Editor’s note: I accidentally posted this blog originally in the wrong place, so it never showed up on the Leadership site.
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I’m not so sure that I agree much with the trait approach. On the surface, it seems like something that might make sense: you’re looking for personality traits that make for good leadership, whether those traits were developed in the person through nature or nurture. Presumably, if your whole life was spent in developing the traits necessary to be a good football team captain, then you might be uniquely prepared and highly successful in that position once it is given to you. However, in the real world, situations change much more dynamically. Someone might go to many years of school, spend even more years ‘in the trenches’ learning the business, manage hundreds of people, and then once the job of CEO is thrust upon them, there is some sort of unforeseen cultural or technological revolution, and they are unable to effectively lead.
I think much of leadership is situational in nature. You can’t really take General Patton and put him in charge of a group of recruits today—he would get too much bad press in the current blogosphere and the politically-correct environment ingrained in modern kids. Similarly, a modern CEO probably would not do too well as the head of a corporation in the early 1950’s, with all the returning battle-hardened WWII veterans probably failing to adhere to modern equality and human resources principles.
I am not, however, saying that certain overarching ideas in leadership cannot be applied universally. Integrity, setting and enforcing rules, having high standards, and leading from the front probably tend to work in most human cultures. Still, how can we quantify what combination of personality traits will show that some specific leader will possess the capability to do all of these things and more? Some might state that the Five-Factor Personality Model probably encompasses much of what people think of when they are considering who would make a good leader, but I would note that, as quoted in Northouse, the 2002 meta-analysis of this model was conducted on studies ranging from 1967 to 1998 (2007, p. 26). This time period is effectively prior to or right at the cusp of the bloom of the Information Age, in fact it’s almost pre-Internet. Much has changed in the 17 years following that assessment. Blogs, widespread ultra-fast communication; the architecture of the internet has so deeply affected our way of thinking and our manner of communication that it has changed the way we interpret culture. Facebook is mentioned in most divorce cases. It’s possible to have ‘friends’ that you never see or talk to, but occasionally exchange inane pleasantries with over a website. People shut themselves into their basements and live vicariously through a glowing screen. What does that 2002 study have to say about the massive social changes since even 2005?
References
Northouse, P. G. (2007). Leadership: Theory and practice. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.