Article 1 of 4 – Are Leaders Born or are Leaders Made?

For ages the question’s been posed “Are leaders born, or are they made?”  Of course the question is applicable to you if you’re considering spending time or money on efforts to become a leader or if you plan to make a leader.

If leaders are born and not made – don’t waste your time or money. If leaders are made, the question becomes “Where can I best spend my time and money, and what kind of leader can I make?” Again, this only matters if you are interested in making yourself or someone else a leader.

To answer that question I present two answers, both answers are arrived at by highly respected researchers.

In a 2002 Harvard Business Review article, industrial and organizational psychologist, Melvin Sorcher and his partner James Brant wrote:

“As far as executive leadership is concerned, people are reasonably complete packages by the time they arrive at the corporate doorstep.”

Sorcher and Brant suggest that people don’t change very much during their careers. Yes I recognize that a lot of development took place between birth and the corporate doorstep, but Sorcher and Brant infer that not much growth ever takes place after arriving on the corporate doorstep.

An equally esteemed professor Warren Bennis from the University of Southern California (Warren is one of those big dogs in the leadership development world,  He contradicts Sorcher and Brant.

“The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born – that there is a genetic factor to leadership.  Myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That’s nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true.  Leaders are made rather than born.’

I believe both of these assertions are partially right.

How can they both be right when they seem to be on opposite sides?

Hundreds of studies have been performed over the decades and across the globe to find true correlation between genetics and leadership.

In one study I counted 66 references to outside studies that contribute to the discovery of whether leaders are born or made.  66! You could name a highway after them.

Among the many findings, a consistent conclusion from most of the researchers is that there is a compelling relationship between genetics and leadership.

As I was deeply immersed in the plethora of these studies, I had an experience that gave me a totally fresh viewpoint.

One of my large insurance company clients became involved in a philanthropic project in northwestern Kenya. While attending their annual all partners meeting, I sat through a brief report on the progress of the efforts being made to help a little village cope with the devastating effects of HIV aids. The majority of children in this small village and its surrounding area had become orphans as parents contracted and died of aids. The work my client was supporting was magnificent, the report was not. It was a dry short narration completely free of visuals or emotion. Yet is was a plea for more financial support.

I couldn’t help but comment to my client that they were short changing their agents and the village by telling, rather than showing this great work. Shortage of funds they said. They couldn’t afford to send a camera crew to document their progress, let alone to develop a motivational multimedia presentation.

After securing some support from a few like-minded companies, I took the opportunity to become that camera crew the next year. Spending a week living in the village with the orphaned children and their teachers I fell in love with those beautiful smiles and sparkling eyes. And I watched an absolutely wondrous event that ties directly into what we are discussing right now. Had I not been paying attention I would have missed it.

Before heading to Kenya, I picked up a couple new soccer balls, deflated them and along with a small hand pump packed them away as a gift for the children attending the small school there. Midway through my week in the village, I pulled out one of the balls, filled it with air and proceeded to start a stampede. The children went wild chasing the ball around the school’s compound.  I watched and laughed and dodged and filmed. Then an amazing thing happened. Leadership happened.

Right before my eyes, without any formal meetings, strategies, appointments or adult intervention, a young Kenyan girl took the role as leader in the playground and brought order out of chaos.  I got to watch an untrained girl demonstrate leadership.  I thought, did she just become a leader or just demonstrate she was a leader?

I am pretty sure this young girl had never attended a leadership course, had any leadership training, read any of the million books on leadership, had parents who taught leadership in their home nor had role models. For her, leadership happened. I am sure of it.

Based on what I witnessed I could have concluded that leaders are born. But I had read too many other studies that showed otherwise.

Utilizing rather sophisticated research methods involving the study of behavioral genetics, Not just me watching a hoard of young innocent children on a playground, Dr. Richard Arvey in a study entitled “The Determinants of Leadership: The Role of Genetic, Personality, and Cognitive Factors” shows quite convincingly that only about one third of all leadership skills and behavior appear to have a genetic component to them.  Several other similar studies delivered like results, indicating that between 31% and 39% of leadership is genetic.  In other words, around a third of an individual may come to earth pre-packaged as a potential leader.

This leaves 61% or 69% of leadership skills and behaviors to be learned or acquired. In rough numbers, the other 2/3rds. Naturally you then look at the impact environment, experience and formal training have on the development of the rest of the needed leadership skills and abilities. How the other 2/3 is broken up between environment, experience and formal skills training is less defined in the studies but for simplicity, we will give genetics 1/3, environment and experience 1/3, and formal training 1/3.

Based on this somewhat scientific breakdown here is my answer to the question are leaders born or are they made.

Individuals are born with varying degrees of genetic disposition to leadership, their environment and the experiences in life provide opportunities to develop or build on that genetic disposition, but formal, intentional leadership training is essential to become a complete leader.

In the three following segments we will explore how this 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 actually works.