It depends what kind of leader you are talking about. It depends on how you define leadership.
If you use the popular and broad definition that leadership is influence, then everybody can be a leader because everybody can influence someone. If your view is that leadership is serving others, then most people can be leaders as well. But if your definition of leadership limits it to public figures, CEOs and company executives, then it might disqualify a lot of people.
There is this popular myth in America that we can become whatever we want. For example, it’s common to find people who believe that anybody can become the president of the United States or play basketball like Michael Jordan if they just work hard enough.
The truth is, we are all uniquely designed and unique gifted. We all have strengths and weaknesses. No one life is exactly the same. There are some things we can do well and others we can’t.
When it comes to leadership, the good news is that leadership isn’t something monolithic. Good leadership is contextual or situational. There is no single leadership style that works in every situation.
If someone can effectively lead 5 people, it doesn’t mean he can effectively lead 100 people even with more training. A doctor who is put in charge of leading 5 other doctors has a different situation and needs different approaches than that same person put in charge of leading an orphanage of 20 children. The same way, leading a company like Apple is different from leading a branch of the military as a General.
Here is what I think is true. Because we have unique passions, gifts, life stories, personalities, levels of maturity, and needs, we are each uniquely prepared to be lead successfully in different situations. The key then becomes self-discovery, then finding what position fits who you are, and then serving and leading there. Everybody can lead somewhere but everybody cannot lead everywhere.
The mistake people often make when they ask this question is that they often have a specific type of leadership position or situation in mind. They don’t have in mind the myriads of ways and situations in which people can lead.
For example, people are smart in different ways. Some people are good mathematicians and physicists while others are terrible with numbers but have amazing artistic gifts or other types of gifts. If the only way measure used to find smart kinds is what our broken school system often does today –which is put them in a class and have them sit down, listen to a someone teach them math and then test them–we will only identify students whose gifts allow them to be good in that situation and miss the opportunity to identify the many others who are smart in different areas. A gift like that of Mozart blesses the world differently than the gift of Michael Jordan or Nelson Mandela. But all of them are amazing gifts.
The same is true with leadership. People can lead in different ways and are gifted in different ways to do so.
To conclude, my response to the question “are leaders born or made?” is that they are “mostly made” and “slightly” born.
Even though the hereditary contribution, which comes as gifts and talents contributes only a small degree to leadership success, that degree is crucial and indispensable for success. Just as it’s not easy to take someone who is not gifted in singing and make them sing like Celine Dione, it’s not easy to take someone who is not gifted to be able to lead in a particular situation and train them to lead there.
Great leadership doesn’t come from simply looking outward, desiring a leadership position, and then going out to get it. Great leadership arises from looking inward, discovering what you have been given and who you are, and then finding the best place that fits the shape of your own piece of the puzzle and placing yourself there to serve and lead generously.
Most leaders are made. Our natural endowments predispose us for success in specific areas. However, to actually turn that potential into performance, we need to add a lot of external circumstances and training. Many people don’t know this, however, the truth is that much of our success doesn’t come from our personal efforts. It happens because of external circumstances that we didn’t play any active part in creating.
A reasonable estimate is that 25% of leadership success is from nature (from birth) and 75% is from nurture (training and external circumstances).
