7/14/2006 10:26 AM
Article prepared for publication in The Human Factor
Can Leadership be Taught? Observations from the Field.
Morgan W. McCall, Jr.
Professor, Marshall School of Business
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA U.S.A.
George P. Hollenbeck
Hollenbeck Associates
Livingston, TX U.S.A.
Leadership has intrigued thinkers, writers and actors for centuries. Our colleague David Campbell’s comment over 20 years ago is as apt today as it was then: “Leadership has an elusive, mysterious quality about it. It is easy to recognize, hard to describe...perhaps no other topic has attracted as much attention from observers, participants and philosophers—with so little agreement as to basic facts” (Campbell, 1984). And apparently the elusion of leadership is not confined to India, or the United States or any single country or geographical area: “It is equally misunderstood in Africa, Asia, South America, Europe and the Middle East” (Avolio,1998).
One leadership question that has persisted over the years is “Can leadership be taught?” A variant of the “Are leaders born or made?” question, the assumption is often made that if leaders are, as Shakespeare put it in Hamlet, “to the manner born,” then leadership can’t be taught; if people are more malleable, then with proper instruction we should be able to teach students to be leaders. The great number of books purporting to teach leadership clearly side with the “yes, it can” school, as do the business schools around the world who--explicitly or implicitly-- promise that one will be a better business leader if one reads the book or finishes the course.
Another bit of leadership “intrigue” is that the leadership books and the MBA programs are thriving despite the fact that there is virtually NO evidence that either reading the best-selling leadership books or attaining an MBA--even at “elite” business schools-- makes people better leaders. The success of the books and programs is perhaps less surprising in the U.S. where the “default” philosophy is that “anyone can become anything” than it is in many of the world’s societies which tended to view the human condition as less easily changed.
In this article, or perhaps more accurately, essay, we will argue that indeed, leadership cannot be taught. We will not side with the “leaders are born” advocates, however. We will instead endorse a comment attributed to leadership guru Warren Bennis: as Bennis told to us, when asked if leadership can be taught, he responded, “No, leadership can’t be taught; but, it can be learned.” From our combined half-century of study and research on executive leadership (McCall et al., 1988; McCall, 1998; Hollenbeck & McCall, 1999, and more recently our research on global executives (see McCall & Hollenbeck, 2002), we will describe what our findings suggest about the best way to approach developing leadership.
We will not attempt to resolve in any detail the “born or made” question—we believe it is best left to the neuroscientists and geneticists to come up with the definitive answer. The executives we have interviewed often tell us, ever so fervently, that real leaders come with the “right stuff.” It comes as a surprise when these same executives, after venting their strong nativist views, proceed to describe to us situation after situation that has enabled them to learn the lessons of leadership. Despite the apparent contradiction, their answer is clearly that leaders are both born and made.
Recent studies of identical twins have tackled the question of how much of leadership is born and how much is made. Using as a criterion the number of leadership-like positions held, Arvey and his colleagues (2006) have determined that statistically the proportion (at least in terms of this criterion) is about 30% born and 70% made. Just exactly what attributes make up the inherited component and how they make themselves known is still a mystery, but something is clearly present in the makeup of people drawn to leadership roles. Further, there is rather clear evidence that many of the traits often associated with effective leaders have inherited components—twin studies have shown that as much as half the variance associated with factors like extroversion, energy level, and intellectual ability are inherited. (cited in Arvey et al., 2006). The 30% finding validates the arguments of those who devote their efforts to selecting the best candidates for leadership development opportunities. While we might argue about what “best” means in this context, we would endorse the value of implementing selection strategies for identifying those with leadership potential.
At the same time, the 70% of the variance that is unaccounted for by genetics suggests that leadership ability can be developed, even if not exactly “made.” In fact, that 70% argues for investing heavily in leadership development. But even when organizations recognize the importance of investing in developing leadership talent, they too often spend their leadership development money on classroom programs that are unlikely to have much impact on leadership ability instead of investing in strategies more likely to produce the desired results. We count ourselves among those seeking the 70% solution.
We think of “becoming a leader” (to again borrow a phrase, this time from the title of a 1989 classic book by Warren Bennis) as a process involving four overlapping components: desire to lead + motivation to learn + ability to learn + opportunity to learn. Our endorsement of leadership learning rather than leadership teaching may appear to be a small shift in emphasis, but that shift makes a world of difference. Our focus changes from a manufacturing model (make a leader) to an agricultural model (grow a leader) with major implications for how organizations spend their time and money in developing leaders.
We will describe briefly the importance and implications of each of these components for leadership development. Our hope is that both organizations seeking to develop leaders and individuals hoping to grow their leadership capability will see course corrections that can help them meet their goals.
Discovering the Desire to Lead.
