Leadership isn’t about being in charge – it is a state of mind. Learn what makes a great leader:

“The only prerequisites to leadership are that you remain positive, calm, and open-minded.” – Alexis Hunter

“The leadership instinct you were born with is the backbone. You develop the funny bone and the wishbone that go with it.” – Elaine Agather

“Leadership should be born out of the understanding of the needs of those who would be affected by it.” – Marian Anderson

“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” – John C. Maxwell

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” – Steve Jobs

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” – John Quincy Adams

“We know that leadership is very much related to change. As the pace of change accelerates, there is naturally a greater need for effective leadership.” – John Kotter

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” – Lao Tzu

“Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.” – John C. Maxwell

“Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions.” – Harold S. Geneen

“The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly.” – Jim Rohn

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

“The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.” – Colin Powell

“The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say ‘I’. And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say ‘I’. They don’t think ‘I’. They think ‘we’; they think ‘team’. They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don’t sidestep it, but ‘we’ gets the credit…. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.” – Peter F. Drucker

“Nothing so conclusively proves a man’s ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself.” – Thomas J. Watson Sr.

“He that cannot obey, cannot command.” – Benjamin Franklin

“Leaders aren’t born, they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that’s the price we’ll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.” – Vince Lombardi

“Leadership is action, not position.” – Donald H. McGannon

“Leadership: The art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

“There go the people. I must follow them for I am their leader.” – Alexandre Ledru-Rollin

“A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together.” – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

“A leader is a dealer in hope.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” – George Patton

“Leadership does not always wear the harness of compromise.” – Woodrow Wilson

“What you cannot enforce, do not command.” – Sophocles

“I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.” – Mohandas Gandhi

“It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership.” – Nelson Mandela

“A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better.” – Jim Rohn

“The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” – Warren G. Bennis

“Example is leadership.” – Albert Schweitzer

“Good leadership consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people.” – John D. Rockefeller

“A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

“The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.” – Kenneth Blanchard

“My father had a simple test that helps me measure my own leadership quotient: When you are out of the office he once asked me, does you staff carry on remarkable well without you?” – Martha Peak

“The best leader is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and the self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” —Theodore Roosevelt