While you are out and about today, think through the concept of “leadership”.
Start writing down the first words that come to mind. If you need a spark, think through the WORST leaders you have seen or been under and then start writing down the first words that come to mind – but keep it clean. The opposite of those words you can put in your list of good words.
Just start there.
Now there is a segment of the human population that “theorizes”, that is, they step back and start asking the same questions, but then they try to gather all of the thoughts and concepts together to come up with an overall summary of an idea, which becomes a theory.
Over the decades (while leadership has existed since the dawn of time, leadership theory is new in the last 100 years or so), there has been an analysis on how people become leaders. You can imagine the driving force behind this analysis comes from leaders who have used great power for selfish reasons. These leaders seemingly were able to propose completely irrational ideas and yet masses of people followed them. How did this happen? How were they the same as noble leaders who did great things and how were they different?
These questions can be analyzed both from observing the characteristics of people who lead large groups of people, but also can be analyzed by observing the relationship between two people. One person follows, or submits to, or allows the other persons ideas and plan to dominate. Why? Was it the characteristics of the follower or the characteristics of the leader? Or both?
The first proposal, seemingly by natural default, was that great men and women are simply born with the right traits, at the right time, in the right place. “Great leaders are born, not made” is the basic proposal. On the one hand, no one would deny that that unique cases exist where there seems to be a “perfect storm” to make someone rise to prominence (like Hitler), but it also proposes that people can’t learn the same skills or traits that leaders have in their DNA. That can easily be dismissed because once one starts simply listing all of the great leaders, they will notice that they are “all over the board” when it comes to the predominate traits that catapulted them to power. Second, it can also be observed that there are people who weren’t always incredibly influential throughout their lives, and that they changed a lot and learned how to become great leaders.
It’s always a both/and. No one can deny that there were great leaders born at the right time, in the right place, etc. . . . But it is also true that people learned how to lead, and became great leaders through that learning.
So take five minutes and write down the traits that you believe made up the great leaders you were exposed to, as well as write down the traits of the horrible leaders you were (sadly) exposed to (and then write down the opposite of that trait).
