Wisdom is learning to ask what our leadership is doing to people while there are still people around us willing to answer.
~ Leadership Masterworks
Ideas worth planting
Toxic Leadership
Small thoughts. Strong roots. Truths worth carrying.
The people we lead do not belong to us. They have been entrusted to us.
~ Leadership Masterworks
Leadership produces fruit. We should look at all of it.
~ Leadership Masterworks
Before people understand the problem, they often feel the problem.
~ Leadership Masterworks
Silence is not necessarily agreement. Sometimes silence is simply what people do when they have learned that speaking is expensive.
~ Leadership Masterworks
Feelings are not infallible, and perception is not the same thing as truth. But neither should that perception automatically be dismissed.
~ Leadership Masterworks
One of the great dangers of toxic leadership is that everybody else can feel something is wrong long before the leader realizes anything is wrong at all.
~ Leadership Masterworks
The more authority we possess, the greater the danger that people will become reluctant to tell us the truth.
~ Leadership Masterworks
Do not measure leadership only by what was accomplished. Ask what it cost to accomplish it.
~ Leadership Masterworks
The better leadership question is not merely, “Do I have the authority to do this?” but, “What is my use of authority doing to the people entrusted to me?”
~ Leadership Masterworks
One bad interaction does not make a toxic leader. The important question is what happens when the unusual becomes usual.
~ Leadership Masterworks
Eventually we must ask: What happened to the people entrusted to us while we were leading them?
~ Leadership Masterworks
A healthy leader can react badly at first. Watch what happens afterward.
~ Leadership Masterworks
Personality can explain behavior. It does not excuse character.
~ Leadership Masterworks
A leader can think he has gained control when he has actually lost visibility.
~ Leadership Masterworks
The more successful a leader becomes at discouraging disagreement, the less trustworthy the information reaching that leader becomes.
~ Leadership Masterworks
An organization can develop an unofficial operating system around a leader’s weaknesses.
~ Leadership Masterworks
If telling the truth produces anger, people become careful with the truth.
~ Leadership Masterworks
When we cannot clearly identify what is wrong, we tend to question our own perception of it.
~ Leadership Masterworks
The objective should never be to catch someone being toxic. The objective is transformation.
~ Leadership Masterworks