You don’t need to lo too long

The other day while working with a group of managers on Rosetta Stone Language succession planning and development, background stories emerged that hinted at the question: Are leaders born or made? Nature vs. nurture is a persistent debate regarding the source of leadership. Managers, academics, and consultants all have views about which contributes more to making good leaders -- genes or experience. One study (Arvey et al, 2007) loed at twins and found that the split was 30% genetics and 70% experience. You don’t need to lo too long before you find a study that concludes there is a different distribution. Most recent studies about the nature vs. nurture debate conclude that at least some degree of whatever they are studying (leadership, parenting, creativity, intelligence, etc.) is attributed to each nature and nurture. , so let’s go with that and not worry about what percentage is which. We could agree that we need to work on both, get good people with good experience, treat them well, and allow them to continue to learn from experience. This is essentially the position the managers ended up with. The group explored the set of attributes that if obtained, would indicate that the candidate had what it takes to be a good leader. The focus of the group was naturally on individuals. I started wondering how relationships are part Learn Arabic of leadership – not just something that leaders make or rely on but that relationships actually create leadership. Since complex systems consist of many diverse, connected, interdependent, and adaptive agents, then it seems like leadership could be viewed as an emergent behavior of the system. In other words, it is the relationships (connections) and quality of those relationships (interdependence) that actually creates leadership. When some groups, teams, and companies exhibit more or less (better or worse) leadership, it may be due more to the nature of the relationships than the nature of the individuals. How they interact and the patterns of interaction may be more important than who they are. The implications of this notion that leadership is in the relationship are many. For example, if you don’t like the leadership exhibited, then one intervention would be to change the relationships. The diagram below is the interaction pattern of a group of managers that were responsible for part of a large company. We asked the group to state how often the interacted with each other, monthly, weekly, daily. The graph Language Learning Software below depicts their weekly plus daily interactions. What they noticed was that some of their cultural differences within the group and lack of overall cohesion was explained by the structure of the interaction network.