Natural Born Leaders Don't Exist
In this companion piece to the Boss Levels video series, Head of Content for Custom Charts for Jira Christopher Berry looks at why so many leaders suck. And why, occasionally, you find one who doesn’t.
According to various sources, only 10% of people are natural leaders and everyone else has to learn the art of leading.
Which is a big fat steaming pile of wrinkly bollocks.
Plenty of people seem to think natural born leaders exist. In fact, we ran a poll on LinkedIn and this was the result:
According to the very lovely Custom Charts for Jira pie chart above, 82% of the people we polled believe there’s such thing as a natural born leader. I expected everyone to say no. So did Chris Cooke, who said when I suggested doing the poll, “Mmm, surely it’s an obvious no.”
Let’s just say for the sake of argument that those 82% are right. The question becomes, what is a natural leader then?
Born leaders are people with an innate capacity to effectively manage and lead groups of people to achieve collective goals. Instead of learning to become an effective leader, they have the instinctive ability to inspire others and encourage them to follow their vision.
Indeed specifically says “instead of learning”. Quite a bold statement, that natural leaders don’t have to learn. And this is coming from a job site, who should know better.
What this boils down to is a “nature versus nurture” debate. But come on people. No one is born with leadership skills. Sure, you could be born attractive. You could be born tall or with a loud, commanding voice. You could be born with more neurons firing than the average person. But this doesn’t mean you can give a 3-month-old baby a blood test to see if it’s got natural leader blood.
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What it does mean is that the cards can be genetically stacked in favor of some people over others, i.e. some are born with certain traits that are statistically linked to strong leaders.
But as with so many things in this world, things aren’t so black and white. The reason people endlessly debate nature vs nurture is because the truth lies somewhere in between. And arguably nurture plays a much larger role in a person’s ability to lead than nature.
Leaders are made, not born
Countless environmental factors contribute to the making of a leader. Upbringing for one. The morals your parents give you help determine how you’ll treat people when you’re older. If you have great life opportunities and your strengths are cultivated, you’ll develop confidence, which is a major leadership trait that doesn’t happen by accident. It happens through encouragement. The more time you spend with a diverse set of friends and acquaintances as you grow up, the more empathetic and understanding you’ll be to different people’s needs in the workplace.
Leadership takes practice and experience. Contrary to what Indeed says, most of the leaders Chris Cooke and I have covered on Boss Levels are at their best when they’re learning. Numerous leaders talk about the importance of failing on the road to success, and of learning from your mistakes. Agile leaders, which are becoming increasingly common as the world pivots to more distributed work environments, are agile because they listen to and learn from others.
I refuse to believe that 10% of people are exempt from learning how to be good leaders, and that the many thousands of leadership courses, coaches, and mentors out there are for the other 90% only. While they might have certain biological advantages, that doesn’t make them automatically great. After all, leadership is a vague and ethereal concept and what makes a great leader in one context or industry is totally different in another. Just because you’re a super-successful football manager doesn’t mean you can go be a great project manager in a software company or headteacher of a school.
Lists of the world’s greatest leaders might include people like Nelson Mandela, Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Elizabeth I, Jacinda Ardern, Martin Luther King etc. The more those lists expand, the clearer it becomes that no two leaders are the same, which means there’s no natural trait you can be born with that makes you immediately suitable for leadership.
Becoming a better leader takes work. Sure, it’ll take more work for some people than others. But no one should rest on their laurels believing they’re a born leader and refusing to learn. They’ll be in for a rude awakening if they do.
This monthly newsletter is part of the Boss Levels series from the Custom Charts for Jira team at Tempo Software, in which Business Unit Manager Chris Cooke and Head of Content Christopher Berry discuss leaders from history, fiction, and the present day. We have more debates coming up on Alex Ferguson, Steve Jobs, and Jacinda Ardern, so stay tuned!
We welcome contributors who want to talk about their favorite leaders, either in the video series, or as part of an interview for the newsletter. Hit us up!