Robert K. Greenleaf

Don't assume, because you are intelligent, able, and well-motivated, that you are open to communication, that you know how to listen.

Ego can?t sleep. It micro-manages. It disempowers. It reduces our capability. It excels in control.

Ego focuses on one?s own survival, pleasure, and enhancement to the exclusion of others; ego is selfishly ambitious. It sees relationships in terms of threat or no threat, like little children who classify all people as nice or mean. Conscience, on the other hand, both democratizes and elevates ego to a larger sense of the group, the whole, the community, the greater good. It sees life in terms of service and contribution, in terms of others? security and fulfillment.

Even the frankest and bravest of subordinates do not talk with their boss the same way they talk with colleagues.

Responsibility . . . requires that a person think, speak and act as if personally accountable to all who may be affected by his or her thoughts, words and deeds… Awareness is important… Am I moving in the right direction? Is my sense of responsibility growing, deepening, becoming sharper and more insistent?.. A sense of responsibility is an attitude, a feeling.