Dakota Meyer was recently awarded the Medal of Honor by the Commander in Chief for disobeying his leaders' orders.  This is an interesting contradiction.  The highest level military leader awards the highest honor to a soldier for disobeying an order.  We all understand why he did it and certainly commend his bravery.  But why was this necessary?  Several officers had the opportunity to make the right decision and save lives.  But they didn't.  Meyer saved 36 lives.  His leadership failed to assess the situation accurately.  Officers are trained to be leaders, right?  At the very least, they are in a position that must make decisions for others. 

I know you are thinking what I am.  Just because you are college educated and put in a leadership position, are you really a leader?  Officers are trained.  Intentional efforts are made to develop specific skills in the area of leadership.  This type of activity falls in line with the belief that leadership can be taught.  Let’s dig a little deeper.

Are leaders born or made?  This question has been asked a million times.  We’ve just looked at one simple example of making leaders and have found that there are some serious issues with that approach.  Let’s take a look at a few situations to see if we can better understand the question.

Let’s now consider the corporate environment.  How many times have you been in a corporate M&A where the bigger company buys a smaller one and brings their leaders in to take over your company?  After a few weeks, you realize the new leadership doesn't know anything about your business; much less, the competition, the market, the technology and so on.  A year or two later, your company has been downsized and is making less revenue than before the acquisition. The smaller company is either sold, shut down or left holding on to the end of their rope with both hands and a death grip. Often the leadership will restructure the management ranks in an attempt to spark some life back into the company.  In Ken Blanchard’s book, “Leading at a Higher Level,” he mentions that some of the best leaders in industry set their sights on the right targets and vision.  Can you teach someone to be a visionary?

What about politics?  Yes, I know, I usually don’t talk about this stuff but it’s too easy to use them as an example.  Leaders in the white house and congress are supposed to bring people together to resolve issues.  Yet, every time you see them on the news (because we never see them in public), they just seem to be blaming someone else for their lack of progress.  John Maxwell mentions in his book, “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, “ that leadership ability determines a person’s level of effectiveness.”  If congress can’t get results on anything (i.e. not effective), what does it say about their ability? Arthur Carmazzi, author of “The 6 Dimensions of Top Achievers,” suggests that leader requires an understanding of how YOU as a leader affect the Psychology of a group, and how the group’s reactions affect you and each of the individual members of that group.  Carmazzi also suggests that a leader’s actions and reactions not only affect the psychology of individuals, but affect the entire culture of the organization or group.  So do you think blaming others has an impact?  Does it help or hurt?  Have we filled our government with real leaders?

Ok, enough examples.  In looking at whether leaders are born or made, we might want to consider some characteristics of leaders.  Daniel Goleman, in his Harvard Business Review article “What makes a good leader?” states that “Without [emotional intelligence], a person can have first-class training, an incisive mind, and an endless supply of good ideas, but he still won't make a great leader.”  Emotional intelligence can be learned but the problem is we aren’t good at identifying it in the workplace and based on our history of developing leadership, we probably couldn’t teach this in the workplace anyhow.  Remember, we hire the right people in the first place (i.e. someone we don’t have to train). 

Stephen Covey identifies effective communication as a key characteristic.  Communication skills can be taught but does it make one an effective communicator?  John Maxwell talks about the Law of Intuition.  Can we teach intuition?  Look around the web and you’ll find thousands of characteristics for leaders, such as empathy, respect, vision, passion, purpose, and so on.  Can we teach all of these?

Are leaders born or made?  I think the answer is convoluted by our interpretation of the word ‘leader.’  When we think of this word, we usually envision a great leader, not an average one.  It’s true that we can teach many people specific skills and put them in a leadership position.  If that’s the definition of a leader, then we can make them but I wouldn’t expect spectacular results.  If we expect a leader to deliver extraordinary results, then we better find people who are gifted in many of those leader characteristics.  This difference would lead us to the comparison between talent and skill.  Such as, you can teach a guy to play basketball but you can’t make them the next Michael Jordan.  Regardless of our definition of the word ‘leader’ or whether they are born or made, the world needs more of them. 

What do you think?