Are leaders born or bred? The Access Group in conversation with HR Leader

The HR Leader and The Access Group hosted “Thriving in a tight talent market with effective leadership” earlier this year. One of the topics of conversation was whether leaders are born or bred. Three professionals provided their insights.

Shandel McAuliffe, editor at HR Leader: “Are leaders born or bred?”

Stuart Freeman, director at Kennedy Reid Group, put forward: “Thirty per cent of leadership skills might be inherent or genetic, but 70 per cent could be learned.”

“Leadership, for whatever reason, tends to feel more natural, tends to feel as though it is a little bit more inherent than people management skills. However, I would temper that view by also saying there are plenty of great examples of the benefit from young leaders learning from other leaders, both within a sporting or a business context,” explained Mr Freeman.

“Being a huge sporting fan, I’ll draw on the amount of people who work as assistant coaches under experienced coaches who are ultimately leaders of whatever sport they’re playing in. And the ones that tend to do the best tend to have worked for coaches that have been really successful in their field.”

Mr Freeman added: “Whilst I totally agree that some people probably are very fortunate to be born with some leadership skills, I think that there’s plenty of opportunity for organisations to work with those skills and develop them further.”

Kim Wiegand, the founder of Julip, shared her views on the subject: “I do think it’s a bit of both. I think everyone is born with an ability to lead depending on the environment and the necessity … A lot of it’s situational. I don’t think that we’ve had as strong an investment or understanding of the power of leadership, and investment in training or development around leadership, in past generations.”

Ms Wiegand continued: “So, to this point, a lot of it has been organic … Whereas now, we have an opportunity to really identify those traits that we can foster and grow and develop formulaically to a point.”

Editor: “And how does all of this relate to HR?”

Michael Byrnes, partner at Swaab: “HR fits into this by enabling people to realise their potential as leaders. And so that involves providing them with the skillset … to enable staff to become leaders. And that [means] developing their communication, developing their skills of persuasion, getting people to think about the way that they present their levels of perceived authority, their ethical framework … So those people, who perhaps have not been exposed to leadership previously, can in fact realise their potential as a leader.”

“You don’t necessarily need to fit into that mould of being a natural, extroverted leader to be a very effective leader. So, that’s why it’s important that we don’t get wedded to this idea of a natural-born leader, which is the cliché, because that can exclude, for a variety of reasons, large groups of people from realising their potential as leaders,” said Mr Byrnes.

Ms Wiegand commented: “HR should, and I believe, does wield more power than most people would give it credit for. What business can function without people?

“They do wield a lot of power in a really positive way. They can absolutely support development of people, they can support identification of people who are not performing well, who are really struggling, who need more support. They are the first fundamental go-to really for most people with any kind of challenges,” Ms Wiegand explained.

“I think the power of the HR team is undervalued, and I think that they have a bigger part to play in the progress and development of organisations than simply managing the HR process.”

The transcript of this webinar, when quoted above, was slightly edited for publishing purposes. The full conversation and the original webinar can be found here.