Are leaders born or are leaders made? When I was young the ruling theory was that leaders were born. You came out of the womb and you were either a leader or not. We all read biographies of great leaders that had them showing signs of their leadership while still in diapers.
In part as a reaction to that, and in part because you can’t sell leadership training if that training doesn’t make a difference, we started to hear about how leadership skills were actually something you could develop in any one.
Well, which is it? The answer is “neither” or, perhaps, “both.”
Nature - "Leaders are Born"
These aren’t really things you’re born with, but there are some things that a person needs to be an effective leader and that are pretty much set by the end of adolescence. In other words, folks show up with these. Training can affect them slightly, but you need these things in order for leadership training to do any good.
You need to be smart enough. Exactly what that means depends a lot on the industry or job. A law enforcement leader needs to be smart enough to master the legal, tactical and administrative knowledge needed for law enforcement leadership.
You need to be fit enough. Again, “enough” varies with the situation where you want to be a leader. You need a higher level of fitness to be effective in patrol work than in investigations, but every law enforcement leader needs the stamina to function well for long hours under less than ideal conditions.
You have to be comfortable making decisions and telling people what to do. Not everyone is comfortable with authority. To be an effective leader you must be and that's pretty much decided by the time you’re done with high school.
You need decent people skills. Leadership is about being responsible for the performance of a group and that means people. There's persuasive evidence that great leaders are the ones with top people skills. There's excellent material on this in Daniel Goleman's work, especially his book, “Emotional Intelligence.”
Those are the things you have to have to be a leader. Training and development can help you get the most out of what you have, but can’t give you the basics. Now for some of the things you can learn from scratch.
Nurture - "Leaders are Made"
It seems pretty obvious that while there are some things you must be born with, an awful lot of what you need to be a leader can be learned. I’ve identified five jobs that everyone responsible for a group at any level needs to do. If you’re going to be a leader, you have to do them, too.
You must be able to accomplish today's mission through the group. Calls have to be answered. Reports must be filed. Investigations should be completed. This means knowing about the work to be done and developing the planning, prioritizing, controlling, people and communications skills to get the job done.
You must be able to make sure tomorrow's mission can be accomplished. There are three components to this. There's training your people so they’ll be better when they leave you than when you came along. There's planning for the future. And there's understanding the future impact of your current decisions.
You must be able to handle critical incidents. Critical incidents, as I’m using the term, are incidents that occur only rarely but have a large impact when they do. In law enforcement they include barricaded subjects, hazmat spills, natural disasters and more. But there are also critical supervisory and management incidents, such as dealing with a subordinate with a substance abuse problem or one who's going through a divorce or who's been involved in a shooting incident. You’ll need the skills to prepare for critical incidents, to identify them when they occur, and the skills to remain calm and in control when they occur.
You must be able to create a great working environment. Yep, that's your job. You want to create a place to work where clear and reasonable expectations, regular and useable feedback, fairness, consistency, growth and the maximum control possible over work life are the norm.
You must be able to make lots of small course corrections. When you’re doing supervision, that means having lots of supervisory interviews, mostly short and single purpose. When you’re managing that means checking to see that projects and budgets and schedules are on track and making adjustments if needed. When you’re leading, it means reminding folks again and again of the most important things.
Those are skills sets and it helps to know what they are, but what's really important is the difference between what great leaders do and what others do. Remember, stealing from a country song, “theory's just a noise, boys, behavior does the work.”
