Inspirational Lessons for Managers
67 Brilliant Principles That Will Make You a Better Manager
Every now and then we stumble upon a series of words which hold such powerful meaning and contain such genius that they remain with us for the rest of our lives. Such profound ideas may have jumped out at us from the inner pages of a book, the title of which we cannot remember. They could have been something that a colleague said to us in the break room while grabbing a fresh cup of coffee. They may have been the words spoken by a lively stranger who chatted us up while we waited to board an airplane. And just maybe, it was something we said to one of our own employees that made us think “Huh, that’s actually really good advice, I need to remember that.”
Regardless of how we encounter such wisdom or what we were doing at the time, these inspirational words eventually become part of our own personal database of guidelines that keep us on track, like bumpers at a bowling alley. And, as if without warning, we find ourselves sharing those bits of genius with our own employees, colleagues and friends, when the timing and circumstances are just right.
In recent years, I have made it a point to capture those quirky little business and management quotations in my phone whenever I find them, so that I can reread them from time to time. They serve as great reminders of the most powerful and inspiring lessons I’ve learned in my career.
Here are 67 of these little nuggets of wisdom that have imprinted themselves on my mind, all of which I now use to teach and develop my employees, as well as to mentor and coach other managers and business leaders. By sharing this list, my hope that just one of these lessons of genius benefit you and enable you to become an even better leader. Without further ado, let’s begin…
- Hope is a bad strategy.
- Every employee has a talent. Your job is to find it.
- Asking people to work harder is not a solution.
- Be brilliant at the basics.
- Lead others the way you want to be led.
- Spreadsheets don’t manage people. People manage people.
- Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
- Treat every commitment you make, big or small, with equal importance.
- Maximize the power of human talent.
- Don’t base long-term decisions on short-term troubles.
- You don’t have to be the expert to be a good manager. Rather, to be a good manager you must enable the experts who work for you to be at their best.
- In difficult times, remain true to ethics.
- There are all kinds of people in the world. Inevitably, you will have to learn to work with each one.
- Quality job candidates do their research and prepare for a job interview. Interviewers must do the same.
- Patience is a virtue.
- Your employees are real people, with real lives, real families and real problems. Just like you.
- Accumulate your knowledge.
- In the absence of a designated leader, natural leaders will always rise to the top.
- If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
- You can build a ladder to the moon, as long as someone will pay for it. Anything is possible.
- Managers have authority. Leaders have influence.
- Use your highest performing employees as your vehicle to drive change.
- Respect the time of others.
- In good times and in bad, the only thing you can truly control is attitude. Everything else is circumstance.
- You can’t find a solution unless you first define the problem.
- The span of one’s focus is inversely related to the quality of his or her output.
- Feedback is a gift.
- Go out of your way to make your employees feel valued every day.
- It’s better to fall short striving for greatness than it is to aim low and successfully achieve mediocrity.
- A little bit of empathy from the manager can go a long way to helping a team overcome adversity.
- Your strategy is only as good as your plan to execute.
- All great things take time. Focus on making incremental progress.
- Success is a foregone conclusion when you surround yourself with great people.
- ‘I don’t know’ is an acceptable answer.
- We all want big wins. But sometime, you just need small victories.
- With each employee, there is a relationship. Good or bad is up to you.
- Do it now, thank yourself later.
- As a manager, your time should be spent dealing with the exceptions, not the norms. If you find yourself managing norms, it’s a sign that something in your system is broken.
- Make it a point to be a better listener.
- Employee engagement starts by giving people something to believe in.
- Be a moral compass.
- True leaders are willing to empower and defer to others.
- Inadequate investment leads to inadequate results.
- Find success one failure at a time.
- The talented candidate who wants to be part of your organization is the talent that will stay.
- Bad news doesn’t get better with time.
- The best decision is a good decision. The second best is a bad decision. The worst decision is no decision.
- Just because something changes the answer doesn’t mean it changes the conclusion.
- It takes courage to lead with accountability.
- Creating a place where people want to be and where they are motivated to do their best work is a sign of great leadership.
- Giving feedback is not the same as being a mentor.
- A meeting without an agenda is just a conversation that ends when it’s time to be somewhere else.
- You can’t un-know what you know.
- The results you achieve matter just as much as how you achieve them.
- In order to be a great leader, you don’t have to have all the answers. You just need to enable your team to find them.
- Be bold, but not reckless.
- A strategy shouldn’t tell you what you could have, but what you will have.
- You’ll never make progress if you try to boil the ocean. Don’t bite off more than you can chew.
- Metrics drive behavior. Be selective with your choice few.
- The first step in changing organizational culture is to create the vision of something better.
- When you stop learning, you stop growing.
- Candidates who share similar values to your organization are often a great fit.
- It’s better for a project to be late and right, than it is to be on-time and wrong.
- Mistakes happen. Commit to learning from them.
- Routine kills creativity. Creativity kills the routine.
- Your organization must drive your success. If you are not finding success, change your organization.
- Always find a way to turn: “We can’t, because…” into “We can, if…”