This post is all about Leadership Trust Quotes.
What is Leadership?
According to Oxford Languages, Leadership is “the action of leading a group of people or an organization.”
When it comes to the workplace, there are all kinds of leaders, but it’s usually pretty easy to determine which leaders aren’t so great, and which ones are truly influential.
What is Trust in Leadership?
It is so important for a team to trust their leader and vise versa.
According to the Center for Creative Leadership, “people can’t do their best work if they doubt others’ intentions or capabilities, the direction or viability of the organization, or, most importantly, if they doubt their own ability to keep up with the demands placed on them.”
In other words, without trust, confusion and doubt in abilities and vision takes over. Without trust, it is so hard to do consistent, great work.
With that said, here are 125 brilliant leadership trust quotes that describe just how important and essential trust in leadership (and great leadership in general) really is.
Leadership Trust Quotes
Here are some amazing leadership trust quotes.
1. “Self-trust is the first secret of success.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
2. “Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
3. “Your words and deeds must match if you expect employees to trust in your leadership.” – Kevin Kruse
4. “Trust is the highest form of human motivation. It brings out the very best in people.” – Stephen Covey
5. “Do the right thing. Always.” – Ted Coine
6. “The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.” – Ronald Reagan
7. “I wouldn’t ask anyone to do anything I wouldn’t do myself.” – Indra Nooyi
8. “Trust has to be the highest value in your company, and if it’s not, something bad is going to happen to you.” – Marc Benioff
9. “Don’t be afraid to show your vulnerability. Be transparent with your team, even when the truth may be unpopular or inconvenient.” – Bill George
10. “Consistency is the true foundation of trust. Either keep your promises or do not make them.” – Roy T. Bennett
11. “He who does not trust enough, will not be trusted.” – Lao Tzu
12. “Trusting is hard. Knowing who to trust, even harder.” – Maria Snyder
13. “The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.” – Henry L. Stimson
14. “If people like you, they will listen to you. but if people trust you, they will do business with you.” – Zig Ziglar
15. “Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.” – Oprah Winfrey
16. “When the trust is high, communication is easy, instant, and effective.” – Stephen Covey
17. “To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.” – George Macdonald
18. “Trust your team. Let others do their work so you can concentrate wholly on your own.” – Gene King
19. “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
20. “Leadership is not about titles, positions or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.” – John C. Maxwell
21. “The supreme quality of leadership is unquestionably integrity.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
22. “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
23. “Great leaders check their ego at the door and empower others to excel” – Deborah Gillis
24. “Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.” – Jack Welch
25. “Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.” – George S. Patton Jr.
Inspirational Quotes About Leadership
Looking for inspirational quotes about leadership? Then see the list of incredible quotes below.
26. “People follow leaders by choice. Without trust, at best you get compliance.” – Jesse Lyn Stoner
27. “It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.” – Napoleon Hill
28. “Always tell the truth or the truth will tell on you.” – Frank Sonnenberg
29. “Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.” – Tom Peters
30. “Be prepared and be honest.” – John Wooden
31. “It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
32. “Leaders think and talk about the solutions. Followers think and talk about the problems.” – Brian Tracy
33. “Trust is the highest form of human motivation. It brings out the very best in people.” – Stephen R. Covey
34. “I never dreamed about success. I worked for it.” – Estée Lauder
35. “Leadership is the relentless pursuit of truth and ceaseless creation of trust.” – Jack Welch
36. “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” – John Quincy Adams
37. “Conviction, commitment, credibility: the three pillars of morally courageous leadership.” – General John Michel
38. “Your words and deeds must match if you expect employees to trust in your leadership.” – Kevin Kruse
39. “The mark of a great man is one who knows when to set aside the important things in order to accomplish the vital ones.” – Brandon Sanderson
40. “I cannot trust a man to control others who cannot control himself.” – Robert E. Lee
41. “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
42. “My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better.” – Steve Jobs
43. “The secret of a leader lies in the tests he has faced over the whole course of his life and the habit of action he develops in meeting those tests.” – Gail Sheehy
44. “The best leaders build trust from the inside out. An organization that does not have the trust of its employees can never earn the trust of its customers.” – Scott Baradell
45. “Leaders live by choice, not by accident.” – Mark Gorman
46. “Leadership is an action, not a position.” – Donald McGannon
47. “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
48. “Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.” – John Maxwell
49. “Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.” – Albert Schweitzer
50. “A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.” – Rosalynn Carter
More Trust Leadership Quotes
Here are even more leadership trust quotes.
