Are Leaders Born or Made?

Are Leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? Do the times make the leader or the leader shape the times? How does the adversity affect the growth of leadership? Is leadership even possible without a purpose larger than personal ambition?

It has been a matter of relentless questioning for anyone who was ever fascinated by great leaders we have ever known, or even wondered if leadership is a quality that people are born with.

If you look up in a dictionary, the definition of Leadership is “the action of leading a group of people or an organization” and that is, a skill. And like any other skill we can learn this too and we can get better at, by practicing it consciously and intently over time. It is a skill which requires years of constant learning and practice.

Most of the times, we often hear people talking about their “Gut feeling” or “Instinct” or even the “Sixth Sense” which helped them get out of danger or profit from something. However, we fail to realise that these people are also the experts in their field. We have heard a stock broker say, he made millions by following his gut feeling on a particular stock, we have heard about the F1 drivers who were able to avoid a major accident by following their instincts during the race and we have also heard about the doctors, who followed their sixth sense and diagnosed terminally ill patients in the early stages and saved numerous lives. Now if you look at the similarities in all these, you would realise that the stock brokers, the F1 drivers and the doctors are all professionals and extremely skilled at their job which would have happened only after years of practice.

Leaders aren’t born, they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that’s the price we’ll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.” _{Vince Lombardi}

When we look at great leaders, we are amazed on how they are able to lead a group of people during the period of grave uncertainty. The fact is, the individual who takes everything upon himself at the moment of uncertainty and leads us out of it, has probably faced a similar situation in the past or has thought about this grave moment in his mind probably a hundred times before, and knows all the possible options he has to lead the group out of it and take them to the safe zone. On rare occasions, where the adversity is new and the leader has never experienced anything similar, he at-least has enough experience and skill to handle the unprecedented situations like the one at hand, which he usually does by falling back on his strengths and taking one step forward at a time.

Like any skill, Leadership is also a skill which we can get better at over time, with conscious practice. However, you must first ask yourself, if you are ready to serve people with least or no benefit to you? Are you ready to learn from others constantly? Are you willing to sacrifice every bit of what you have for the benefit of others? and most importantly, Do you have the courage to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you?

PS: I chose the picture of Abraham Lincoln for this article because I think he is the original poster boy of true Leadership in all sense. Follow my blog to read series of upcoming articles on Abraham Lincoln and his Leadership.

Be Great!