Page 237 - The extraordinary leader

214 • The Extraordinary Leader

On the One Hand

We begin by acknowledging that there is a legitimate point of view in arguing
that leaders are born that way. The revered guru of management, Peter
Drucker, wrote in The Practice of Management that “leadership cannot be
taught or learned.” Added to that is a long series of studies on the personality
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dimensions of leadership and the strong evidence that personality does not
change a great deal over a person’s lifetime. Other researchers have analyzed
the profound influence of parents and their role in shaping the values of a
child’s willingness to take on responsibility, and the role that has in the child’s
developing leadership abilities. Those characteristics appear to change little
over a lifetime.
Harrison Gough, the eminent University of California at Berkeley
psychologist, has noted that the “dominance” scale of his California Psycho-
logical Inventory is a strong predictor of being selected as a leader. Other
psychological tests have been used successfully to select leaders. Leadership
abilities are often first exhibited in junior high school, high school, and col-
lege. Longitudinal studies of leaders in industry and the military show that
key characteristics in leaders show up very early in life and remain quite fixed.
The most powerful psychometric instruments are biographical inventory
tests, in which people are asked a series of questions about what they have
done in their earlier lives. (Were you the captain of any team, the president
of any school group, or did you start your own business as a young child?)
Because the past is the best predictor of the future, a probing analysis of
people’s past strongly predicts their future, and leadership patterns are often
established early in life.
Add to that the evidence on leadership having some correlation with phys-
ical stature (taller people are more apt to be perceived as strong leaders) or
body chemistry (higher levels of testosterone in men are correlated with leader-
ship positions), and you can understand why the question is repeatedly asked.

On the Other Hand
Whereas there may be some predictive power of psychological tests and early
childhood experience, it is clear that they fail to explain why a good number
of leaders succeed. There is clearly no one factor that anyone has identified
that consistently predicts who will succeed as a leader. Notable cases of “late
bloomers” suggest that people with fairly undistinguished early portions of