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Lesson 1: What is Leadership? Part I
Are Leaders Born or Made?
Leadership style is only one aspect of leadership. Many have asked the question of how leaders come to be. Are leaders born, or are they made? Leadership in this context can be identified as a set of qualities that must be possessed or a set of actions that must be mastered.
Do you believe leaders are born or made? What evidence can you provide to support one over the other? Watch the following video from Peter Senge which will provide additional clarity on this debate.
Peter Senge: Are Great Leaders Born or Made? Transcript
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Born to Lead
Trait theory, or "great man" theory, is based on the idea that effective leaders are born with specific traits that have been proven important. Most of these traits or qualities are basic personality characteristics. Trait theories of leadership—those seeking to identify the personal traits that differentiate leaders from others—dominated leadership thought in the first half of the 20th century. Hundreds of traits, both physical and psychological, were studied over the course of about 40 years. Studies that sought to understand traits that predicted who would become a leader were largely inconclusive.
Some traits, however, seemed to appear consistently in individuals who were already leaders, including intelligence, enthusiasm, dominance, and self-confidence—but these attributes also appeared in non-leaders. Thus, by the middle of the 20th century, most leadership scholars concluded that further efforts to identify a universal set of leadership traits was pointless.