Executives whom we have interviewed about their leadership journeys repeatedly emphasize the accidents of fate, the chance occurrences, and the serendipity that have defined their paths. Only a few start their careers with any more than a general idea of the direction they are headed. As these successful leaders look back at the key events that shaped the directions they eventually took, one of the most frequent types of events across dozens of studies is the early learning that comes soon after entering the world of work. In our book, Developing Global Executives, we have called these Foundation Assignments, which include different kinds of early work experiences and first managerial assignments. Only half of the 101 global executives we studied around the world could identify even broad influences that led them to choose global leadership careers; the other half could cite nothing other than chance encounters. Some examples illustrate this point (McCall & Hollenbeck, 2002):
-“There was nothing special that influenced me—I grew up in East Sarawak; I was just planning to finish secondary school, but they offered me a scholarship based on my test scores.” (An Indonesian executive back in Indonesian after a stint in London).
-“There was nothing special in the way I grew up. I grew up in a small country and it makes you cautious; it inhibits your thinking. And my family is the reverse of me—my father and mother have never left (Switzerland), and my two brothers live within fifty miles of where we were born.” (A Swiss executive in the United States).
-“Nothing really. I had an ordinary background, worked on a farm before I went to the university. I had no idea what a multinational company was before I went.” (a British executive in Holland).
Each of these executives emphasized how important it had been for them to discover their interest.
Career counselors have long known that early jobs and activities are periods of discovery in which young people learn what they like and what they dislike, and where they fit in and where they don’t. Many parents, of course, despair that that their youngsters will ever find their way. We still have been surprised, however, at how even the most accomplished among our global executives had to “discover” their interest in a life of global leadership. And, although we usually focus on how interests are discovered in the beginnings of careers, we also found that discovering interest in becoming a global leader can take place at a later stage: at age 40 or 50 or even older. With the new career patterns being shaped around the world, where individuals may have several different careers over a lifetime (Hall,1986), individuals may end up “beginning their careers” many times over.
In our prescriptions to both organizations and to potential leaders, we have come to emphasize the importance of identifying the kinds of experiences that allow people to discover an interest in leadership. In some cases these experienced were administered to global leaders-to-be in a heavy-handed manner: People were “sent” on assignments to other countries, sometimes on project teams for limited amounts of time, and other times in “permanent” assignments that required relocation. Sometimes the challenge was the first managerial job (where having a good boss seems particularly crucial), whether domestic or international, where individuals either discovered the excitement of leading or returned to their role as an individual contributor.
Until people discover that they want to lead, there is neither attention nor motivation to develop the abilities required to do it. Assuming a leadership role is often a major transition for the person (see, for example, Hill, 1992), and negotiating that transition requires a commitment that only comes with a desire to lead. When the transition involves both leading people and living and working in a foreign country, it is more demanding and requires even greater desire.
Motivation to Learn to Lead.
Although individuals often have to discover their desire to become global leaders, and despite the fact that those discoveries may sometimes seem chancy and random, actually becoming an effective leader requires more than just an interest in leadership. Career advisors say, “Lots of people want to be doctors, but few want to study medicine.” So it is with leadership. The true test is whether the desire to be a leader translates into the motivation to invest the time and energy and concentration required to learn the lessons essential to effective leadership--and to keep learning them again and again in the face of changing circumstances and adversity. Although most executives accept without question that reaching the expert level in visible and straightforward endeavors like golf, tennis, or music requires enormous passion, energy, concentration, and practice, they see leadership differently. It never seems to occur to these same executives that the much more convoluted and multi-dimensional work of a leader takes as much or more of this same focus.
As levels of performance increasingly are judged by global rather than just local or regional standards, high levels of success in almost any endeavor, whether sport or management, does not just “happen.” Studies of gifted individuals consistently find that they share “an intense drive to master” (Winner, 2000). Ivan Lendl, the former world champion tennis player recently provided us with an excellent example as he described (Owen, 2006) the intense and extreme preparation of his daughters to become professional golfers. When the reporter challenges the need for such intensity and suggests golfers who in the past became great without it, Lendl dismisses the challenge with the simple statement “the world has changed;” what worked in simpler times is no longer sufficient. The world of leadership, both literally and figuratively, has changed also. Perhaps “natural born leaders” could get by on the 30% gift in simpler times, but leading in the complex organizational world of today’s global economy requires deep knowledge, a huge range of abilities, and serious skill development.
While motivation to learn to lead flows from the desire to lead (people are motivated to learn to do the things that interest them), desire to lead can result from experiences that teach it. It is often difficult to determine which came first—the experience or the interest. Which argues again for giving people leadership experience at an early age! But whatever way the causal arrow points in discovering a desire to lead, acquiring the ability to lead requires a highly motivated approach. In all domains of expertise “the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain” (Ericsson et al., 1993).
