The provenance of leadership

Below is a conversation I carried on via Facebook with a friend of mine last month. His question: "Are leaders born or learned?" He went on to set the question in a purely secular context (so considerations like spiritual gifting did not enter into the equation) and to define a leader as "Someone who others follow, and willingly. Not a manager - a manager is someone who can spin many plates on sticks, do all the paperwork, keep a business running...a leader is bigger - people follow a leader/obey a leader, etc, but they want to..."

My reply:
"I'm going to go with learned. The cultural relativism card is often overplayed, but here it is useful. Throughout time and space, men have followed other men for a range of reasons that defies any one "inborn" trait. Loyalty itself has no one universal manifestation, and there is therefore no one personal characteristic that can elicit it. Rather, you must grow up in a society, becoming steeped in its constructions of valor/leadership/loyalty, before you can successfully wield them. Some people take to this better than others--which is often mistaken for "born" leadership--but in fact there is no such thing. (Remember, this is a secularly posed question.)"

His rejoinder:
"Rob, I think I disagree somewhat. I have found that some people are just naturally the leaders in any crowd. I've been trained in leadership for over 20 years - heck, I have an MBA with an emphasis in leadership, but I've found that all the training in the world only goes so far. Observe a situation with little kids - why do some kids 'lead' the group? They've no training in leadership or motivation. I've had leaders that I would follow through fire, and other leaders, with the same training, whom I would-uh-not follow...I think there is a very strong element of innate leadership that cannot be taught."

My response:
"Mmm, I don't find the example of children very persuasive. There are a lot of reasons some children 'lead' and others 'follow' ... peer pressure, politeness, timidity/assertiveness, the first kid to speak up happened to have a good idea the others like ... I'm skeptical that these young 'uns possess some transcendent quality that accrues them followers (in part because, as I wrote above, I challenge the notion that such a transcendent quality exists in the first place). I will add, though, that just because leadership must be learned does not necessarily mean that it can be taught ..."

What are your thoughts? Agree/disagree? Leave a comment.