Are leaders born, or are they made?

The Designing Leaders crew had this discussion last month over dinner, and we have been thinking about it a lot since then. It’s an old question that we have all asked ourselves before, and plenty of people have offered up an answer, but nothing that seems to really settle it once and for all.

Having a good answer to this question is important. For one thing, it shapes your recruiting decisions. If you are looking for new employees who could be leaders someday, do you only look for people who were “born” to lead? Or do you instead look for people who have technical skills and who could learn to lead? It also affects your training budget. If people are born leaders, should you be spending money on leadership development education? These are not abstract questions, these are things you deal with every day. As a result, you need a perspective on the “born vs made” question in order to guide you.

The focus of our original discussion was on qualities that are critical for leadership: charisma, self-confidence, speaking ability, a problem-solving mind. These are concepts that we often think people are born with, and either you have them or you don’t. They are definitely important for a leader. The question of whether you are born with a finite amount of these attributes, or if they can be developed, is one that can be (and often is) debated. But if someone is born with them, that certainly seems to give them a leg up.

Can someone with these qualities, but no leadership development, be a leader? Maybe. Can they be a GOOD leader? That’s a little more doubtful.

We see plenty of people who display style without substance. How many of us have had a boss who sounds good but never accomplishes anything? Have you had a boss who talked a lot, talked loudly, waved his or her arms in the air, and generally looked overworked, but if you look at what they actually accomplished, the result is a big zero? A boss who would create a lot of interest in a project, then wait for that interest to wane and let it die a quiet death? Someone who looks like they are working on things but who then subtly passes responsibility to the bosses farther up, getting the monkey off their back but at least look like they are carrying monkeys? Chances are that at some point you have seen someone with a lot of the surface qualities you expect in a leader — speaking, self-confidence, a seemingly positive attitude — but it was all just an act, with no real ability to lead.

Can someone learn how to lead? Sure. That’s why there’s a huge industry around leadership development. There are skills that people can learn and talents they can develop that will help them get the most out of their employees. But can those people actually lead if they do not have some of those innate skills? If they have no self-confidence, if they cannot look others in the eye while speaking, if they are not risk-takers, if they do not have any passion, if their minds cannot look beyond a narrow focus and see something bigger, can they really use what they learn? It is one thing to learn about leadership, it’s another to be a leader. If they are not born with certain characteristics, and if they are not able to develop them (remember, the ability to do that is open to question), then they are going to have a lot of trouble putting into practice they things they study in a classroom.

So in the end, the answer to “are leaders born, or are they made?,” seems to be “both.” Not a very satisfactory answer, especially if you insist on an either/or frame of mind, but hopefully, a useful answer nonetheless for those of us trying to develop new leaders…or develop ourselves.

What do you think?