LDS Quotes on Leadership
“The story is told of a church official who returned from installing a new stake presidency. ‘Dad, do you Brethren feel confident when you call a man as the stake president that he is the Lord’s man?’ the official’s son asked upon his father’s return home. ‘No, not always,’ he replied. ‘But once we call him, he becomes the Lord’s man.'”
“It has always been hard to recognize in fallible human beings the authorized servants of God. Paul must have seemed an ordinary man to many. Joseph Smith’s cheerful disposition was seen by some as not fitting their expectations for a prophet of God. “Satan will always work on the Saints of God to undermine their faith in priesthood keys. One way he does it is to point out the humanity of those who hold them. He can in that way weaken our testimony and so cut us loose from the line of keys by which the Lord ties us to Him.”
| "Faith and Keys," Ensign, Nov. 2004
“I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.”
“Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.”
A story is told of a woman who was upset that her son was eating too much candy. No matter how much she told him to stop, he continued to satisfy his sweet tooth. Totally frustrated, she decided to take her son to see a wise man whom he respected.
She approached him and said, “Sir, my son eats too much candy. Would you please tell him to stop eating it?”
He listened carefully then said to her son, “Go home and come back in two weeks.”
She took her son and went home, perplexed why he had not asked the boy to stop eating so much candy.
Two weeks later they returned. The wise man looked directly at the boy and said, “Boy, you should stop eating so much candy. It is not good for your health.”
The boy nodded and promised he would.
The boy’s mother asked, “Why didn’t you tell him that two weeks ago?”
The wise man smiled. “Two weeks ago I was still eating too much candy myself.”
This man lived with such integrity that he knew his advice would carry power only if he was following his own counsel.
| After the Trial of Our Faith
“While I was working for a large bank, I was invited to attend an executive program at the University of Michigan. During the program, Professor Kim Cameron taught the concept of positive leadership and its heliotropic effect. He explained: “This refers to the tendency in all living systems toward positive energy [light] and away from negative energy [darkness]. From single-cell organisms to complex human systems, everything alive has an inherent inclination toward the positive and away from the negative.”
| "Brighter and Brighter until the Perfect Day"
“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.”
“Yours is a great responsibility in this day when the need for courageous leadership is so urgent. You can become those leaders. … Our [people] need to develop qualities of leadership. They need to learn the value of staying power—stick-to-it-iveness. They need to learn devotion to duty—the devotion to duty that keeps a good doctor on the job right around the clock in an emergency; the devotion to duty that leads a scientist or a teacher to persevere in a low-paying position in public service because that is where his maximum contribution can be made.” –
“We cannot afford husbands and fathers who fail to provide spiritual leadership in the home. We cannot afford to have those who exercise the Holy Priesthood, after the Order of the Son of God, waste their strength in pornography or spend their lives in cyberspace.”
| Conference October 2012
“Leadership is about taking responsibility, not making excuses.”