Managing Leadership^®

One of the principal motives for attempting to identify and emulate the personal characteristics of leaders is the hope that we will thus be transformed into leaders, ourselves. There are at least two problems with this notion, but we’ll just briefly cover one of them, today:

• Most of us are able to strengthen - perhaps even to discover - current personality characteristics. But we cannot develop them anew.

This is pretty straightforward, and with a moment’s thought, I would suggest it’s awfully hard to dispute. After all, how many people that you understand to be leaders - not to mention “great” leaders - have attributed their success in this to having mimicked a list of such traits promoted in a professor’s book or a guru’s workshop?

These lists, to the extent they are valid at all - a subject generally rejected by researchers - are not basic science: no one has experimented in a lab with various combinations of personality features mixed in assorted ways to see what would develop, ultimately discovering the list of those leading to leadership.

Rather, these lists are a flawed effort to reverse-engineer a leader from attributes observed in people adjudged to be successful leaders. But those who attempt to draw out the contributing factors - even the “leaders” themselves - don’t really know what it is that led to their success. It could be the result of a trait altogether overlooked, or it could be circumstantial and un-repeatable by the same “leader” in a different organization - a development with which we have abundant experience.

The idea that we can produce leaders from such lists is like that of medieval alchemists who attempted to produce gold from common metals. But you cannot mix or blend or stamp or mill leadership traits into people, transmuting them into leaders.

Leadership comes from a far broader, deeper, and fundamental mix of phenomena than can be comprehended by such lists. The leadership alchemists miss this point. But, of course, so do the great numbers of us who so earnestly hope they can pull off the stunt in the end, after all.

They won’t, though. We will be creating life long before we create “leaders” by mixing personality ingredients together just so, and then throwing the switch to convulse that particular monster into existence.

And, in my opinion, the former is a far less scary prospect than the latter. What do you think?

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Here are all the posts in this series:

1. The argument for individual leadership
2. Humility? Check. Sincerity? Check . . .
3. Passionate? Check. Inspirational? Check . . .
4. All hat, no cattle
5. We’re here to help you
6. The lengthened shadow of the leader
7. Sticks and stones

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Today’s Tip: Speaking of alchemy, take a look at this Business Week piece on faked resume credentials patched together by overly ambitious executives. Perhaps these executives have discovered that, as Groucho Marx said about sincerity, if you can fake it, you’ve got it made.

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Technorati Tags: characteristic, leader, leadership, organization, Business Week, Groucho Marx, sincerity, leadership characteristics, leadership traits

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