21 Inspirational Leadership Quotes for 2023 (2024)

Here are 21 of my favorite quotes that you can use to inspire yourself, engage your teams, and improve your people, performance and profits every day. Thoughts are mine except where attributed.

1. "Make it better, not just different." This one hangs framed above my desk. First heard it from an Area Director of 15 Chili's restaurants.
2. "You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth." —H. L. Mencken
3. Reduce Complexity in process and systems wherever you find it and however you can. "We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems." --James Clear
4. Spend time with your best performers not just with your problems.
5. "Compliance can be commanded, but commitment cannot. People reserve their full capacity for emotional commitment for leaders they find credible, and credibility must be earned."--Geoff Colvin
6. “Effective executives . . . do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes.” --Peter Drucker. Knowing where your time goes and being strategic and intentional about what you spend your time doing represent a huge lever that turns efforts to lead yourself into successfully leading others.
7. Managing your team is similar to parenting in that your goal is to teach your team so well that they eventually don’t need you.
8. “Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.”--Alex Haley
9. Don't expect 100% productivity from an employee when you only give them 1% training.
10. Every time you walk past a problem in your business you've approved it.
11. You cannot decide what to deal with today unless you know where you want to be tomorrow. Any plan to improve your use of time depends on being clear about your goals. Strategic clarity is always step one.
12. "What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals. At your funeral people will not recall what you did; they will only remember how you made them feel." --Jim Rohn
13. Judge people on their best days not their worst.
14. "When people seem uncommonly disciplined, look for a powerful ritual hiding in plain sight. It’s not that they have more discipline than you or I, but they were able to turn that discipline into consistency with a ritual. Short-term results come from intensity but long-term results come from consistency. Turning intensity into consistency unlocks a powerful asymmetry." --Shane Farriss
15. "What would it look like if it was easy?"--Timothy Ferriss
16. “If the only new thing we have to offer is an improved version of the past, then today can only be inferior to yesterday.”-Robert Hewison
17. "Successful companies don’t 'Build Business'. They build people. People Build Business."--Jim Buelt
18. "Leadership is at its best when the vision is strategic, the voice persuasive, and the results are tangible.” --Michael Useem
19. Leadership or managerial burnout occurs not because we are trying to solve problems but because we are trying to solve the same problems over and over.
20. “Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.“ --Danny Meyer
21. Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good; it’s the thing you do that makes you good.

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