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Henk Penseel's Wittenborg Blog - Natural born leader

Please read the title right. It's not the Natural Born Killers, the famous movie of Oliver Stone featuring Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis. If you read quickly, many do that quite often, you see something different than what is printed. A sentence further you recognize your mistake. It happens because there is so much to read that you scan most of what is written. But I really want to say something about what is natural (your dna), and what is learned by reading (carefully, not scanned). A natural leader makes quick decisions rightly most of the time within mille seconds. That's called quick, isn't it?

However, these days the leader follows a course by which he learns that making the right decision is built upon many small decisions, which you should put in some sort excel sheet. After that is learned, the leader is told that not every decision has the same weight. So he (it could be a she of course too) learns to expand his excel sheet. In his case the outcome stays the same with or without the weighted decisions on paper.

He might have gained some insights by attending the session and talking about that in the group. His attention could have been attracted to something he didn't think of. But in general the decision he made with his gut feeling didn't change.

Was it wrong to go to such a meeting? I don't think so. (He expanded his network.) But the so called 'leaders without natural talent' attending the meeting will not become real leaders, but superficial leaders who learned some tricks to prove afterwards all the decisions they made.

I've seen it so often that half of the persons following leadership courses don't belong there. Still some of them are able to get better positions all the time, then they fail, made redundant, but you see them at a high position somewhere else. Just for a short period. They leave again with a substantial farewell bonus. I wonder how is it possible that so many succeed in being not a natural born leader and convince all these selection committees....

WUP 10/01/13