Born or Made

“I think the leaders are born with the ability to become a leader.”

“[L]eadership really comes from the challenge of difficult jobs and being moved around and having challenges at critical points in your career. That’s how you train leadership. But I think a lot of leadership is kind of born.”

“[C]ertainly leaders that are born can become better leaders, and people who might not expect to be leaders can develop leadership skills.”

“Put it this way that they have the essential ingredients of understanding, courage, analysis, things that go into leadership. But I don't think they’re born ready-made. I think you have the potential there and you have to develop it. I think leaders are developed over time by facing different crises and solving them pretty much in the right way.”

“Both . . . I think you take a look at Bonaparte for example. You find somebody who is gifted because he didn’t get much teaching about what he did aside from the artillery in terms of his medical thing. Alexander of Macedon was given not only experience but the most effective military unit in the world to fight battles with in the phalanx so he had a lot going for him but where would it have gone with the average leader and the answer is probably no place. So there had to be a vision there too.”

“You can train them what to do. How they will do it, I have no control over.”

“Well, we have to start with the basics: willing to take initiative, some sense of values, some sense of the common good. Now once you get past those, what makes some initiatives effective, successful, and others not in that they are not all bound to the leader, obviously; it’s the context. Why was Rosa Parks’ effort successful but a woman six months earlier was not successful? It has to do with the characteristics of the people.”

“I don’t know that it’s possible to answer. I think it’s only possible to answer to say that we’re all given different kinds of qualities, but then the question is: What do you do with those qualities that you’ve given? Do you ignore them, hone them, train them? I think what you can do is you can always improve somebody. It’s like any kind of sports skill, you can improve them if you train them.”

“As I went through [various leadership] positions, I always did the best I could in [that] position... Because I did well, people asked me to do other things.”

“I think we all are leaders. Leadership changes from group to group, activity to activity. If you go to my daughter’s house, you’ll see her running her family very effectively, but if she goes somewhere else, she might be a follower, for example. So, we all are leaders and followers every day. I don’t believe that it gets encapsulated into one person.”

“[B]oth is the obvious answer... I mean, you need to be able to have a certain set of skills and be able to manage what you’re doing so that you can then focus on understanding the way other people are reacting to you, what their needs are, and how you can help them do what they need to do.”

“Both. You can become a better leader. I can become a better leader. Every day I can.”

“Most people who teach leadership don’t self-reflect, don’t question, don’t measure very much. They assume what they’re doing is teaching leadership. On the other end, you have a much smaller number who says, no, leadership can’t be taught. And in the middle you have a mix – I suppose I would put myself in the middle -- of people who say that maybe perhaps under certain circumstances, certain things can be taught. But when people ask me that question, I will say, 'Can playing the piano be taught?' Well, yes. Can you be taught certain skills? Even the most unmusical person can be taught over time to play the reasonably good piano. Can they be taught to become a wonderful pianist? Unless they have innate skills, innate musical skills, bloody unlikely. ”

“I would say, to put it differently, leadership cannot be taught, but it can be learned.”

“What I always tell my students is human beings haven’t changed. You see leaders doing the same stuff they’ve been doing for a long time, so human nature hasn’t changed; ethics hasn’t changed. It goes in cycles and cultures.”

“It’s a combination of both but I certainly think that most of it is being made.”

“It’s the nature of organizations that organizations are flatter structures where leaders are not just up here sort of determining things. It’s very complex instead. If you think of building cars or something, you have all kinds of different expertise brought together. It’s very intentional. It’s very complex. So the leader, or the CEO, has to be so engaged in so many ways to do a good job that it does take a lot of social skills as well as other kinds of skills.”

“I don’t think you’re born with leadership. You may have leadership qualities, but I think the leadership skills have to be developed, or made.”

“Nurture. Nature. It’s hard to say. It probably takes both.”

“I think you can learn to be a leader and I think it’s a learned talent. But the motivation to learn it is, it has to be there, so maybe that’s innate.”

