50 inspiring quotes that help you lead your team

Are you a Leader? Would you like to lead you team by motivating and inspiring them? Quotes do motivate and inspire us to do our best. Being a leader, sometimes these inspiring quotes may help you lead your team in the right way and drive towards success.

Below are the best inspiring quotes we found from few true and successful leaders. Share these quotes and particularly use them to become a successful leader.

Who is a leader?

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

                                         —Jack Welch

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

                                        —Max DePree

3. “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.”

                                          —Lao Tzu

4. “My own definition of leadership is this: The capacity and the will to rally men and women to a common purpose and the character which inspires confidence.”

—General Montgomery

What does Leadership mean?

5. “Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.”

                                                                                                                         —Peter Drucker

6. “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”

                                                                                                                                    — George Patton

7. “To have long-term success as a coach or in any position of leadership, you have to be obsessed in some way.”

— Pat Riley

8. “My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better.”

—Steve Jobs

9. “A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together.”

                                                                                                                                  –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

10. “You don’t lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case.”

— Ken Kese

11. “When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy.’ They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”

                                                                                                                                         —John Lennon

12. “We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”

                                    —Plato

13.  “I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.”

                                                            —Leonardo da Vinci

14. “When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.”

                                                                                                    —Helen Keller

15. “A person, who never made a mistake, never tried anything new.”

                                                                                                                —Albert Einstein

16.  “What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.”

                                                                               —Bob Dylan

17.  “When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”

                                         —Henry Ford

As a leader, how could you divert or come out of failure?

18. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

                                                         —Mark Twain

19.  “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

                                                 —Michael Jordan

20. “If you look at what you have in life, you’ll always have more. If you look at what you don’t have in life, you’ll never have enough.”

                                                        —Oprah Winfrey

21. “It is a curious thing, Harry, but perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who, like you, have leadership thrust upon them, and take up the mantle because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear it well.”

                                                                          ―  J.K.Rowling, Harry Potter

22. “The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.”

                                                                                ―  Ronald Reagan

23. “Don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions; go over, under, through, and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing, and don’t care if they like it.”
                                                 ― Tina Fey, Bossypants

24.  “Power isn’t control at all — power is strength, and giving that strength to others. A leader isn’t someone who forces others to make him stronger; a leader is someone willing to give his strength to others that they may have the strength to stand on their own.”

–Beth Revis, Across the Universe

25. “I have three precious things which I hold fast and prize. The first is gentleness; the second is frugality; the third is humility, which keeps me from putting myself before others. Be gentle and you can be bold; be frugal and you can be liberal; avoid putting yourself before others and you can become a leader among men.”
                                     ―Lao Tzu

26. “A man can only lead when others accept him as their leader, and he has only as much authority as his subjects give to him. All of the brilliant ideas in the world cannot save your kingdom if no one will listen to them.”
                                         ―Brandon Sanderson, The Well of Ascension

27. “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
                                                                                                    ― Antoine de Saint- Exupery

28.  “In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.”

                                                                                                                     – President Harry Truman

29.  “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

                                                                                                          – President Abraham Lincoln

30.  “If you think you are leading and turn around to see no one following, then you are just taking a walk.”

                      – Benjamin Hooks

What is the challenge of leadership?

31. “The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly.”

                                            – Jim Rohn

32. “The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.”

                           – Walter Lippmann

33.  “To lead people, walk beside them. As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence … When the best leader’s work is done, the people say, ‘We did it ourselves!'”

                                                                                                                                – Lao Tsu

34.  All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.

                                          —John Kenneth Galbraith

35.  Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

                                                —Colin Powell

Difference between management and leadership:

36.  Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.

                                                                                                                                                   —Tom Peters

37.  Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

                                                                   —Stephen Covey

38.  You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

                                                                                              —Eleanor Roosevelt

39.   “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.”

                                                                                                                                           —steve jobs

40.  “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

                                                        – steve jobs

41.  “Don’t ever give up. Don’t ever give in. Don’t ever stop trying. Don’t ever sell out. And if you find yourself succumbing to one of the above for a brief moment, pick yourself up, brush yourself off, whisper a prayer, and start where you left off. But never, ever, ever give up.”

                                                                                                                     –Richelle E. Goodrich

Difference between Followers and leaders:

42.  “Followers who tell the truth, and leaders who listen to it, are an unbeatable combination.”
                                                                                                                                 — Warren Bennis

43.  “In the face of leadership flaws, too many people assume cynical perspectives, rather than do the hard work of building relationships in which they can have more positive influence.”

                                                                                                                                           — Ira Chaleff

44.  “Leadership is the creation of an environment in which others are able to self-actualize in the process of completing the job.”
                                                 — John Mellecker

45.  “You cannot be effective if those who work for you are not. So building their effectiveness ought to be a priority.”
                            — Richard N. Haass

46.    “There are three kinds of people: Those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who ask, ‘What happened?'”
                                                                              — Casey Stengel

47.  “A competent leader can get efficient service from poor troops, while on the contrary an incapable leader can demoralize the best of troops.”
                                                            — Gen. John J. Pershin

48.  “Outstanding leaders go out of the way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.”
                                                                                           — Sam Walton

49.  “You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.”
                                                                                    — Woodrow Wilson

50.  “You have to enable and empower people to make decisions independent of you.  As I’ve learned, each person on a team is an extension of your leadership; if they feel empowered by you they will magnify your power to lead.  Trust is a great force multiplier.”
                                                                                                      — Tom Ridge

Also, check out 100 inspiration quotes that motivates you to succeed