Is leadership a talent or can it be learned?

Lately I'm came across this questions a number of times. It seems that many managers, recuiters and companies are haunted these days by bad leadership. Apparently there are too many un- or misleading managers at work, people that have been promoted until they reached their incompetency. I will try to give a short insight in my views of leadership, based on my own working experience as a leader, experiences I've made with my leaders and some thoughts to bring it all together.

To be frank right ahead: there is no unique answer to the question. If leadership could be learned we wouldn't have a problem and would not even think about the topic, just train people correctly. On the other hand if leadership would only be a question of talent, the world economy would have been doomed years ago. Yes you are guessing right, I'm giving you the one answer you don't want to hear: It's a bit of both.

There are four basic pillars on which a true leader stands:

1. Knowledge
2. Experience
3. Talent
4. His guts

There is no way you can be successfull without knowing your subject. You need to have a good insight in things and a good leader is always a good analyst too and I'm not talking only numbers here, but also seeing und understanding people, decripting networks, breaking down overall complexety and viewing trends, just to give a few examples.

Even if knowledge by definition can be learned, it will only get potentialized by experience. If you would have to choose a guide to climb Mount Everest would you just choose a technically well trained guide or the experienced one who climbed the Everest already? Experience is even often unvaluable and most companies and recruites underestimate widely this component in the recruiting process and often prefer titles and degrees over realtime experience.

I truly believe that even if you're an expert of your business with many years of experience you will only be a leader if you have the specific talent of leadership. Watch kids in kindergarden und you'll see there is always one that stands out, the kid everybody follows, naturally because s/he has "something". Didn't you experience that in workgroups someone is taking the lead, not because s/he is particularly good at the subjet, but only because it felt natural to do so and everybody agrees, often there is not even discussion about it. This natural leadership is a talent and you're born with it. Like you're a gifted tennis player or virtuose violonist. You can learn to play tennis as much as you want, train and play for years, but you only have a chance to get to the top if you have the talent.

And finally the true leader has guts and uses them wisely. Didn't you ever come to the point where all analysis wouldn't help and you couldn't count on your experience? Or even worse when all analysis and advice would point you one way and you just "believe" it should be the other way? A true leader knows how the deal with his guts, when to use it and when not.

So in the end I do believe that leadership is a natural born talent that needs to be developped and expanded over years through knowledge and experience. A true leader is someone who over years grew his naturally given legitimacy to lead by becoming an expert in his field and combining his knowledge with realtime experience. Trusting his natural instincts he has a strong "belly opinion" and will use it wisely, above all in situations where information and knowledge is contradictory.

A good example may be Alexander the Great who at the age of 18 lead several successfull military campaigns and even if he was appointed General of the army by birth right, his personality made him a true leader, becoming more powerful by experience through ten years of battle, creating one of the wastest empires of the ancient history. Once he died and the leader was gone, civil wars broke out and the empire fell apart.