Leadership Case

What Leaders Need

Perhaps you are not convinced that anyone can be a leader. Your natural reaction is "If it is so easy, why am not I leading something?" In the section entitled "Leadership Myths" earlier in this chapter, we point out that the leaders are not born, they are made. Leadership is a happy joining of someone who has the desire, training, and circumstances to lead, with a group of people that requires leadership. The following section explains these necessities in detail.

Leaders must be trained

Leaders are out there, they just need to be encouraged and taught. And leader does have to be taught. Even the Dalai Lama, recognized at age 2 as the leader of Tibetan Buddhists in what is considered a divine event, received a through education in the roles and responsibilities expected of him by the monks who searched among the villages and farms of Tibet for the next living incarnation of Buddha.

Napoleon underwent a long education at St. Cyr (France's equivalent of West Point) before he started on his way to field marshal. Winston Churchill was a newspaper reporter, an adventurer, a member of Britain's Parliament, and a junior Cabinet minister before he emerged as a leader on the eve of World War II.

All leaders go through a period of training, of taking on increased responsibilities and increased learning, and no leader rises to the top without the assistance and, sometimes, the patronage of people who will give a potential leader the encouragement and opportunities needed for him or her to home leadership skills.

Leaders require a goal

Another way to look at the problem of why emerging as a leadership is so tough is this: Leadership requires a goal that cannot be attain without a leader's help. If a group of people is capable of dealing with its own problems on a day-to-day basis, it does not need leadership.

When Bill Clinton's campaign advisors told him and the nation, "It is the economy stupid," what they were saying in effect, was, "It is not leadership, stupid." As students of history, Clinton's advisors rightly observed that the best thing to do in boom times is to get out of the way, and to help the economy along with loosened regulation and lower interest rates. These are not leadership decisions, but rather, calculated thinking that recognized that the economy has a life force of its own. By being smart enough to stay out of the path of the great engine of market capitalism; Clinton could ride a wave of good feeling all the way to the White House.

Conversely, after a person is in the White House, he or she is expected to lead, even when few leadership tasks are available. What is perhaps Bill Clinton's greatest undoing is that he could