Article: Are Leaders Born Or Made?

Are Leaders Born or Made? Leaders are individuals who are capable of guiding an individual or a group of people solely by gaining their trust and control. A few words that could be used to describe a leader are innovative, creative, bold, courageous, brave, intelligent, humble, and fearless. Leaders can fail into both categories of being born or made. Each individual has the will power to do anything or be anyone they choose to be. This also connects to the role a person plays. In many cases, someone who generally displays characteristics of a leader, are appointed leadership roles. This can account for the belief that individuals are born with leadership skills. In other circumstances, individuals may look at the examples of past leaders

Perspectives from Management Educators, the author conducted a research on whether a person can be taught to be a leader. In this article, scholars were asked the same question, and although each scholar gave a definite “Yes” as their answer, they all gave their unique point-of-view on how aspects of leadership can be taught. One scholar, Steve Stumpf, gave his insight of leadership skills being taught as, “the methods of teaching need to focus on creating meaningful experiences from which the student can learn. Book knowledge is only a small part of effective leadership, due to the fact that leadership is a performance sport. Leadership requires both thinking and doing to the satisfaction of many others with diverse expectations.” (Doh, 2003) Stumpf’s point-of-view goes in collaboration of a solution I mentioned earlier which was to incorporate these leadership skills into day-to-day interactions. With people being proactive with their leadership skills by stepping forward and conducting roles in a timely and effective manner rather than being a reactive leader in which an individual begin to use leadership skills as a last resort to solve a problem. Another scholar, Mike Hitt, mentioned that “there are some people who are more prone to be leaders than others.” This would solely be dependent on the personality of each individual. He continued, “some people are more extroverted and some more introverted. And maybe those who are

There are many people who can naturally born with leadership skills and this can be discovered when the person is young because they display strong leadership characteristics. This is so because they either thrive off of self-motivation. Others may learn the characteristics of being an effective leader and decide to display them. Depending on the person’s personality, they may or may not choose to be an effective leader, whether they were born with the skill or not. The article, Can Leadership Be Taught? Perspectives from Management Educators, the author and information panel agreed that although people are born with leadership skills, there are individuals who have learned leadership skills. I completely agree with the information each member of the panel contributed. They all captured the idea that leadership skills can be effectively taught in a be highly practical manner, if it included training or coaching from practitioners, assurance that students may learn as much or more from failures in leadership as they would in attempting to replicate successes, and that to effectively teach leadership, programs must be tailored to the particular needs, attitudes and circumstances of the students.” (Doh, 2003) Based on the different point-of-views given by the author and scholars, the information that was given in this article seemed