Warren Bennis Quotes

60 Sourced Quotes

Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.

Warren Bennis
There are two ways of being creative. One can sing and dance. Or one can create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish.

Warren Bennis
The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born — that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born. And the way we become leaders is by learning about leadership through life and job experiences, not with university degrees.

Warren Bennis
Failing organizations are usually over-managed and under-led.

Warren Bennis
Good leaders make people feel that they're at the very heart of things, not at the periphery. Everyone feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the organization. When that happens, people feel centered and that gives their work meaning.

Warren Bennis
Taking charge of your own learning is a part of taking charge of your life, which is the sine qua non in becoming an integrated person.

Warren Bennis
The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it.

Warren Bennis
Who succeeds in forming and leading a Great Group? He or she is almost always a pragmatic dreamer. They are people who get things done, but they are people with immortal longings. Often, they are scientifically minded people with poetry in their souls.

Warren Bennis
If I had to reduce the responsibilities of a good follower to a single rule, it would be to speak truth to power.

Warren Bennis
The basis of leadership is the capacity of the leader to change the mindset, the framework of the other person.

Warren Bennis
The manager does things right; the leader does the right thing.

Warren Bennis
This duality, making yourself better while teaching and developing others' judgment capabilities, is the key to leadership that is both productive and principled.

Warren Bennis
Around the world, the generals are being ousted, and the poets are taking charge.

Warren Bennis
Great groups give the lie to the remarkably persistent but incorrect notion that successful organizations are the lengthened shadow of a great woman or man. However, each great group has a strong leader. In fact, great groups and great leaders create each other.

Warren Bennis
The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.

Warren Bennis
To be authentic is literally to be your own author... to discover your own native energies and desires, and then to find your own way of acting on them.

Warren Bennis
The failure to find the right niche for people - or to let them find their own perfect niches - is a major reason that so many workplaces are mediocre, even toxic, in spite of the presence of talent. Leaders of great groups give them whatever they need and free them from everything else.

Warren Bennis
Unlike top management at Enron, exemplary leaders reward dissent. They encourage it. They understand that, whatever momentary discomfort they experience as a result of being told they might be wrong, it is more than offset by the fact that the information will help them make better decisions.

Warren Bennis
More leaders have been made by accident, circumstance, sheer grit, or will than have been made by all the leadership courses put together.

Warren Bennis
If I were to give off-the-cuff advice to anyone trying to institute change, I would say, How clear is the metaphor?

Warren Bennis
With a vision, the executive provides the all-important bridge from the present to the future of the organization.

Warren Bennis
The truth may be that history, in its kindness, gave this new generation a grand crucible challenge, as it did my own. The young of today have been summoned to receive that same kindness through the collective failures of their elders.

Warren Bennis
Power is the basic energy needed to initiate and sustain action or, to put it another way, the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it. Leadership is the wise use of this power: Transformative leadership.

Warren Bennis
Leaders encourage reflective backtalk. Norbert Wiener told me, I never know what I say until I hear the response. Leaders know the importance of having someone in their lives who will unfailingly and fearlessly tell them the truth.

Warren Bennis
Leaders are people who do the right thing. Managers are people who do things right. … a profound difference.

Warren Bennis