51. “It’s important to remember that trust is a matter of perception and something every business has to earn.” – Adam Rogers
52. “Great teams consist of individuals who have learned to trust each other. Over time, they have discovered each other’s strengths and weaknesses, enabling them to play as a coordinated whole.” – Amy Edmondson
53. “I believe fundamental honesty is the keystone of business.” – Harvey Firestone
54. “Trust doesn’t mean that you trust that someone won’t screw up—it means you trust them when they do screw up.” – Ed Catmull, CEO, Pixar
55. “Earn trust, earn trust, earn trust. Then you can worry about the rest.” – Seth Godin
56. “Great teams have trust at the heart of their success. If you don’t trust each other, you’ll play safe. Trust makes it possible to aim higher. To leap further and to know someone has your back if you fall.” – Adam Grant
57. “Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.” – Stephen R. Covey
58. “As you go to work, your top responsibility should be to be trust.” – Robert Eckert
59. “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.” – Albert Einstein
60. “A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other.” – Simon Sinek
61. “Trust starts with trustworthy leadership. It must be built into the corporate culture.” – Barbara Brooks Kimmel
62. “It takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” – Warren Buffett
63. “Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.” – Amy Rees Anderson
64. “Better to trust the man who is frequently in error than the one who is never in doubt.” – Eric Sevareid
65. “For every good reason there is to lie, there is a better reason to tell the truth.” – Bo Bennett
66. “It takes two to do the trust tango–the one who risks (the trustor) and the one who is trustworthy (the trustee); each must play their role. – Charles H. Green
67. “Trust is built when someone is vulnerable and not taken advantage of.” – Bob Vanourek
68. “If you don’t have trust inside your company, then you can’t transfer it to your customers.” – Roger Staubach
69. “The people when rightly and fully trusted will return the trust.” – Abraham Lincoln
70. “Trust, but verify.” – Ronald Reagan
71. ”Trust each other again and again. When the trust level gets high enough, people transcend apparent limits, discovering new and awesome abilities of which they were previously unaware.” – David Armistead
72. “When a gifted team dedicates itself to unselfish trust and combines instinct with boldness and effort, it is ready to climb.” – Patanjali
73. “Leadership requires five ingredients–brains, energy, determination, trust, and ethics. The key challenges today are in terms of the last two–trust and ethics.” – Fred Hilmer
74. “The real test of leadership is to be as authentic at home as we pretend to be at work.” – Jim Woods
75. “It takes a great man to be a good listener.” – Calvin Coolidge
Creative Leadership Quotes
If you’re wondering how you can be a more creative leader, these quotes are for you.
76. “You must trust and believe in people, or life becomes impossible.” – Anton Chekhov
77. “Little questions can sometimes solve big problems.” – Sam Harrison
78. “Mindless habitual behavior is the enemy of innovation.” – Rosabeth Moss Kanter
79. “You manage things; you lead people.” – Admiral Grace Murray Hopper
80. “If I had asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses.” – Henry Ford
81. “Innovation happens because there are people out there doing and trying a lot of different things.” – Edward Felten
82. “Good is the enemy of great.” – Jim Collins
83. “Done is better than perfect.” – Sheryl Sandberg
84. “There are no rules here. We’re trying to accomplish something.” – Thomas Edison
85. “Companies have too many experts who block innovation. True innovation really comes from perpendicular thinking.” – Peter Diamandis
86. “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou
87. “Only those who dare to fail greatly, achieve greatly.” – John F. Kennedy
88. “Innovation is taking two things that already exist and putting them together in a new way.” -Tom Freston
89. “Vision without action is daydream. Action without vision is nightmare.” – Japanese Proverb
90. “It’s easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out of date.” – Roger von Oech
91. “Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.” – Theodore Levitt
92. “An innovation is one of those things that society looks at and says, if we make this part of the way we live and work, it will change the way we live and work.” – Dean Kamen
93. “He who rejects change is the architect of decay.” – Harold Wilson
94. “When the trust account is high, communication is easy, instant, and effective.” – Stephen R. Covey
95. “Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity – not a threat.” – Unknown
96. “When mistrust comes in, love goes out.” – Irish proverb
97. ”Trust is built with consistency.” – Lincoln Chafee
98. “Don’t avoid people who disagree with you – a dissenting view can push everyone else to do better work.” – Jake Knapp
99. “Taking risk is okay. Failure is okay. If you’re not pushing your limits, you’re not growing quite as much as you could.” – Stacey Cunningham
100. “A leader is a dealer in hope.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
Quotes About Effective Leadership
Effective leaders are the cream of the crop. These quotes are all about what it takes to be an effective leader.
101. “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” – Mahatma Gandhi
102. “Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.” – John C. Maxwell
103. “Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
104. “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” – Warren Bennis
105. “A good leader leads the people from above them. A great leader leads the people from within them.” – M.D. Arnold
106. “Earn your leadership every day.” – Michael Jordan
107. “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
108. “Great leaders are always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everyone can understand.” – Colin Powell
109. “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” – William Arthur Ward.
110. “Do not get others to do what you can do yourself.” – Booker T. Washington
111. “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” – John F. Kennedy
112. “If you can’t feed a hundred people, feed just one.” – Mother Teresa
113. “To be successful, you have to be selfish, or else you never achieve. And once you get to your highest level, then you have to be unselfish.” – Michael Jordan
114. “I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.” – Ralph Nader
115. “The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.”
– John Maxwell
116. “Become the kind of leader that people would follow voluntarily; even if you had no title or position.” – Brian Tracy
117. “A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” – John C. Maxwell
118. “Wise leaders generally have wise counselors because it takes a wise person themselves to distinguish them.”
– Diogenes of Sinope
119. “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
120. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
121. “The very essence of leadership is that you have to have vision. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.” – Theodore M. Hesburgh
122. “In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.” – Thomas Jefferson
123. “Leaders instill in their people a hope for success and a belief in themselves. Positive leaders empower people to accomplish their goals.” – Unknown
124. “A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together.” – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
125. “Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.” – Jack Welch
This post was all about 125 Brilliant Leadership Trust Quotes For Ultimate Success.
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