Natural-born leaders are the stuff of legend—from Alexander the Great conquering the known world by his early 20s, to young Arthur pulling Excalibur from the stone, to teenage Joan of Arc helping the French vanquish the English. The idea of fate smiling upon a chosen few seems to persist into modern times. Type "natural-born leader" into Google and you'll conjure up recent articles in Forbes and The Huffington Post as well as several book titles.
But is leadership truly a matter of nature … or nurture? How we answer this question points to different paths for "lifting leaders." One path might rely on recruiting extraordinary natural leaders and another on nurturing ordinary people to be leaders.
Nature versus Nurture
One way to examine this question is to look at identical twins. If people are born leaders, it stands to reason that if one twin becomes a leader as an adult, the other should, too, right? And in fact, when researchers examined the leadership status of 488 identical and 632 fraternal twins at age 30, they found that identical twins were more apt than fraternal twins to reflect one another's leadership status. Parsing the data, they calculated that leadership is 24 percent heritable—or in other words, about one-quarter nature versus three-quarters nurture (De Neve et al., 2013).
This finding leaves open the question of whether leadership is a fixed trait or an acquired skill—that is, do leaders reach a certain point and stop improving or, like a fine wine, keep getting better with time? Years ago, after comparing leadership experience and group performance for 385 leaders in five different organizations for the U.S. Navy, Fred Fiedler arrived at what seemed to be a definitive answer to the latter question: No. In a paper bluntly titled Leadership Experience and Leader Performance—Another Hypothesis Shot to Hell, Fiedler (1970) reported that teams with more experienced leaders actually demonstrated slightly lower performance. Basically, some leaders were better than others, and experience was a poor substitute for aptitude.
But is that really true? Is leadership ability really so fixed?
Changes in Leadership, Changes in Performance
Some recent studies in education suggest otherwise—or at least that leaders' behaviors can and do change over time. A study of 197 elementary schools found that individual leaders' performance (or at least teachers' responses to questions like, "To what extent does school leadership … focus the energies of the school on student achievement?") changed significantly over four years (Heck & Hallinger, 2010, p. 873). Moreover, those changes were dynamically linked to changes in school improvement capacity, which, in turn, correlated with higher student growth rates.
A three-year analysis (May, Huff, & Goldring, 2012) of the daily activities of 39 elementary school principals provides a similarly dynamic picture of leaders, albeit a bit of a photo negative. It found that over three years, principals changed significantly in how they spent their time. Perplexingly, however, schools where principals focused more time on managerial tasks (like school finance and personnel issues) had higher achievement, and schools where principals shifted their time to instructional or transformational leadership (like goal setting and teacher development) had lower achievement. This finding runs counter to two decades of calls for principals to be instructional leaders, not simply building managers.
Bear in mind, however, that these data were correlational, not causal. Performance dips may have prompted principals in struggling schools to focus more on instructional issues whereas higher performance may have taken the pressure off other principals to be instructional leaders. Indeed, in the first study, researchers observed all principals proactively driving school performance, whereas in the second study, the principals were reactively responding to school performance.
A More Nuanced View
Nearly 30 years after pronouncing the link between leadership experience and performance "shot to hell," Fiedler (1997) synthesized two decades of research for the U.S. Army and arrived at a more nuanced conclusion—namely, that the benefits of leadership experience were situational. He found that in high-stress circumstances, with little time for analysis or contemplation, experienced leaders are better than less-experienced (and even more intelligent) ones. Smarts alone, it seems, isn't all that helpful in a foxhole. On the other hand, in low-stress situations, leaders often rely too much on experience or how they've always done things—which can lead to performance plateaus. As Fiedler observed:
When the task requires deliberation and careful reconsideration of the consequences, the highly experienced leader is likely to be impatient and call for immediate action in the belief that "we don't need another study; we already know what to do." (p. 6)
In these circumstances, intelligence and patience are virtues, helping leaders dissect problems and plan better actions. Fiedler concluded that "stressful situations call for experienced leaders, and experienced leaders require a modicum of stress in order to function well." On the other hand, "intellectually demanding problems require that intellectually able leaders work in a relatively stress-free environment" (p. 6).
Born, Made, or Coached?
Fiedler's findings suggest that when faced with high-pressure situations (for example, turning around a school), inexperienced leaders may benefit from someone with more experience helping them make better (and quicker) decisions. Experienced leaders, on other hand, may benefit from a critical friend asking questions and providing the "modicum of stress" they need to stay sharp. And when faced with thorny challenges, all leaders may benefit from someone who can help them reflect calmly, think through problems, and find the best path forward. In short, leaders can benefit from a dose of Aristotle's Golden Mean—moderation between too much or too little experience and too much or too little stress.
Two studies in education may offer a final piece to this puzzle. Goff and colleagues (2014) found that principals were more receptive to, and able to act on, feedback from teachers when paired with coaches. And another study of 12 principals of under-performing schools (Warren & Kelsen, 2013) found that when paired with experienced administrators, they improved their leadership abilities and saw significant performance gains in their schools. Coaches in the two studies helped leaders become more reflective and more proactive, respectively—seemingly applying Aristotle's Golden Mean by inviting reflection and offering experience as needed.
The fact that we know so much about Aristotle is thanks, in part, to a seemingly natural-born leader, Alexander the Great, whose conquests helped disseminate Hellenic ideas to the rest of the civilized world. Yes, Alexander may have been blessed by nature (and royal lineage), but he also benefitted from nurture—namely, tutoring by some of the best minds of his day, including Aristotle, who continued to correspond with him during his conquests. Leadership, in any era or context, seems to be a matter of nature, nurture, and coaching.
