Are leaders born or made? Sunday, 10 June 2012 Written by Aristides Cardoso

According to Gardner (1990) when a question is asked for numerous times without producing an answer, there is potential of it being the wrong question or being a means to portray intricate anxiety. The question “are leaders born or made” has been asked for centuries without a concrete answer emerging.  Why are we asking this question?  Are we trying to provide an elucidation to why people are rising to their potential by being a leader?  Gardner (1990) says that individuals utilize only a small portion of their potential.

Leaders are not born they are made.  The typical business functions and activities of the various leaders are composed by each with its own sets of needs, expectations, and priorities.  The leader is responsible for integrating and coordinating the best job possible.  What makes this role such a challenge is that the leader has limited authority and control over the people with whom he or she interacts.  Success in meeting the goals of the organization of everyone involved.  The leader must persuade and inspire other to cooperate.  This is the reason that leaders are more important than followers.  According to Cronin (1984) leader should recognize bad leadership and as well as good leadership between leaders and followers.

Leaders should listen to their subordinates attentively and by doing so, a leader can show respect for his or her subordinates.  It demonstrates that he or she conjectures the individual has worthy thoughts and, therefore, is valued.  When subordinates feel needed, they tend to take more interest in what they do.  If a leader takes the time to listen, it will motivate its subordinate, and it creates and builds a trust.  According to Greenleaf (1977) servant is a leader or follower who is always searching, listening, contemplating that a better time is an advent.

When people talk about leadership occurring as an event it means they usually view leadership as continuous and characteristics of a greater person and a set of enduring habits, values, or standards.  The common phrase natural born leader reinforces the belief that relationship is a durable quality.  This approach does that leadership exists as the leader and follower contemplate a beginning, middle, and an end to leadership.   Leadership happens when one person offers direction that another willingly capitulates, or when someone inspires an entire organization or community to support a particular direction.  Leadership deals with the influence leaders have on people beyond the formal authority of their organizations.  According to Gardner (1990) leadership is the accomplishment of group purpose, which is used by effective leaders, innovators, entrepreneurs, and thinkers.

It is vital to have effective leaders who can influence their workplace environment through words and actions.  Leaders influence arises from followers’ interactions with him or her while a manager’s influence stems from the manager’s position in the hierarchy.  It is the responsibility of the leader during this time to step up and get the organization back on the right path.  Basically, it is the job of the leaders to emerge when people and organizations face unknown places that require someone to step up, take the lead, and gain willing followers.  To succeed it requires focusing on those who will follow, gaining their support, and then moving forward.  Every good leader should have the ability to process information as it is presented to them.

Effective leadership, indeed, is an important motivator.  It is essential for companies to have the ability to motivate employees to act the ways to achieve specific goals.  Therefore, leader on one hand, as part of employees is involving in the direct relationship with other common workers.  However, as particular employees core responsibilities and abilities are agents of motivation.  The relationship between leaders and subordinates tends to be directive, and strict.  It works the according with human nature.  Leaders and subordinates can satisfy their works and responsibilities by working harder than before in right circumstances.  Therefore, cooperation is the joint that linking leaders and subordinates.  Leadership is performing as motivator.  According to Gardner (1990) effective leaders heighten both motivation and confidence.

Leadership is performing more and more behavior of encourage and motivation instead of the negative control and coercion.  Leaders have traits of individual leadership styles.  Most importantly, to find what kinds of styles can match business situations and more motivating is one of the essentials to make a successful leader.  Without followers, leaders are no longer leaders no matter how strong their others abilities are.  Moreover, if followers just do what leaders want them to do, but not help him or her efficiently to achieve the goals and have no positive actions, the leader could not be seen as an effective one.  Therefore, leadership itself has responsibility in motivation.  Leaders and followers have different potential and various skills and cognizance.  Leaders positively needs to motivate his or her subordinates as a group instead of forced and negatively control.

Conclusion, I believe leaders are made.  I also believe that it is important to be a leader and not a follower.  Followers never seem to rise above expectations or go further than just what the expectations are.  Leaders go above and beyond the expectations and rise to meet even more than the goals set for themselves.  The authors say, "We present a framework and propositions for examining how the self-concept plays an integral role in the display of authentic transformational leadership behavior bestowed individual and situational characteristics" (Sosik & Cameron, 2010).