Natural-born Leaders?

Are leaders made or born or both or neither? Are some people destined for leadership while others are destined for followership and still others doomed to watch from the sidelines? Our ideas about these questions have changed over the years.

The study of leadership behavior really got rolling around World War I when psychologists hired by the military set out to discover ways to measure leadership ability so potential military leaders could be singled out and developed. Unfortunately, try as they might, the psychologists could never prove much about the traits they thought leaders should possess. They figured leaders should be intelligent, but then they discovered that real geniuses have trouble in leadership roles because followers can’t understand them. They figured a strong sense of initiative would be useful, but then they discovered that too much initiative resulted in a tendency to do things alone and leave followers behind to fend for themselves.

To make a long and frustrating story short, the attempt to study leadership by studying individual character traits was eventually abandoned. The more recent and more practical approach is to study the functions or roles of leadership – such as motivating, communicating, making decisions, organizing tasks, and setting standards. Some people are good at some leadership roles but not others, so the best leader for any particular job depends on the situation, the task at hand, the way the group is organized, the kinds of followers involved, and the nature of the surrounding environment.

Talents are inborn, but skills have to be learned and developed. A successful senator may be a lousy corporation president and vice versa. A born leader in one situation may turn to be a born loser in another.