“I think leaders are able to articulate a compelling vision and convince others to go along. I think it's a simple thing...Can you be a leader without any followers? I didn't think so...I don't think it's something you can kind of proclaim yourself. I think either the record shows it or not”

“It was a great cadre of people who said leaders are born and if you weren’t born into leadership there’s no chance of your being a leader. My own perspective was completely different than that . . . [I]t was just obvious to me that there are certain skills which can be encouraged, nurtured, and taught.”

“I guess one thing that occurs to me is that leadership . . . is a gift. And if you’re going to indulge in the use of that gift . . . the least you can do is to prepare responsibly to be good at it. I think there are a lot of people who want to be leaders, but they don’t want to pay the price.”

“I think you learn to be a leader. Maybe somebody is born with special skills to be a great quarterback: stature, size, strength. But I don’t know if humans are born with an innate, inherent instinct to be helpful, to care, or to have integrity. And I think, through school, through your church, through your family, through your community, you learn to care and learn to think about what you hope for. And that’s acquiring the skill.”

“‘[Y]ou’re either a leader or you’re not.’ I really disagree violently with that.”

“In an organizational setting, leadership means the word ‘influence’... I firmly believe that you can teach someone to be an influencer... there are individual characteristics that can enhance the process, the influence, the relationship, [and] the learning, but yes you can [teach someone to be a leader].”

“The notion that leaders are in some sense naturals in it—you’re sort of born with the set of skills and it’s just a matter of time before they’re manifest—or not. I just resent that as an educator.”

“Leadership is part of the human condition. The idea of figuring out how a group of people moves and orchestrates, that’s part of our DNA, that’s part of the human condition. But empirically, when it emerges in the world, it’s very determined and influenced - the narratives and the ways it’s constructed by particular cultures and social structures…”

“I would argue that the vast majority of what makes someone a truly effective leader is developed over time so there is very little that is inborn that gives that person such a strong advantage.”

“Well, you know, it’s something that is not necessarily you’re born with, I don’t think. It’s something at least I had to learn over the years through experience and working with people and whatnot.”

“[Developing leadership] Takes lots of patience. It requires that you remember you were young once. What I do with this group, I’m blessed to be working with some smart twenty-something year olds, right? I remember when I was 25 years old. I’m embarrassed to even talk about some of the things I was doing at 25, so, it just requires that look back.”

“I learned... how there were certain things that I was doing as a leader, that... if I made some... changes, I could be better and more effective.”

“All I knew was I was going to graduate. I don’t know if that’s leadership, per se, or whether my position in my family, being an immigrant, which is already can do, I’ve got to do it, risk-taking, new place, walking into a school when I was six and not knowing the language. So, all those things were like a preparation for leadership, but I still had to say yes. Then making a decision to join the Peace Corps when I finished college, I wanted to reintegrate my culture to learn my language because I was illiterate in my own language. I said yes to those things. I think that people have leadership qualities and may even be born with them, but you have to decide at a certain point what kind of leader am I going to be, what am I going to do with my life?”

“I don’t think you’re born with any of that kind of thing. I think there are characteristics that one can be born with. I mean, one of my dear faculty friends in my department at the University of Maryland studied childhood temperament and prenatal and natal, early childhood temperament development. And, certainly, you see that with your own kids, you see they have different personalities, even as they’re becoming little people. And I see those carry forward in both our son and daughter, even as the adults they are now. And I do believe that’s true. But not that you are born caring about issues external to you, I think all that is learned.”

“Yeah, I mean, leaders, to quote Napoleon, (are) “merchants of hope,” to speak to the collective imagination of the people to create a group identity is an important function. And you don’t have to be charismatic, some of them are bureaucrats.”

“I think women have always thought that they were in the process of becoming, and what you could become has enlarged, but therefore, you need help to imagine it. And, to me, that then gets back to leadership and mentoring and how do you structure environments for people to achieve their maximum.”

“I think if you don’t have the commitment and desire to accomplish the goal, whatever it is, I don’t think you can train that. I don’t think hired guns are quite the right way to go. I think you have to have people who are believers. I believed in graduate education. I believe in graduate education. So, it was an easy thing for me to get others pointed in that direction, but if you’d put a different goal in front of me, I don’t know that I would have been as effective as a leader.”

“Oh man, I think the majority of it is nurture, which is why we have parents and why you have teachers and primers.”