Your Opinion: Can You Teach Leadership? Or Are You Born With It?

Can you teach leadership? Or are you born with it?

I’ve gone back and forth on this. Here’s where I’ve landed.

Certain qualities that make leadership easier – charisma, confidence, a natural ability to read rooms – may have a significant innate component. Not everyone starts from the same place.

But leadership as a practice – the behaviours, the decisions, the habits of mind that define effective leadership – is absolutely learnable. I’ve seen people transform their leadership capacity through deliberate effort.

What can be taught: how to listen, how to give and receive feedback, how to set direction, how to build trust, how to make decisions under uncertainty, how to develop people.

What is harder to teach: the desire to lead in service of others rather than in service of self. That’s more of a values question than a skills question.

So: yes, leadership can be taught. But only to people who want to lead for the right reasons.