The Age Old Question

Tell me, Richard. You’re a college professor. Are leaders born or made?

I was startled by this peculiar greeting. Actually, I was flabbergasted. It’s true. I am a college professor. I teach management and leadership courses at Covenant College, high atop Lookout Mountain, near Chattanooga, Tennessee. I was calling on a senior executive of a large foundation to express appreciation for the foundation’s long-standing and generous financial support of the college. As I entered the door into his luxurious, well-appointed, mahogany-paneled office, I was greeted with this bewildering question: Are leaders born or made?

Not one to shy away from a first-rate challenge, I retorted, Made! This is what Covenant College is all about! We’re in the business of making leaders! Frankly, I felt rather smug with my quick-witted comeback.

What followed could be described as gracious, just as easily as spirited. This highly regarded community leader and I took opposing stances on this age-old question.

Leaders are made! I said.

Leaders are born! he exclaimed. Your position is not biblical!

We soon ran out of time, forgetting the original purpose of our scheduled appointment. Though befuddled by this executive’s unanticipated challenge and relentless interrogation (he is an attorney by training), his provocative greeting prompted what has grown into my zealous pursuit for a balanced and reasoned response to this troublesome, age old question.

Let me ask you, Are leaders born or made?

Richard

The Demise of the Person

What is man?

What makes a person a person?

What makes you, you?

Familiar questions?

Led by the naturalistic philosophies and the human sciences, the traditional Judeo-Christian view of the person is under an insidious attack. In fact, your very personhood is under attack. The uniqueness of your personhood is being assaulted, discounted, distorted, and destroyed by technology, bureaucracy, media, the behavioral sciences, the judicial system, and even by recent advances in the field of bio medicine ... such as artificial insemination, cloning, genetic engineering, abortion, and euthanasia.

The machine of modern society is geared to absorb your individuality and rob you of your humanness ... distilling the human mind to nothing more than the boom and buzz of electrical impulses and chemical reactions.

The image of personhood that is emerging, particularly from the behavioral sciences, is radically distorted and far removed from the traditional and classical views of the person. The prevailing view of humanity is devoid of any concept that people are dependent on, or responsible to, a Creator God.

Stephen Evans described this attack this way, It is fair to say that the rise of the human sciences in the twentieth century has been marked by the demise of the person. That is, there is a definite tendency to avoid explanation of human behavior which appeals to the conscious decision in favor of almost any non-personal factors. The idea that God is the Creator of all things is forgotten. (Evans, C. Stephen, Preserving the Person: A Look at the Human Sciences, Grand Rapids, MI, Baker Book House, 1977, p. 14)

You know there's more to you than that!

Richard

Created to Lead

You were created - then commanded - to lead:

• Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
  Genesis 1:26-28 (ESV)

• Each and every person possesses, in equal portion, the created attributes imparted by God in His incomparable act of creation. Leadership ability emerges from these God-given attributes. Consequently, and contrary to popular belief, leaders are not born; leaders are not made. Leadership is not the byproduct of the genetic code, nor is leadership the product of having grown up in the “right” environment or having attended the “right” college. Leadership has nothing to do with being the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Rather, leaders are created. Leadership arises directly from the attributes of God. Because every person, male and female, is created to be God’s image, every person, male and female, possesses equal capacity and full potential for effective leadership. In short, each and every person possesses, right now, the right stuff for leadership. There's more ...

• Because you are created in God’s image, you have the responsibility to bear God’s image. That is, you are to rediscover and cultivate the long-forgotten created attributes of God. You have been charged with the responsibility to carry each one of these created attributes, your leadership traits, into every arena of your personal and professional life. When you reflect God’s created attributes, you are leading. Leadership, then, is best defined as “claiming and cultivating the created attributes of God.” This is your created capacity for leadership. This is the Genesis Principle of Leadership.

This is the truth about leadership.

Christian Views of Leadership

There is far too much misleading “Christian” advice about leadership out there.

The Christian community is enchanted with the current leadership craze. Have you noticed? There is an eruption of “Christian” publications, associations, seminars, and sermons focusing on leadership.

