86 Motivational Quotes About HR For Teams And Managers

Here’s a roundup of 86 HR quotes on key topics like leadership, communication, culture, and teamwork, recruiting, and managing talent. Get inspired here, and share your favorites:

Human Resources

1.“Human resources are like natural resources; they’re often buried deep. You have to go looking for them; they’re not just lying around on the surface.”
- Ken Robinson

2.“The value of a business is a function of how well the financial capital and intellectual capital are managed by human capital. You’d better get the human capital part right.”
— Dave Bookbinder

3.“Without the right succession planning put to play in human resources, we build for the future without a future.”
- Mmanti Umoh

4.“Human Resources isn’t a thing we do. It’s the thing that runs our business.”
- Steve Wynn

5.“The hardest challenge being an HR is that sometimes you have to be the LAWYER, the JUDGE, and the HANGMAN.”
- Hassan Choughari

6.“The wealth of time is the only wealth that is more valuable than human resources”
- Sunday Adelaja

7.“Recruitment IS marketing. If you’re a recruiter nowadays and you don’t see yourself as a marketer, you’re in the wrong profession”
- Matthew Jeffrey

8.“The competition to hire the best will increase in the years ahead. Companies that give extra flexibility to their employees will have the edge in this area.”
- Bill Gates

Leadership

9.“To win the marketplace, you must first win the workplace.”
- Doug Conant

10.“The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant.”
- Max de Pree

11.“Train people well enough so they can leave. Treat them well enough so they don’t have to.”
- Sir Richard Branson

12.“Any idiot can point out a problem… A leader is willing to do something about it! Leaders solve problems!”
- Tony Robbins

13.“Inventories can be managed but people must be led.”
- Ross Perot

14.“Leadership is about giving people a platform for spreading ideas that work.”
- Seth Godin

15.“High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation.”
- Charles Kettering

16.“If you’re good to your staff when things are going well, they’ll rally when times go bad.”
- Mary Kay Ash

17.“What chance gathers she easily scatters. A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together.”
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

18.“True leadership lies in guiding others to success. In ensuring that everyone is performing at their best, doing the work they are pledged to do, and doing it well.”
- Bill Owens

19.“Management is nothing more than motivation other people”
- Lee Lacocca

20.“To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.”
- Eleanor Roosevelt

21.“The more seriously you take your growth, the more seriously your people will take you.”
- John Maxwell

22.“Children imitate their parents, employees their managers.”
- Amit Kalantri

Communication

23.“Every good conversation starts with listening.”
- Tom Haak

24.“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
- George Bernard Shaw

25.“Communication — the human connection — is the key to personal and career success.”
- Paul J. Meyer

26.“Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing”
- Rollo May

27.“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.”
- Peter Drucker

28.“To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.”
- Tony Robbins

29.“The two words ‘information’ and ‘communication’ are often used interchangeably, but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out; communication is getting through.”
- Sydney J. Harris

30.“We never listen when we are eager to speak”
- Francois de la Rochefoucauld

31.“Brevity is the soul of wit.”
- William Shakespeare

32.“We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”
- Epictetus

33.“For effective communication think about how is your speech is perceived than in what you are actually saying.”
- Byron Rivers

34.“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t being said. The art of reading between the lines is a life long quest of the wise.”
- Shannon L. Alder

35.“Effective communication is 20% what you know and 80% how you feel about what you know.”
- Jim Rohn

36.“When the trust account is high, communication is easy, instant, and effective.”
- Stephen R. Covey

37.“If you have nothing to say, say nothing”
- Mark Twain

38.“Your ability to communicate is an important tool in the pursuit of your goals, whether it is with your family, your co-workers or your clients and customers.”
- Lee Brown

39.“Be Sincere; be brief, be seated”
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

40.“Ensure your documentation is short and sharp and make much more use of people-to-people communication.”
- Bentley and Borman

