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Wittenborg MSc Student, Henk Penseel's Blog on True leadership

My grandfather was founder of a sports club in Amsterdam of which he became chairman. My father, after a couple of years of being secretary in the board of that same sports club, was elected chairman after my granddad stopped. He stayed on voluntarily for more than two decades. After a few others who had the chairman position, I decided to run for chairman too. Before that I had some experience as a leader in sport teams and at school. Later in my work I was asked frequently to lead a team. During that time I was confronted for the first time to leadership trainings.

Since then I have attended many of them. You were in a group for a day or more to do all kinds of role plays, fill in surveys to find out what type of person you were. Depending on the social science stream of the trainer you could be blue or orange, a pragmatic or a postmodernist, or you had a personality authority or a knowledge authority. In short at the end of these meetings you received a stamp of the trainer stating what kind of leader you were, or you were maybe a follower. But the aim was to give you tools to become a better leader.

During the last weeks before my father died we had some talks about all kinds of things. For me it was hard to speak out aloud how admired him all my life. He was calm, had a natural authority, had helped many people with problems, but kept some of that knowledge to himself. How could he have lead a sports club without any troubles all these years. "The mentality of people has changed,"  he said, "I wonder whether I could have succeeded as chairman so long nowadays".

Did he follow any training or study for leading a sports club that performed in the highest division In The Netherlands? No, he didn't. Like many other leaders in the world, he didn't follow a course for being a good leader. It was in his genes, he had leadership talent. Still, according Kakabadse in Success Insight (1998), Plato had as early as 386 BC initiated one of the first leadership training centers in the world, which he called Academie, meant to teach politicians.

Two questions run through my mind. One is, whether it is possible to become a leader if you don't have the talent for it. And the second one, I wonder how many high ranked leaders got that job without using their elbows. I know my dad had talent and didn't use his elbows.

henk penseel

WUP 30/12/12