Leadership Is An Innate Skill?

I saw a recent post that raised the question as to whether leadership skills are innate (and cannot be learned). Leadership is a bit of an ill-defined term, so I’m not exactly sure about the context of the original discussion triggering the post, but at face value I have to say that innate skills can help but instilling a continuous learning process about one’s own leadership style (and that of others) can also help dramatically. What I share below intends to illustrate not only that one can build knowledge to help with leadership skills but also that one may find little progress on a day-to-day basis until one day when it all comes together

Two areas that created an “ah-ha” for me with respect to helping me recognize my leadership style were related to going to business school and getting support from a client executive to develop the business skills one of his line managers. Had it not been for these two events, I probably would have turned out as an engineer focused on individual contributor work as opposed to a person focused on business within the technology space. While either of the outcomes is perfectly fine, I am happier that I have found the business slant is more the “natural me”.

The first step in going to business school helped me to develop my leadership skills by explicitly forcing me to focus on thinking about and analyzing business issues, as opposed to passively addressing business issues while working on the job. Business school also gave me an extra level of confidence in knowing that I had spent dedicated time to try to improve my knowledge.

The second step may have occurred, in part, by chance. During a management consulting engagement I was involved with, I was sitting in a three-person, executive review meeting with one of the partners of my consulting firm and the president of the company. The upshot of the meeting was that one of the functional managers was not performing too well and both the president and the partner wanted me to coach the functional manager to help him take his management skills up by an order of magnitude or the functional manager would be fired. What followed from there was some behind the scenes work in analyzing how to approach the situation and then direct assistance with the functional manager to improve the business. After that particular client engagement, things started “clicking” for me, and I was able to get into both interim and direct management roles more regularly to foster my leadership skills.

The upshot of all this is that combining knowledge, practice, and a real environment to foster one’s management and leadership skills helped me to breakthrough and reach a new level (one-time, discontinuous improvement as opposed to gradual change). While the process of improvement may have taken many years with slow growth, I was suddenly able to get things to click together.

I have found similar discontinuous improvements in other areas of life. For example, in tennis, I remember going to tennis camp and getting a breakthrough on getting better control with my one-handed backhand. In drumming, I started to study a completely different style of music (jazz fusion instead of just progressive rock music drumming). The knowledge had to sit for awhile, but one day it all clicked and took me up a notch when I least expected it. If I hadn’t prepared for the time when the conditions and environment were right, I wouldn’t have reaped the benefits. Sometimes I think working on leadership skills might be in the same vein.