The Myth of the Natural Born Leader

The term ‘Natural Born Leader’ is a myth. You aren’t born with leadership skills.

You may be born attractive, tall, muscular. You may be gifted by your parents with a brain that fires a lot more neurons than the typical person.

Of course, you also may be born to end up bald with hands that sweat profusely when you get even the slightest bit nervous.

So, yes. The deck can be genetically stacked in favor of one person over another. And a lot of those genetic traits are probably statistically linked to strong leaders.

But there is no blood test you can take at 3 months old to see if you have natural leadership talents. That’s just not how it works.

Your upbringing plays a big role. If your strengths are cultivated and you have great life opportunities, you probably have a leadership edge. Confidence is a big leadership trait, and that doesn’t happen by accident. It comes from being beaten over the head with encouragement. The morals your parents give you determines how you will treat people as an adult.

Then there’s a big matter of luck. Are you at the right place at the right time to put your leadership traits to work? If you are a newcomer on your little league team, you might not get picked as the team captain. Now, great leaders make their own luck, and they are leaders regardless of their title, but developing as a leader is easier when you are in a leadership role.

That’s because leadership takes practice. It takes experience. You have to learn some hard lessons by doing. And you can’t get that experience sitting on the sidelines.

And that’s the point of this article. Your genetic traits and upbringing affect your starting point, and they probably, as a group, define a ceiling. But individuals can break from their genetic limitations and can overcome childhood conditioning.

In a nutshell, leadership is a vague, ethereal concept, but the skills within leadership can be refined and developed, and, in cases where you are starting from zero, learned completely.

Not a good writer? It will hurt your leadership. Go take a class or start writing a blog.

Not a good public speaker? How are you going to give instructions to your team if you are scared to stand up and speak? Join toastmasters or go moonlight as a stand-up comic. The point is to get in front of an audience and speak.

You can learn almost all the skills you need to be a good leader. You can work on technical competence. You can develop a better memory. You can figure out how to keep from missing people’s birthdays, and you can practice active listening.

The challenge, often, lies in two main areas. The first is believing that you can be a leader. Some people never even try it. They just resign themselves to being a follower and staying on that path. That’s not to say there is anything wrong with not being a leader. Some people don’t want to be in charge. I’m talking specifically about people who would like to take on bigger roles, but don’t have faith in themselves.

The second area that impedes leadership development is not making an active effort to actually try to get better. They don’t evaluate their own style. They don’t ask for feedback. And if they don’t do either of those, there is no way they are going to do a gap analysis and see what they need to do to become a better leader.

So, if you want to be a leader, ask yourself what is stopping you doing one tiny thing today to get you closer to that goal? If there was a such thing as a natural born leader, you’d be out of luck. But since there isn’t, you’ve got a fighting chance. Becoming a better leader is going to take work. For some, it might take a lot of it. But it is worth it if that’s what you want. Just go take that first step.

UPDATE BASED ON COMMENTS…

I got a comment about how people rise to the occasion. It is true that some ‘natural born leaders’ through raw talent can outperform others. Think of it as being a spectrum of leadership skills on a bell curve. The blue curve represents natural leadership abilities.

In this image, “A” is a better natural leader than “B”. But what happens when you add leadership training to some of the people on this bell curve, but not others? What if “B” actively worked on leadership skills, but “A” just stuck with natural abilities?

You get a new spread. Now people may shift their position on the new curve. The upward mobility of a person varies, so they may find a new spot on the curve, and can keep growing.

In the comment, the presumption was that person “A”, a person on the far right of the natural talent curve, could rise to the occasion in a crisis. True. But I would rather have person “B”.

You might notice that there is an overlap in the curves, though. Person “A” is still a better leader than a lot of people at the left end of the trained (green) curve. But a lot more people to the left of “A” passed “A” through training.

As I think about it, both curves probably should be depicted as being skewed with long tails to the right. Outstanding leadership is a rather uncommon trait. But this addendum to the article is really just to clarify my point about growth and concede that there are some untrained people who outperform trained people. But the big takeaway is that those untrained people with raw talent have a lot of runway in front of them.