link with followers - this is much more than communication, which is often the first choice whenever we ask groups to name what they believe to be the most important quality for a leader to possess. To this we would add resilience, the ability to withstand emotional and physiological stress, setbacks and conflict.
— Brad Jackson & Ken Parry, 2018
Motivation
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Instead of giving people false assurance that their best is good enough, leaders insist that people surpass themselves. And rather than smoothing over conflicts, leaders force disputes to the surface’
Both leaders and followers work together to bring about substantial rather than superficial changes. These changes are driven by a mutual purpose that is forged through a non-coercive influence relationship.
— Joseph C. Rost (1991)
Self Improvement
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It is important to realise that the quality of all of our lives is dependent on the quality of our leadership. The context in which we study leadership is very different from the context in which we study, say, astronomy. By definition, leaders wield power, and so we study them with the same self-interested intensity with which we study diabetes and other life-threatening diseases. Only when we understand leaders will we be able to control them.
— Warren Bennis, 2007
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— Yukl, 2002