Ability to Learn from Experience.
Passion and motivation may be necessary for learning to lead, but they are not sufficient. Desire and motivation may lead a person into the kinds of experiences that develop leadership ability, but little development can occur unless the person has the skills to learn effectively from that experience. Unlike the classroom, learning on line is confounded by getting the job done—the lessons are easily missed in the pressure to obtain results.
Ability to learn from experience is an inadequately researched topic that we nonetheless know is a complex mix of intellectual and emotional abilities. Clearly some people are better at it than others. Research has consistently found that executive leaders are typically at about or above the 90th percentile in tested intellectual ability compared to the population as a whole (e.g., Campbell, 1995); but, we also know that sheer intellectual ability--essential though it may be--does not explain the differences among those who are able to learn the lessons of leadership from the experiences they have.
We have some research on what the ability to learn from experience actually entails. McCall and his colleagues found that high potential international leaders were more likely to:
--show commitment to making a difference, taking risks, and using their intelligence in novel ways to get results;
-- have a sense of adventure, resulting in a willingness to take or make opportunities to learn about the business or of other cultures;
--learn more from an experience by seeking and using feedback and creating a climate where other people are more likely to provide useful feedback);
--change as a result of trying new things, incorporating feedback, and seeking to become more effective. (See McCall, 1998, for a summary of this research).
In a recent study we followed managers in a high tech company as they entered new executive roles. The demands of executive jobs—the pace, complexity, and accountability—coupled with being new in them, combine to reduce both trying new things and reflecting on experience. The ability and willingness to reflect—to think about what has happened and why—took place “on the run” more than in a planned fashion. Although a few of our executives seemed to naturally structure reflection into their days through diaries or during commutes, the default option was too often to focus on results to the exclusion of the patterns around them.
We found also that some executives were “teaching” executives who built into their leadership roles a responsibility to help their subordinates learn from the situations they were experiencing. They might set up “after action reviews” where executives examined what went right, what went wrong, and the lessons that could be learned after an event or a project took place; or, they might “dialogue” with executives about the lessons to be taken from the events of the organization.
Opportunities to Learn Leadership.
A classic story of career counselors tells of the man who dies and goes to Heaven where St. Peter is giving him a tour. St. Peter points out one of Heaven’s residents and says “that is the greatest architect who ever lived.” The new arrival exclaims, “You must be mistaken. I knew that man down on earth and he wasn’t an architect, he was a shopkeeper.” St. Peter replied, “Ah, but if he had been an architect, he would have been the greatest that ever lived.” So be it with leaders; if potential leaders with the ability to learn from experience never have the opportunities to develop their leadership talents, they will end up shopkeepers!
The kinds of experiences that offer the essential leadership lessons have been identified in numerous sources (e.g. McCall, Lombardo, & Morrison, 1988; McCall, 1998; McCall & Hollenbeck, 2002). They span a large domain, from challenging assignments (like start ups and turnarounds, often in foreign cultures) to exposure to exceptional people (usually either really good or really bad bosses) to the hardships faced in work and life. One of the common features of these experiences is adversity or challenge, requiring the development of new perspectives and new skills in order to succeed.
Carlos Ghosn, currently CEO of both Nissan and Renault, in his recent book about the turnaround at Nissan describes these experiences and the role that companies must play:
It is imperative for a company to prepare its future managers. You can’t prepare them by leaving them at corporate headquarters to work in administrative functions. You prepare them by sending them to the most difficult places…. You have to take the ones with the most potential and send them where the action is…. Leaders are formed in the fire of experience. (Ghosn & Ries, 2005, 152)
As many organizations have found, however, getting the high potential leaders into jobs “where the action is” is easier said than done. Sometimes companies don’t or won’t recognize Goshn’s “imperative” and don’t have the processes in place to make it happen, but sometimes they don’t have the jobs. The U.S. company General Electric is an example of a company that recognized the imperative, historically had the systems in place to implement the imperative, had a CEO willing and able to make it happen, and had an abundance of learning opportunities. (see Charan et al., 2001). CEO Jack Welch referred to these learning opportunities as “popcorn stands.” When he wanted to give a potential leader a new opportunity he would say, “Give him a popcorn stand.” In GE’s case, a popcorn stand might be a $100 million business, but whatever the size, the popcorn stands—the learning opportunities—provide the opportunities for potential leaders to learn. Current GE CEO Jeff Immelt never tires of pointing out that he had profit and loss responsibility at 28!
Not every organization has GE’s learning opportunities but, we argue that every organization has some learning opportunities and challenges that can teach the lessons of leadership. The problem arises because short term results may be better if executives are kept doing what they already do well, rather than given “popcorn stands” that require learning. In addition, when organizations do move people into challenging experiences, they tend to enact their belief that leaders “have it or they don’t” and let their talented people “sink or swim.”