A great deal of this “Christian” thinking about leadership is woefully unexamined, ignoring the deeply flawed behavioristic notions of personhood driving contemporary notions about leadership. Regrettably, far too many prominent Christian writers, leaders, and pastors recklessly ransack and adopt the latest leadership “flavor of the month,” casually baptize this defective notion about leadership by sprinkling it with a sloppily selected Bible verse, and then piously pronounces this view as “the” Christian view of leadership.

Consequently there is a vacuum of Christian thinking about leadership. The Christian community is notorious for “training the next generation of leaders” but turning out followers by the cage full – “rabbits” – as Solzhenitsyn might have called them.

It is time for a Christian view of leadership!

It's Time to Tell the Truth about Leadership

It's time to tell the truth about leadership!

• Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines a leader as “...one who has the ability to lead, show the way to, guide the course or direction of, or to be the first or foremost.”


• This definition is not exactly helpful. It reflects a vacuum of substantive, meaningful thought about leadership. It does not produce solutions to our culture’s leadership problem. Just look at the headlines.


• There is too much rubbish out there – too much ill-informed and misleading advice.
  

I trust you will enter into this discussion.

Three Things and a Photo

Seth Godin said, "Give me three things and I can find a place for them in my brain." (Seth's Blog)

Mike Farrand, my good friend, advised, "Make sure to include a photo with your postings - even if it doesn't relate to your text."

So, here goes: three things and a photo:

Three Things (Can you find a place for this in your brain?):

1. Leaders are not born.
2. Leaders are not made.
3. Leaders are created.

And a Photo (How's this!?):

Yes - I took this picture myself - last week in Alaska. Whales are created too!

Cheers! Dick

Leadership is not an option. Perhaps that’s why leadership has become an industry, not just an intriguing subject.

There are few people who don’t lead someone: a son, a daughter, a neighbor, a co-worker. A few lead many; most lead only a couple. Both by role, expectation, and interpersonal relationships, leadership is everywhere – leaders are everywhere. From many perspectives, those who have led us have formed us.

The subject of leadership has mushroomed into an industry that annually sells millions of books, prints untold numbers of magazine and journal articles, and captures thousands of seminar attendees looking for that extra-special advantage. “Experts” and “would-be-experts” wax eloquent on all the skills and maneuvers a leader can employ to move people into some pre-determined, desired behavior pattern.

Possibly there’s little in this human adventure that’s as important as one’s influence on others. The very character of life is the result of those whose influence has led us in one direction or another. So it’s understandable that the subject of leadership would capture center stage in a world struggling to find significance and meaning.

For many practitioners it’s simply a cause and effect dynamic. If the leader can create an effective causation, the effect on those to whom the causation is applied will be appropriate. The effect on the follower is directly impacted by the skill of the one exercising lead causation. Great skill – great effect; little skill – little effect.

The great gurus of business and politics and religion have been carefully and thoroughly analyzed in an attempt to uncover their leadership secrets. Most have a book they’ve written to share with the world the keys to their success. All have been credited with specific keys to their effectiveness – keys that, if you and I could duplicate, would launch a new measure of our own success.

But a student of leadership soon discovers a discouraging fact. The great bulk of information on the subject is simply another way of saying the same thing others have already said – or a new twist on the same motivational behavior that didn’t work last time. It tickles the imagination, gives short-lived new energy to modified old patterns, but adds little to the understanding of this important phenomenon. Even when graced with a Bible verse, a pithy quote from classic literature, or a clever joke, the foundation of our understanding of leadership somehow isn’t strengthened by what someone else did or said. The age-old questions of “where” and “how” and “when” about leadership simply never found resolution in the plethora of pages.

You are correct. There’s a direct relationship between the remarkable creative act of God and the leadership capabilities within each person. That relationship is intriguingly exposed and expanded in your notions of the source of leadership. No longer do we need to discuss whether leaders are born or made – whether leadership is genetic or environmental. The source is The Source. Leaders simply reflect the characteristics God created within everyone.

H. Charles Roost, Ph.D.
Founder and Director, International Steward, Inc.
Grand Rapids, Michigan