It’s hard to soar with the eagles when you’re surrounded by turkeys.

Do you have a passion for quality, in product, process, or people? If you don’t then why not? Is it because you don’t really care about your company’s mission, you’re turned off by a boss who doesn’t care, or you’re surrounded by people who don’t care?

If you find yourself disengaged then either it’s time to step up to the plate and engage those around you or it’s time to move.

Employee engagement is the key to engaged customers and better results.

If you don’t believe me then perhaps you’ll believe the Gallup Organization who says it well in this post.

McKinsey has done some interesting research and written a great article on how leaders kill meaning at work. I had a conversation recently with a friend who is a recruiter and we were discussing (not gossiping) about a variety of people we know who are serial tormenters. They go from job to job, tormenting new people at every organization. The recruiting system must be broken if this keeps going on. I guess they get good references from current employers in the hopes that they’ll leave.

The funny thing is that the serial tormenters I know don’t even realize that they are doing it. They seem to think everyone else is doing something wrong. Where do serial tormenters come from? Are serial tormenters born or are they made? Do they learn from being tormented themselves? Great research ideas if anyone out there has time.

Ask yourself: Do you work for a serial tormenter? Could you be one yourself? Would you know it if you were one?

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Trust academics to study everything. You might have read last week’s rant on whether leaders are born or made. Sure enough, some very distinguished academics attempted to use research to figure this out.

Heritability and Leadership

To study whether leaders are born or made one group of researchers used identical and fraternal twins. “Preliminary evidence using a behavioral genetics approach has shown that approximately 30% of the variation in leadership style and emergence was accounted for by heritability; the remaining variation was attributed to differences in environmental factors such as individuals having different role models and early opportunities for leadership development (Arvey et al. 2007*).

Because identical twins have 100% of the same genetic makeup and fraternal twins share about 50%, this behavioral genetics research was able to control for heritability to examine how many leadership roles the twins emerged into over their respective careers. In this and subsequent research for both men and women across cultures, similar results were obtained. The authors conducting this research conclude that the “life context” one grows up in and later works in is much more important than heritability in predicting leadership emergence across one’s career.”

I’m glad that debate is done and we can turn to actually figuring out how to develop people as leaders instead of inventing tests to identify leadership capabilities at birth.

*Arvey RD, Zhang Z, Avolio BJ, Krueger RF. 2007. Developmental and genetic determinants of leadership role occu- pancy among women. J. Appl. Psychol. 92:693–706

Research from the Center for Creative Leadership attempted to answer the question of whether leaders are born or made. You can read the research here. While 52% of the respondents believe that leaders are made, fully 19% believe that people are born leaders. A further 28% believe that they are both born and made.

I found it to be a very strange topic to research. If you look at the results, 48% of people would appear to believe that you need to be born with leadership capabilities to become a leader and of those, 19% think that no amount of training can help. I suppose that those who believe that you need to have some innate leadership capability would be those that support streaming of children in early grades or that an aristocracy is a better form of government than a meritocracy. The same discussion takes place all the time in the world of entrepreneurship wherein people attempt to pontificate about whether entrepreneurs are born or made.

It is a silly discussion as it doesn’t get us anywhere as a society. We need entrepreneurs and we need leaders. Every single person has some degree of entrepreneurial spirit and some degree of leadership capability. Leadership does not only happen at the CEO level or in politics. Each and every person needs to perform some act of leadership even if that is only providing a vision and motivating oneself to get through the day. Every person in a working environment who collaborates with others needs to perform small acts of leadership on a daily basis.

I’m hoping that the Center for Creative Leadership come out soon with a study about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Perhaps instead of arguing about whether leaders are born or made, we should be trying to figure out how to accelerate their growth as fully 81% seem to believe that this is possible..