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

In school there are art appreciation classes – I don’t have to become an artist to really recognize great art or great music or appreciate the science that so greatly affects my health and comfort. In the same way but even more importantly, even if you don’t become a leader or want to, your life is directly affected by leaders – you are a follower, we all are in some capacity and the better we understand leadership, the better we will be at selecting our leaders, supporting our leaders and following them or even opposing them when the opportunity comes and we get to choose.

But besides being considered a leader – even without any title or authority – you are going to want to have some influence with others at some point in time – even if its to choose which ice cream joint to go to or which movie you and your friends go to. Or especially if you, for some crazy reason end up as a parent, wouldn’t it be nice to understand when to be a dictator to protect your toddler or when to lead rather than dictate a teenager? Leadership is more than official title or authority and learning to influence others is leadership development.

Let me have McGue, Bouchard, Iacono and Lykken summarize for me.

“It is very important to under-score the findings here that while genetic influences account for a sizable portion of leadership variance, environmental factors are substantially important in determining leadership. The question of whether leaders are “born or made” is perhaps a red herring. Leadership is a function of both the environmental and genetic factors that impact individuals—not one or the other. What is of great interest is the question of determining more precisely the kinds of environmental experiences that are most helpful in predicting and/or developing leadership and the ways in which these experiences possibly interact and/or correlate with genetic factors. Also, there is a need to explore the potential developmental processes associated with leadership and whether genetic and environmental influences might vary across the careers of individuals.” (McGue, Bouchard, Iacono, & Lykken, 1993).

So what this means to you and me is this: Every single one of us can benefit from learning more about leadership development. We can learn how to become better leaders and have more effective influence to make things happen. We can learn how to create an environment where we can help others become more effective leaders and we can learn how as followers we can choose our leaders and what we can expect from our leaders and how to hold them accountable if they fail to lead.

Now, let’s get started learning. In future articles we will be talking about how to learn, how to practice leadership, how to recognize it, how to develop it, and all the stuff that goes with it.

If you’re wondering where all the data from the past 4 articles comes from, here you go:

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  • And more important than all of these – Just look around for a few years and watch how leaders lead. (Kent Merrell, 2018)