Are Leaders Born or Made?

A timeless debate like the age-old controversy about “a chicken and an egg” is more or less applicable also to the question whether leaders are born or made. In the most texts I've so far read the prevalent answer is: a leader is born.

Personally, I’m more for a kind of the in-between position: early genetics shown in childhood is an imprint that is hard to undo. Later, learning and practice bring new qualities and dimensions to leadership. Statistically, leadership capability will definitively fall along the Gaussian distribution.  Some people are, indeed, born leaders but they still need a lot of work and learning to become true leaders and to get even better as they go along. At the bottom of the curve there are others who, no matter how hard they try, simply aren't ever going to be leaders.  They just don’t have the innate wiring. All in between start out with a very good prerequisites and are hard workers and learners but mostly never become outstanding leaders.

It may be true that some people feel more inclined and are better prepared to take on leadership roles and then consequently learn and develop the necessary skills to become a superior leader. Certain basics of good leadership can be self-taught, but a number of useful skills will be acquired through experience developed over a time. Understanding leadership functions is important to develop skills and capabilities to then achieve a successful leadership style matching one’s own character and talents. Therefore, modern theories about leadership involve a combination of personality traits and also specific skills, capabilities learned over time and gained through experience. It is rather a life learning process and not a semester at an MBA school.

My Writing Process

I was invited by Regina Puckett to take part in the Writing Process blog tour. Its purpose is to showcase different author methods all over the world. Charity is an amazing lady and it is wonderful to participate in a chain of it. It was started by Victoria that is an amazing lady and a wonderful author with Ellora's Cave Publishing and Liquid Silver Books.

My tour questions

What am I working on?

Professionally I teach social informatics at University of Ljubljana. On the other hand as an author I’m interested and do research about a different approaches to outstanding leadership.

How does my work differ from others of the same genre?

It is a work that merges Western and Fareast mentality and is based on approach coming from martial arts (Wing Chun, Tai Chi) Philosophy aiming to a personal growth in order to become an exceptional leader.

Why do I write what I do?

Leadership of multicultural teams is today very much subjected to different cultural values, norms, ethics or, what I have named as “the cultural background noise” (the environment we grow up in has a great impact and influence our values, ethics and morals, mentally and subconsciously). With the globalization process the occurrence of multicultural teams are even more frequent and this is why I aimed my research toward the leadership that can bridge this “noise” and connect West and East, Internal and External.

How does your writing process work?

At the beginning mine writing process takes quite a while as I do frame it, I do read a lot about the subject, but when started the words just flew.

Be sure to check out the next two authors next week:

Coleman Weeks’s blog http://howdowefeedtheworldsstarving.com/
Ed Gellock’s blog http://lakesidelivin.wordpress.com/
LaRae Parry’s blog http://laraeparry.wordpress.com

IQ & EQ for Leaders

Human beings are complex integrated systems. It is hard to define them by some theoretical calculations as hard as it is to quantify demanding processor’s unquantifiable actions. Nevertheless I teach my students two measures commonly used to explain humans and their roles in leadership.

IQ (intelligence quotient) is representing a person’s reasoning ability (measured using problem-solving tests) calculated by a mathematical formula that is supposed to be a measure of a person's intelligence. The quotient is traditionally derived by dividing an individual's mental age by his chronological age and then multiplied by 100 (thus IQ = MA/CA x 100) to get the statistical norm or average taken as 100. The most direct ancestor of today's intelligence tests was developed by Alfred Binet. He did it due to a request of an education commission in France in order to distinguish some intellectually impaired children from other intellectually normal ones. Later on Binet’s intelligence test was revised extensively to get the today's version of IQ by Lewis Terman.

EQ (emotional intelligence) is the level of your ability to understand other people, what motivates them and how to work cooperatively with them. It is a combination of: Self-awareness - the ability to recognize an emotion as it happens; Self-regulation – having a control when one experiences emotions; Motivation - one achievement that requires clear goals and a positive attitude; Empathy - the ability to recognize how people feel which is important to success in your life and career; Social skills - the development of good interpersonal skills which is as well tantamount to success in your life and career.

Pushing hands and Virtue

Most people believe that martial arts are violent ego driven systems with intention to injure or kill. Several times in my previous posts I have described that this is not so. Today I will discuss two training concepts used in Tai Chi and Wing Chun. They complement each other and again show the other side of the coin of martial arts.

In Tai Chi it is said that you can’t learn pushing hands ('tui shou') by winning but only by losing. To the beginner it may sound very contradictory, but it is so true.

To learn (empirically) so-called internal martial arts aspects pushing hands are practiced. It is a comparable method of training to Wing Chun sticking hands ('chi shou'), a method that is used for development of automatic reflexes to hit upon contact while all the time sticking to the opponent. Therefore, the sticking hands are more combat oriented, and the pushing hands are less aggressive and more based on using opponent energy. In both one should be perceptive to a partner, as only then ‘listening power’ develops. It is a special feeling of where rival is preparing – not yet in full – to push, pull or hit. And yes, in both martial arts we use the same methods also for legs or combination of all extremities, head and … the whole body.

