leadership

156:5.7Force­ful am­bi­tion, in­tel­li­gent judg­ment, and sea­soned wis­dom are the es­sen­tials of ma­te­rial suc­cess. Lead­er­ship is de­pen­dent on nat­u­ral abil­ity, dis­cre­tion, will power, and de­ter­mi­na­tion. Spir­i­tual des­tiny is de­pen­dent on faith, love, and de­vo­tion to truth—hunger and thirst for righ­teous­ness—the whole­hearted de­sire to find God and to be like him.

99:5.1While re­li­gion is ex­clu­sively a per­sonal spir­i­tual ex­pe­ri­ence—know­ing God as a Fa­ther—the corol­lary of this ex­pe­ri­ence—know­ing man as a brother—en­tails the ad­just­ment of the self to other selves, and that in­volves the so­cial or group as­pect of re­li­gious life. Re­li­gion is first an in­ner or per­sonal ad­just­ment, and then it be­comes a mat­ter of so­cial ser­vice or group ad­just­ment. The fact of man’s gre­gar­i­ous­ness per­force de­ter­mines that re­li­gious groups will come into ex­is­tence. What hap­pens to these re­li­gious groups de­pends very much on in­tel­li­gent lead­er­ship. In prim­i­tive so­ci­ety the re­li­gious group is not al­ways very dif­fer­ent from eco­nomic or po­lit­i­cal groups. Re­li­gion has al­ways been a con­ser­va­tor of morals and a sta­bi­lizer of so­ci­ety. And this is still true, not­with­stand­ing the con­trary teach­ing of many mod­ern so­cial­ists and hu­man­ists.

160:1.9Even though you are ef­fec­tively armed to meet the dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tions of life, you can hardly ex­pect suc­cess un­less you are equipped with that wis­dom of mind and charm of per­son­al­ity which en­able you to win the hearty sup­port and co-op­er­a­tion of your fel­lows. You can­not hope for a large mea­sure of suc­cess in ei­ther sec­u­lar or re­li­gious work un­less you can learn how to per­suade your fel­lows, to pre­vail with men. You sim­ply must have tact and tol­er­ance.

81:6.3713. Ef­fec­tive and wise lead­er­ship. In civ­i­liza­tion much, very much, de­pends on an en­thu­si­as­tic and ef­fec­tive load-pulling spirit. Ten men are of lit­tle more value than one in lift­ing a great load un­less they lift to­gether—all at the same mo­ment. And such team­work—so­cial co-op­er­a­tion—is de­pen­dent on lead­er­ship. The cul­tural civ­i­liza­tions of the past and the pres­ent have been based upon the in­tel­li­gent co-op­er­a­tion of the cit­i­zenry with wise and pro­gres­sive lead­ers; and un­til man evolves to higher lev­els, civ­i­liza­tion will con­tinue to be de­pen­dent on wise and vig­or­ous lead­er­ship.

181:2.16When the Mas­ter had fin­ished speak­ing to James Zeb­e­dee, he stepped around to the end of the ta­ble where An­drew sat and, look­ing his faith­ful helper in the eyes, said: “An­drew, you have faith­fully rep­re­sented me as act­ing head of the am­bas­sadors of the heav­enly king­dom. Al­though you have some­times doubted and at other times man­i­fested dan­ger­ous timid­ity, still, you have al­ways been sin­cerely just and em­i­nently fair in deal­ing with your as­so­ciates. Ever since the or­di­na­tion of you and your breth­ren as mes­sen­gers of the king­dom, you have been self-gov­ern­ing in all group ad­min­is­tra­tive af­fairs ex­cept that I des­ig­nated you as the act­ing head of these cho­sen ones. In no other tem­po­ral mat­ter have I acted to di­rect or to in­flu­ence your de­ci­sions. And this I did in or­der to pro­vide for lead­er­ship in the di­rec­tion of all your sub­se­quent group de­lib­er­a­tions. In my uni­verse and in my Fa­ther’s uni­verse of uni­verses, our breth­ren-sons are dealt with as in­di­vid­u­als in all their spir­i­tual re­la­tions, but in all group re­la­tion­ships we un­fail­ingly pro­vide for def­i­nite lead­er­ship. Our king­dom is a realm of or­der, and where two or more will crea­tures act in co-op­er­a­tion, there is al­ways pro­vided the au­thor­ity of lead­er­ship.

81:6.42Lead­er­ship is vi­tal to prog­ress. Wis­dom, in­sight, and fore­sight are in­dis­pens­able to the en­durance of na­tions. Civ­i­liza­tion is never re­ally jeop­ar­dized un­til able lead­er­ship be­gins to van­ish. And the quan­tity of such wise lead­er­ship has never ex­ceeded one per cent of the pop­u­la­tion.