ABSTRACT
Have you ever had the experience of someone saying to you that she had met a person who was a natural born leader? It has happened many times to me in interviews, consulting projects, and/or interacting with students in my university classes. You meet someone who seems to fit that description, someone who seems to be a natural at influencing others to achieve certain objectives. And it is easy to say, “She is a natural born leader.” It’s easy because we can simply attribute the individual’s leadership to something we may not understand, as opposed to digging in and trying to understand its source. It’s much more efficient to say it is born into the individual and use that as my basis of truth. Why? Because once we say leadership is made, we have to systematically examine every aspect of the individual’s life course to try and understand what contributes to a person’s leadership development. Perhaps more vexing, is the possibility that certain events and experiences may contribute differently to the leadership development of different individuals. Can you see why it is easier to simply say it is born, and leave it up to the bio-geneticist to solve this mystery?