Our experience would suggest two critical activities that organizations must refine if they are to best develop their leadership talent. First, they must go beyond replacement planning to development planning in matching jobs with people. That is, they must consider not just who might replace the incumbent in key jobs; they must also consider who could learn the most if given that job. To do development planning requires identifying what jobs can teach and who is most likely to learn the lessons.
Second, organizations must take steps to help talented people learn. The “sink or swim” approach may indeed enable the “cream to rise to the top,” but too often the cream curdles instead. They must focus on results AND learning. This suggests clear learning objectives as well as performance objectives, feedback on learning as well as on performance, and, as appropriate, seeing to it that resources are available to enhance learning.
Perhaps the bottom-line is best expressed by test pilot-American hero Chuck Yeager who, among many accomplishments including being the first pilot to break the sound barrier. Yeager was elevated to icon of the “right stuff” by author Tom Wolfe in the book of the same name. As it turned out, Yeager was annoyed at the suggestion that he was born with the right stuff, whatever that might be in the world of piloting. In his autobiography Yeager said, “All I know is I worked my tail off to learn to fly, and worked hard at it all the way. And in the end, the one big reason why I was better than average as a pilot was because I flew more that anybody else” (Yeager, 1985, 319). It is the same for those who excel at leadership—they work hard at getting better and learn from their experiences. Perhaps the reason some leaders are exceptional is that they lead more than anybody else!
In Conclusion
An organization can’t “make” anyone develop, but that doesn’t mean that development should be left to chance. With the vast majority of leadership lessons acquired rather than inherited, then there is enormous opportunity to facilitate development by considering the basic ingredients of leadership development—discovering interest, motivation to learn to lead, ability to learn from experience, and opportunity to have the experiences that teach. Each of these can be influenced by an organization.
Underneath these processes, however, organizations must see leadership as an essential element of business strategy, and they must recognize that leadership capability can indeed be developed. With leadership as part of strategy, not confined to programs run separately and independently from the mainstream of the business, leadership development becomes a strategic imperative rather than a Human Resource program. The commitment and resources will be channeled to identifying the required leadership development experiences and identifying individuals who would profit from those experiences; they then assure that talented people get the right experiences and the support to help them learn the lessons of leadership.
Indeed, leadership can’t be taught. But with the proper care and feeding, it can be learned!
REFERENCES
Arvey, R., Rotundo, M., Johnson, W., Zhang, Z., & McGue, M. “The Determinants of Leadership Role Occupancy: Genetic and Personality Factors.” Leadership Quarterly, 17:1, 2006, 1-20.
Avolio, B., in Church, A.. “From both sides now: Leadership—so close and yet so far.” The Industrial/Organizational Psychologist, 35, 3, 1998, 57-58.
Bennis, W. On Becoming a Leader. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1989.
Campbell, D. “Preface.” In .E. Rosenbach & R. Taylor (Eds), Contemporary Issues in Leadership. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984.
Campbell, D. "The Psychological Test Profiles of Brigadier Generals: Warmongers or Decisive Warriors?" in Assessing Individual Differences in Human Behavior. Lubinski, D. and Dawis, R.(Eds.) Mountain View, CA: Davies-Black, a division of Consulting Psychology Press, Inc. 1995.
Charan, R., Drotter, S., & Noel, J. The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership-Powered Company. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001.
Ericsson, K., Krampe, R., & Tesch-Romer, C. “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expertise,” Psychological Review, 100, 3, 1993, 363-406.
Ghosn, C., & Ries, P. Shift: Inside Nissan’s Historic Revival. New York: Currency/Doubleday, 2005.
Hall, D. & Associates. The Career is Dead: Long Live the Career. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1996.
Hill, L. Becoming a Manager: Mastery of a New Identity. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1992.
Hollenbeck, G. “Leadership Development: Contemporary Practice.” In Kraut, A.I. and Korman A.K. (Editors) Evolving Practices in Human Resource Management. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999.
McCall, M. High Flyers: Developing the Next Generation of Leaders. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998.
McCall, M. & Hollenbeck, G. Developing Global Executives: The Lessons of International Experience. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002.
McCall, M., Lombardo, M., & Morrison, A. The Lessons of Experience: How Successful Executives Develop on the Job. Lexington, MA: Lexington, 1988.
Owen, D. “Title IX Babies,” The New Yorker, May 15, 2006, pp 44-49.
Winner, E. “Giftedness: Current Theory and Research,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9,5, 2000, 153-156.
Yeager, C., & Janos, L. Yeager: An Autobiography. New York: Bantam, 1985.
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