Youth Leadership Development - Can anyone make a leader?

Whether leaders are born or made has been one of the greatest philosophical debates in leadership development over thousands of years.

It doesn’t matter how many learned academic works you read, you won’t find a single cohesive answer in response to the question.  It tends to be an emotive subject and one in which passions can occasionally run hot.

Many authorities would agree that before starting the debate, you need to decide what type of leadership you are talking about.  Some people provide what is termed inspirational leadership by setting an example of desirable behaviours others can follow.  They may not have a position of authority as such but they show people around them what can be achieved by having the right mind-set and application etc. 

In a sense, that is a pretty sound definition of leadership.

Of course, leadership is sometimes rather more direct and requires people to motivate a group of individuals around them and occasionally make decisions where consensus cannot be reached.  Those individuals also have to position the group to help them deal with failure or problems just as effectively as they do success.

These issues and challenges are universal.  Groups need to be motivated and led just as much in say European societies as they do in Aboriginal and Torres strait Islander leadership societies.  

Almost anyone who has worked in coaching people to step into leadership roles where decisions will need to be made, will perhaps privately admit that some individuals are rather better positioned, in terms of psychological makeup, to assume the mantle of such a role than others.  That doesn’t mean that other people are not capable of being developed and grown into such positions but the techniques required to do so may be different to those applied to individuals who have more latent orientation in that direction.

In a sense, it is possible to make a case for saying that some people are born with a greater predisposition towards assimilating leadership responsibilities than others.  However, that doesn’t mean that they will necessarily make good leaders unless they have appropriate training.