NEW YORK – As 2014 comes to an end, it’s time for the annual tradition of “best of” and “top 10” lists. This week, Inc. Magazine offered its list of 10 tips and quotes from the best leadership books of the year. We’ve listed five of them (in no particular order) and the full list is available here.
Resilience is critical to success in leadership: "A few years ago, two former business school professors of mine, Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, author of Power, and Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, did an informal study of my Stanford MBA classmates to discern what factors were the most influential in determining which students would 'make it' and which would not. […] After eliminating many different factors, they landed on resilience as the one defining skill and behavior that allowed some to stand out from the rest. After all, it wasn't that none of us face that adversity — we all did. But some were able to pick themselves up and brush themselves off and move on, while others were not."
— Denise Brosseau, Ready to Be a Thought Leader: How to Increase Your Influence, Impact, and Success
Leadership is, at its core, about the mobilization of ideas: "Leadership is about setting a direction. It's about creating a vision, empowering and inspiring people to want to achieve the vision, and enabling them to do so with energy and speed through an effective strategy. In its most basic sense, leadership is about mobilizing a group of people to jump into a better future."
— John P. Kotter, Accelerate: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World
Good leaders are highly aware of their own vulnerabilities: "The role played by blindspots is to meditate between the poles of self-confidence and self-doubt. A leader with too many blindspots can be overconfident, even blindly arrogant, and exposed to a range of risks."
— Robert Bruce Shaw, Leadership Blindspots: How Successful Leaders Identify and Overcome the Weaknesses That Matter
The role of a leader is primarily to care for others: "And when a leader embraces their responsibility to care for people instead of caring for numbers, then people will follow, solve problems and see to it that that leader's vision comes to life the right way, a stable way and not the expedient way."
— Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't
Take time to reflect and lead in the moment without stopping only to focus on problems: "Most leaders can barely breathe through the blur of activity, much less reflect on and register the best of what is happening in the present moment. And on the rare occasions when they do step back to assess the situation at hand, they focus on the problems, ignoring the opportunities."
— Kathryn D. Cramer, Lead Positive: What Highly Effective Leaders See, Say, and Do