Duty is the great business of a sea officer; all private considerations must give way to it, however painful it may be.
Interpretation
Duty and responsibility should take precedence over personal feelings in leadership roles.
This quote by Horatio Nelson highlights the paramount importance of duty in leadership, especially for a sea officer. It emphasizes that personal emotions or considerations should always be secondary to the responsibilities of leadership, even when fulfilling these duties is challenging or painful. This reflects the nature of leadership where one's personal comfort must often be sacrificed for the greater good and obligations toward their team and mission.
In practice
In a leadership seminar to emphasize the importance of prioritizing team goals over personal desires.
Firstly, you must always implicitly obey orders, without attempting to form any opinion of your own respecting their propriety. Secondly, you must consider every man your enemy who speaks ill of your king; and thirdly, you must hate a Frenchman, as you do the devil.
Never break the neutrality of a port or place, but never consider as neutral any place from whence an attack is allowed to be made.
To do nothing was disgraceful; therefore I made use of my understanding.
Let me alone: I have yet my legs and one arm. Tell the surgeon to make haste and his instruments. I know I must lose my right arm, so the sooner it's off the better.
In honour I gained them, and in honour I will die with them.
First gain the victory and then make the best use of it you can.
People want to be on a team. They want to be part of something bigger than themselves. They want to be in a situation where they feel that they are doing something for the greater good.
I was only the servant of my country and had I, at any moment, failed to express her unflinching resolve to fight and conquer, I should at once have been rightly cast aside.
When you were made a leader you weren't given a crown, you were given the responsibility to bring out the best in others.
Civility is not a tactic or a sentiment. It is the determined choice of trust over cynicism, of community over chaos.
The cardinal responsibility of leadership is to identify the dominant contradiction at each point of the historical process and to work out a central line to resolve it.
Perhaps, therefore, it is odd that if there is any one phrase that is guaranteed to set me off it's when someone says to me, 'OK, fine. You're the boss!' What irks me is that in 90% of such instances what that person is really saying is, 'OK, then, I don't agree with you, but I'll roll over and do it because you're telling me to. But if it doesn't work out I'll be the first to remind everyone that it wasn't my idea.'
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