From your reading of the text, which elements do you think support the thesis that ‘Leaders are born not made’?

The session ‘Define your leader’, 29 January 2001, at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum started with the experiences of two people with ‘outstanding stories’, in the words of moderator John R. O’Neil, president of the Center for Leadership Renewal in the US. Lorraine Monroe, director of the School Leadership Academy in the US, admitted she ‘loved the power of leading’. She outlined a list of characteristics of great leaders that she had largely gained from her experience as a head teacher in failing schools. In her view, successful leaders:
● can identify and articulate a dream, and inspire a team to carry it out;
● are creatively crazy;
● can identify people who can replace you;
● can fire people, though this takes guts;
● have done the job themselves, so carry credibility with the team;
● are able to balance home and work – particularly difficult for women;
● can emanate a vision, and realize when this is no longer the case, and are prepared to quit before people notice.
Warren Bennis, professor of business administration and founding chairman of the Leadership Institute at Marshall School of Business of the University of Southern California, focused on what he called ‘finding your voice’. This is a combination of self-awareness and character, the ability to differentiate ‘what you want to be from what you want to do’. Great leaders all know their real selves and have sometimes taken extraordinary steps to discover this, like Gandhi who spent a year listening to Indian villagers to understand his destiny.
O’Neil quoted a definition of leadership used in the Basque country:
● show up on time;
● all of you show up on time;
● tell the truth and work hard;
● work hard but don’t let the outcome be attached to your ego.
Asked about the role of charisma in a leader, Bennis said that the leader was ‘a social architect whose role it is to create the ecology of learning’. Many great leaders, including Martin Luther King, whom he had known, were accidental leaders. King had a symbiotic relationship with his followers – it was he who followed them to jail, at first. In Monroe’s view, the leader has to ‘galvanize’ activity.