In this introductory talk to the BPI Senior Executive Board, Jim Kouzes reflects on the perennial question of whether leaders are born or made. Drawing on 35 years of collaborative research with Barry Posner and data from the Leadership Practices Inventory (approximately 5 million entries, with a sample of 150,000 leaders), he reports that only 0.0013 % of people show no leadership capability, effectively concluding that virtually everyone possesses some innate capacity to lead. The focus then shifts to how that capacity can be developed. Kouzes argues that the key to becoming an exemplary leader lies in learning, noting that better learners tend to exhibit stronger leadership behaviors—a finding reinforced with colleague Louis Brown Hatalla. He outlines five fundamentals for learning to lead: (1) Believing you can, (2) Aspiring to excel, (3) Challenging yourself, (4) Engaging support, and (5) Practicing deliberately. The talk sets the stage for a deeper session on these principles.
Chapters
Greetings everyone, I'm Jim Kouzes and it's a delight to be able to talk with my colleagues from the BPI Senior Executive Board. Thanks to Lou and Scott for the invitation and I look forward to our time together coming up very soon. Barry Poser and I have been working for many years On leadership behavior, and over all the years we've been working, there's one question that has consistently come up as the most frequently asked question, and that question is, are leaders born or made? You may have asked yourself that question. I know I get that every question— that question every time that I do a seminar, I do a speech, I do a workshop or a class with students. Are leaders born or made? There's something about leadership that makes people want to ask that question. I have never been asked, are managers born or made? But when it comes to leadership, there's always some wonder about whether it's something that is in the DNA or is it something that comes from learning, whether it's observing others, whether it's reading, whether it's from your experience. So Barry and I— have been working together for over 35 years on leader behavior, and we have done the research to answer this question. And we have determined that, in our very scientific approach, empirical approach to this question, that we have never met a leader who was not born. Now, of course, all leaders are born. We're all born. So are architects, so are engineers, so are computer scientists, so are talent developers. We're all born. That's not the appropriate question to be asking ourselves, really. The question is, can we learn to lead, and can we be more effective at leading than we currently are? Now, Barry and I took a look at answering this question in a more scientific manner, and we asked ourselves, to what extent do people demonstrate currently leadership behavior? To a great extent and to no extent at all. And we asked ourselves the question, What percentage of people demonstrate no leadership capability whatsoever? And if you were to answer that question, what do you think is the answer to that question? Well, I'll tell you what we get, and that is 0.0013% of people demonstrate no leadership capability. Now, this is from our database using our Leadership Practices Inventory. We have about 5 million people total in the database. We use a sampling of about 150,000 leaders, and we asked ourselves this question, and And that's what we came up with, 0.00013%. So in other words, if leadership is born, then 99.99987% of people demonstrate some leadership capability and have the capacity to do so. So really the question then is how do we, better enable leaders to learn to become exemplary. And one of the hints that I want to give you is that the vast majority of people have some leadership capability. And what makes them more effective at demonstrating that capability? And what we have found along with our colleague, Louis Brown Hatalla, is that those leaders who are better learners are more likely to demonstrate exemplary leadership behaviors. And that's what I want to share with you when we are together. I want to talk about 5 fundamentals. Believing you can is the first of those. Aspire to excel. Challenge yourself. Engage support. And practice deliberately. I look forward to that opportunity. Talk to you soon.
