Quotes about Development

Commit to Spend the Time Needed to Develop Leaders:

Find someone to mentor. Once you reach a certain level in your leadership, the most valuable thing you have to give is yourself. Find someone to pour your life into. Then give him time and resources to become a better leader.

People who make growth their goal—instead of a title, position, salary, or other external target—always have a future.

Successful leaders help their people find their right seats. Sometimes that requires moving people around to find where they make the greatest contribution. Sometimes it means trying and failing. As a leader, you have to take it all in stride. Positioning people correctly is a process, and you have to treat it that way.

As you release tasks to the leaders you're developing, you need to trust them, believe in them, and hold them accountable.

The best way to develop rational, well-balanced confidence is to go after a few victories immediately following a failure.

If we're not failing or making mistakes, it means we're playing it too safe.

Education makes all the difference.

What's worse than training your people and losing them? Not training them and keeping them.

Leaders have to deal simultaneously with people issues and business issues, and they need to be able to do both effectively. That's an art. As you work to develop people, maintain a relational approach, valuing them and adding value to them. At the same time, do what you must to achieve a good bottom line.

A leader is great, not because of his or her power, but because of his or her ability to empower others. Success without a successor is failure. A worker's main responsibility is developing others to do the work.

Leadership expert Peter Drucker says, "The better a man is, the more mistakes he will make, for the more new things he will try. I would never promote to a top-level job a man who was not making mistakes . . . otherwise he is sure to be mediocre." Mistakes really do pave the road to achievement.