2012.2.11 NA
Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: Talented people’s leadership is born by natural and can’t be learned by people.
The Secret of Leadership
What sparks an ordinary people differentiate from other people to become a great leader? Did Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, and Martin Luther King know what is leadership? Is leadership a born gift? In my opinion, even if leaders I mentioned above may have no idea about leadership, the leadership is not a gift but can be learned by people nowadays.
Leadership has its own rule which can be studied. Great leaders may followed the rule unconsciously. But once we know what that rule is, we can follow it consciously. Just like the rule of language. We speak our mother tongue without noticing the grammar at a very young age. Caesar, Napoleon and Hitler may show their leadership like speaking their mother tongue. But for many CEOs in this modern world, they attended MBA classes and spending huge money to learn leadership and management. This is a solid fact which is like people learning a second language by rules. Then, let’s turn to the question “Is leadership a born gift?”. Also like languages - no one can utter a meaningful word as soon as they were born, no one own the leadership as soon as they left mother’s uterus.
Leadership can be practiced like physical skills. If one was a leader in the Student Union in his/her student time, he/she may be have higher possibility in charge in his/her working group. According to a recent study from Psychology department in Harvard University, 93.2% people who had leader experiences in school found management positions after they graduated. Thus, we believe that those young leaders are benefit a lot from their student leadership experiences. They have more chance to acquire skills of leading. Since they practiced so much, there is no wonder for them being more competitive to be leaders.
Leadership includes skills like organizing and planning. And all of these skills can be learned in a progress from apprentices to masters. Organizing is matching people and things they good at. That is just to collect information and structure the whole program. This is a basic thing apparently can be done by all ordinary people. Then, planning may be a little difficult to an apprentice, but still, it’s not impossible to achieve. When people have do organizing, they also can do planning for the reason that planning is another kind of matching -- between things and time.
Since the world is orderly, there is a rule behind leadership which can be studied, practiced and learned. We are human beings but not any other animals who can find regulation of the world. Based on that, we modern people can crack the secret of leadership and learn it.