35 Quotes About Bad Leadership

Experiencing bad leadership can make all the difference in the world to an employee. Sometimes those experiences can be invaluable lessons in life. These quotes about bad leadership demonstrate the price and high costs paid.

“A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.”

“A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit.”

“A leader is a dealer in hope.”

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”

“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.”

“A leader is someone who helps improve the lives of other people or improve the system they live under.”

“A leader’s job is not to do the work for others, it’s to help others figure out how to do it themselves, to get things done, and to succeed beyond what they thought possible.”

“A word of encouragement from a teacher to a child can change a life. A word of encouragement from a spouse can save a marriage. A word of encouragement from a leader can inspire a person to reach her potential.”

“America isn’t Congress. America isn’t Washington. America is the striving immigrant who starts a business, or the mom who works two low-wage jobs to give her kid a better life. America is the union leader and the CEO who put aside their differences to make the economy stronger.”

“As a leader, you must consistently drive effective communication. Meetings must be deliberate and intentional – your organizational rhythm should value purpose over habit and effectiveness over efficiency.”

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

“Being a good leader requires remembering that you’re there for a reason, and the reason certainly isn’t to have your way. High-integrity leaders not only welcome questioning and criticism – they insist on it.”

“Good leaders must communicate vision clearly, creatively, and continually. However, the vision doesn’t come alive until the leader models it.”

“I believe to be a leader is to enable others to embrace a vision, initiative or assignment in a way that they feel a sense of purpose, ownership, personal engagement, and common cause. ”

“I think I’m a natural-born leader. I know how to bow down to authority if it’s authority that I respect.”

“If you are a leader, you should never forget that everyone needs encouragement. And everyone who receives it – young or old, successful or less-than-successful, unknown or famous – is changed by it.”

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”

“Leadership is an individual sport, one that has to be fine-tuned to each of the people that reports to you. Leaders also need to provide the direction, energy, encouragement and inspiration for each person who reports directly to the leader as well as for the overall organization.”

“Leadership is hard to define and good leadership even harder. But if you can get people to follow you to the ends of the earth, you are a great leader.”

“Let me define a leader. He must have vision and passion and not be afraid of any problem. Instead, he should know how to defeat it. Most importantly, he must work with integrity.”

“No leader, however strong, can succeed at anything of national importance or significance unless he has the support and cooperation of the people he is tasked to lead and sworn to serve.”

“No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it.”

“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.”

“One of the best paradoxes of leadership is a leader’s need to be both stubborn and open-minded. A leader must insist on sticking to the vision and stay on course to the destination. But he must be open-minded during the process. ”

“People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. The leader leads, and the boss drives.”

“People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision.”

“Teamwork makes the dream work, but a vision becomes a nightmare when the leader has a big dream and a bad team.”

“The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people.”

“The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant.”

“The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves.”

“The role of a creative leader is not to have all the ideas; it’s to create a culture where everyone can have ideas and feel that they’re valued.”

“The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.”

“The true measure of the value of any business leader and manager is performance.”

“To me, a leader is someone who holds her- or himself accountable for finding potential in people and processes. And so what I think is really important is sustainability.”

“When the best leader’s work is done the people say, ‘We did it ourselves.'”

A leader has the ability to make all the difference as far as destructive behavior and a negative impact on your organization.