23 quotes to shape your leadership

Jonathan Hayashi June 6, 2018

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We all want to be leaders don’t we? Especially because we know our capacity as a leader will directly effect those serving in the church under us.

We all want to be leaders, don’t we? Our capacity as leaders will directly affect those serving under us. Here are 23 quotes from a variety of inspirational leaders that will challenge your growth and remind you what you love about the leadership position you hold.

1. “We’ve traded the leadership pipeline of Jesus for the constructs of cultural Christianity.” —Will Mancini (auxano.com and LifeYounique.com)

2. “A leader’s role is to define reality and then give hope.” —Napoleon Bonaparte

3. “It is hard to think of many things that do more damage to an organization than leaders who have no plan for how they will hand over power.” —Andy Crouch, Strong and Weak

4. “True greatness, true leadership, is found in giving yourself in service to others, not in coaxing or inducing others to serve you.” —J. Oswald Sanders, Spiritual Leadership

5. “I cannot give you the formula for success,  but I can give you the formula for failure, which is: Try to please everybody.” —Herbert Swope, American journalist

6. “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” —Warren Bennis, Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge

7. “No one can be a good bishop if he loves his title and not his task.”  – St. Augustine

8. “Developing leaders in a pipeline is developing them for all arenas of life.” – Eric Geiger, Senior Vice President of Lifeway

9. “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” – John F. Kennedy

10. “A visionary may see, but a leader must decide.” — J. Oswald Sanders, Spiritual Leadership

11. “Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.” – Charles Spurgeon

12. “The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you’ve made a hiring mistake.” – Jim Collins, Good to Great

13. “Confident and courageous leaders have no problems pointing out their own weaknesses and ignorance.”  – Thom Rainer, President of Lifeway

14. “I will be letting a younger generation make more and more calls as I move into my 50s.  They have a better pulse on today’s culture.” – Carey Nieuwhof

15. “Many who aspire to leadership fail because they have never learned to follow.” —J. Oswald Sanders, Spiritual Leadership

16. “Great vision without great people is irrelevant.” – Jim Collins, Good to Great

17. “You must have a strategy because you will run out of money before you run out of ministry ideas.” – Kevin Peck, Designed to Lead

18. “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.” – Peter Drucker, Author and Educator in Modern Management Education

19. “If you’re a leader and not a learner, you’re going to have a really short shelf-life.” –Todd Adkins, Director of Leadership at Lifeway

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

21. “No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself, or to get all the credit for doing it.” — Andrew Carnegie, quoted in Managing Software Development Projects

22.“He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander.” – Aristotle

23. “Behavior from important people in an organization, contrary to the vision, overwhelms all other forms of communication.” – John Kotter, Author and Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School

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Dr. Jonathan Hayashi earned his B.A. from Moody Bible Institute with a double concentration in Pastoral Ministry and Biblical Studies; a M.A., in Congregational Leadership from Moody Theological Seminary, and Doctorate of Educational Ministry in Biblical Counseling from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He presently serves on the Executive Committee at Southwest Baptist University (Bolivar, MO) and serves on the Board of Trustees at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He served as Senior Pastor at Northern Hills Baptist Church Holt, Missouri from 2020-2022. Learn More »

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