Nature or Nurture – The Case for Leadership Development

In my last full post I put forward my thoughts on what constitutes great leadership and was encouraged by the quantity and quality of the responses. Those responses have caused me to modify slightly my three criteria for great leadership although the essence of each remains:

1. Great leaders set challenging and worthy goals.
2. Great leaders inspire others to attempt those goals.
3. Great leaders provide the capability for others to realise those goals.

Now, I am interested in helping others to develop their leadership capabilities. Actually, I am interested developing myself and would like to make 'helping others to develop' what I do. Either way, I have a vested interest in leadership development. Yet it seems to me that there are two obvious questions that need to be addressed before we go further down the 'leadership development' path.

1. Can leadership capabilities be developed?
2. Should leadership capabilities be developed?

Let us start with the first question. Is great leadership an inherent capability or can it be learnt? This question has been around for a long time and is the subject of much academic research. Having waded through much of this research, and remembering my advice from my first post to 'keep it simple stupid', the answer seems to be – 'Yes'. Does this seem confusing? Well it is not really.
Simply put, if you read the literature on the nature of leadership and its various traits, styles and behaviours you will note that there are as many views as there are experts. As in most areas of knowledge, theories come and theories go and then those same theories come back again with new names. What those theories seem to me to have in common is that great leadership derives from a mixture of personal attributes, learned skills and knowledge and the context within which that leadership was applied. The various theories attach different emphases to these factors and apply them in different ways but it all boils down to leadership being part who you are, part what you know and part being in the right place at the right time.
Now, while you cannot change who you are, there is a vast and growing coaching industry out there based on the premise that by improving your self-awareness you can learn to make the most of what you have got. For example, you may be the dullest, least inspiring person on earth (no, of course I don't mean you – this is just an example) but if you have the insight to recognise this and the self confidence to accept this you can then learn techniques to improve your ability to communicate or find someone with inbuilt charisma to sell the message for you.
So, while it is certainly true that some aspects of great leadership are inherent I do not believe that should prevent anyone from seeking to improve their leadership capabilities.
That then leaves the second, and from an investment point of view, more important question. Should we look to develop our own leadership capabilities and those of others? In essence, what is the business case for the time, cost and effort that will inevitably be involved?
Let us look at my three criteria for great leadership. First, what is the value of increasing the capability of ourselves and others to set challenging and worthy goals? Let me make it clear from the outset that I am not advocating anarchy here. Taken to the extreme, if everyone is a leader then no-one is a follower and chaos rules. No business could operate if everyone behaved as if they were head of Strategy – although I have experienced situations where that appeared to be the case. Nevertheless, it is recognised that for businesses to flourish they must innovate and improve. Encouraging a culture where everyone understands that they have permission – no, that they have the obligation – to seek to improve requires us to develop the ability to envisage challenging and worthy goals for ourselves and for our teams.
Second, what is the value of developing the capability to inspire in ourselves and others? Well, in business it is rarely the case that individuals can make things happen. It is great teams and effective teamwork that deliver change. One characteristic of great teams is that they share a common sense of purpose and developing the capability for our team leaders to inspire that common sense of purpose is an essential pre-requisite to getting things done. No inspiration, no change, no improvement.
Then from a personal perspective, it took a long period of plodding along doing the same old stuff before I was lucky enough to meet two great coaches who helped me to understand that the only thing holding me back was myself, and who inspired me to attempt things that I had always convinced myself were beyond me. My fumbling attempts at 'Four Seasons In One Day' on the guitar and this blog are two of the outcomes from that process and I thank them both for giving me the self belief to make things happen. My life is the richer for it.
Finally, if we accept that as businesses and as individuals there is value in moving forward, then there is value in learning the skills to enable ourselves and others to achieve the goals we set.
So, to answer my two questions. Great leadership is part nature and part nurture. While we can only dance with the person we brought to the dance floor, we can certainly help them to dance better. We can make the most of what we have through an intelligent and structured approach to leadership development. And it is worth the investment. Developing self leadership capabilities can help us to enrich our lives. Developing leadership capabilities in others can improve our collective ability to innovate and improve to the good of ourselves, our communities and our organisations.
In the next post I will look at the way I structure my approach to leadership development, particularly in the field of project management which is my background, and the eight key capabilities that help deliver success.