During this practice the mind should be opened but focused on breathing and on performing slow cyclical movements. It should be wiped out of all other assumptions or expectations. When push, pull, hit or just normal cyclical movement comes, your body knows what and how to react and so it takes control and reacts spontaneously. Therefore, it is important to be very relaxed and in the proper stance that allows to move back and front, left and right and at the same time preserve full stability. Having a strong ego in this practice just does not help because if it intervenes you stop “sensing” what the opponent is coming with.

Leadership “style”

What kind of style a good leadership reflects? Can it be defined uniformly? Is it in fact a style or is it personality? Both or something else?

Questions that fire up discussions, writings, blogs, books …

Alexander the Great, Mao Zedong, Mandela, Hitler, Gandhi, Che Guevara, Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, all were leaders. Some of them were charismatic, all of them influential, some fierce and some inspirational. What attracted people to follow them? Was it their leadership quality that attracted masses, or their actions made them the leaders? They were definitely heroes or anti-heroes. They all failed many times, yet they were remembered for their greatness. Failures are soon forgotten, greatness will always be remembered.

Most western books describe and define leadership process with explanation of the way the leader exercises and manifests his leadership process. Thusly, they try to combine them into the most common leadership styles: laissez-faire, democratic or participative, charismatic, bureaucratic, and autocratic. We all know that nobody complies in full with only one style, but the prevailing one is then assigned to that leader. Due to this, the researchers identify subtypes to those five main leadership styles, such as strategic leadership, team leadership, facilitating leadership. Even further distinct divisions about leadership are made based on influence styles, such as cross-cultural leadership and coaching. Some authors characterize leadership as people-oriented or relations-oriented, for instance, servant, task oriented, transactional or transformational leadership. Others classify leadership characterized by situation, such as emergent leadership style, innovative, visionary, command and control, and again also transformational leadership. There is a plethora of definitions of styles and how leaders exercise the leadership process over subordinates. But does this really explain what a leader is and what his style is?

Feedback in Leadership

“Don’t come to me with problems – come with solutions ….” is a typical sentence that you can hear from a manager or a boss that is not in favor of receiving a feedback.

Why, indeed, a feedback is so important? Because it gives the transmission of evaluative or corrective information about an action, event, or process to the original or controlling source.

Feedback is an unavoidable key component in all systems. In the Nature the systems that adjust according to feedback are similar to Darwinian adaptation and to what are called dynamical systems. Feedback in Nature is a normal process of learning of any leaving creature. In Nature what is not useful or too much energy consuming cannot survive a certain period. Feedback example is the V-shape flying pattern of geese. It can be explained by a simple set of four to five adjustment rules and flying efficiency. They change the position when the first goose is tired and goes back to the tail, then the second one takes a lead etc. This V-shape consumes less energy of each goose and permits to fly faster than a single goose could. They've certainly learned it through try and error feedback.

In martial arts listening and then replying accordingly is the name of the feedback game. Jing refers to one of the most important representations in Tai Chi – “listening” or “paying attention” to the opponent’s energy and his mind’s intent. Therefore, “listening” is actually a feedback for the mind of what you can sense and feel with your extremities or your whole body about opponent. Mostly, this can be practiced when in contact with another person: you trying to read or feel what he or she is intending to do, and even how he or she will do it. In one to one or mass battle in order to win a combat this knowledge of feedback reply is crucial. If you are late, you get hit.

Leadership and trust

Trust is vital. It is one of the fundamentals of any kind of cooperation between two living beings.

For the word “trust” Google offers first: 'trust is the leading value-for-money brand for digital lifestyle...'. Only the next shot is the definition of trust by Webster's dictionary.

Unluckily, trust is a rare supply these days. People have trouble trusting each other, according to the AP-GfK poll conducted in November 2013. Furthermore, it seems that Americans are suspicious of each other in their everyday encounters. Only one-third of them say most people can be trusted – down from half of the people who felt that way in 1972. Another study since 1972 is the General Social Survey that has been monitoring societal change and within it also a trust. In the Final Report of General Social Survey 2012 “Trends in Public Attitudes about Confidence in Institutions” a scale covering 13 institutions (adding Banks and Financial Institutions to previous 12) confidence fell from an average of 29.2% to a second low point of 22.6% in 2008-2012. Indisputable is that trust as well as “unquestionable” is a basis of any religion. Modern economic activities are not far from this. Just look at the confidence in the financial sector, market, stock market or values of companies, and the value of money. On 1971 Federal Reserve notes were banned to be redeemable in gold and Executive Order 11615 in August of the same year ended the direct convertibility of dollar to gold. Other nations followed. From there on paper money has the value only if we trust in its “price”. And the money is not the only paper that has the value only because of the trust people put in …

In martial arts trust is the foundation of any practicing. Imagine that you are invited to be a sparring partner in a friendly match with Mohamed Ali. If you do not trust that he is capable of stopping the fist in front of your nose, you’d probably not even enter the ring. The same self-confidence in his abilities must also have Ali, because if he is not able to stop his fist, he’ll probably break your nose. How many partners for training will then he has if breaking the nose with his first hit occurs regularly?