41.“Communication is a skill that you can learn. It’s like riding a bicycle or typing. If you’re willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of every part of your life.”
- Brian Tracy

42.“I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university.”
- Albert Einstein

Teamwork

43.“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.”
- Michael Jordan

44.“No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it.”
- H.E. Luccock

45.“Teamwork begins by building trust. And the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability.”
- Patrick Lencioni

46.“If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.”
- Henry Ford

47.“Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up.”
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

48.“The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.”
- Phil Jackson

49.“Politeness is the poison of collaboration.”
- Edwin Land

50.“You need to be aware of what others are doing, applaud their efforts, acknowledge their successes, and encourage them in their pursuits. When we all help one another, everybody wins.”
- Jim Stovall

51.“It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.”
- Napolean Hill

52.“If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.”
- Booker T. Washington

Culture

53.“Employees engage with employers and brands when they’re treated as humans.”
- Meghan Biro

54.“In order to build a rewarding employee experience, you need to understand what matters most to your people.”
- Julie Bevacqua

55.“If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.”
- John Cleese

56.“A person who feels appreciated will always do more than what is expected.”
- Unknown

57.“When people go to work, they shouldn’t have to leave their hearts at home.”
- Betty Bender

58.“In order to build a rewarding employee experience, you need to understand what matters most to your people.”
- Julie Bevacqua

59.“Good employees make mistakes and good leaders allow them to”
- Unknown

60.“Allow people to be themselves. People want to be GREAT, great companies let them be GREAT.”
- Arte Nathan

61.“True motivation comes from achievement, personal development, job satisfaction, and recognition.”
- Frederick Herzberg

62.“Human resources isn’t a thing we do. It’s the thing that runs our business.”
- Steve Wynn

Recruiting

63.“If you think hiring professionals is expensive, try hiring amateurs.”
- Unknown

64.“Never hire someone who knows less than you do about what he’s hired to do.”
- Malcolm Forbes

65.“Time spent on hiring is time well spent.”
- Robert Half

66.“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
- Steve Jobs

67.“If you fulfil the wishes of your employees, the employees will fulfil your visions.”
- Amit Kalantri

68.“Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for the love of it.”
- Henry David Thoreau

69.“You can’t teach employees to smile. They have to smile before you hire them.”
- Arte Nathan

70.“You can have the best strategy and the best building in the world, but if you don’t have the hearts and minds of the people who work with you, none of it comes to life.”
71.“Don’t hire anyone you wouldn’t want to run into in the hallway at three in the morning.”
- Tina Fey

72.“Hiring people is an art, not a science, and resumes can’t tell you whether someone will fit into a company’s culture.”
- Howard Schulz

73.“Dating and hiring have a lot in common.”
- Scott Wintrip

74.“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional, wait until you hire an amateur.”
- Red Adair

Talent

75.“Nothing we do is more important than hiring people. At the end of the day, you bet on people, not strategies.”
- Lawrence Bossidy

76.“In most cases, being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way.”
- Tina Fey

77.“I am convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day, you bet on people not on strategies.”
- Lawrence Bossidy

78.“Hire character. Train skill.”
- Peter Schutz

79.“Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?”
- Thomas John Watson Sr.

80.“When people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are emotionally invested, they want to contribute.”
- Simon Sinek

81.“Development can help great people be even better — but if I had a dollar to spend, I’d spend 70 cents getting the right person in the door.”
- Paul Russell

82.“You cannot push anyone up the ladder unless he is willing to climb.”
- Andrew Carnegie

83.“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.”
- Elbert Hubbard

84.“You’re not just recruiting employees, but are sowing the seeds of your reputation.”
- Unknown

85.“Ultimately, delivering strategy is about hiring the right people and motivating them to deliver results.”
- Helen M. & P. Schubert

86.“Hire for passion and intensity; there is training for everything.”
- Nolan Bushnell

Originally published at https://peoplemanagingpeople.com on July 17, 2020.