26 Leading with NLP
see no officer under my command is debarred, by attending
to his first duty, which is, and always has been, to train private
men under his command.’
Teaching others to be leaders makes sense on a personal
as well as a business level. Parents are leaders in a family and
they strive to help their children become independent
adults. In business, leaders develop others in order to help
them learn and help the organization become more com-
petitive. Business is increasingly becoming knowledge based.
What you know defines what you can do. Smart people build
smart products. And smart people do not usually work in
dumb organizations.
A perennial question about leadership is: ‘Are leaders
born or made?’ And the answer is ... ‘Yes.’ Both. It’s a mis-
leading question because it is phrased as if the answer must
be one or the other. We are all born with skills and talents
and we have to make the most of them by learning. Shake-
speare wrote, ‘Some are born great, some achieve greatness
and some have greatness thrust upon them.’ No one leaps
from the cradle a fully qualified leader. We all have to learn
something. Only learning brings out our natural talents.
I am also suspicious of any single answer that closes the de-
bate and takes away choice. For example, if you believe that
leaders are born and not made, why try to develop yourself
or others as leaders? The question has been answered in
your genes.
In researching this book I read a great deal of literature
on military leadership and not surprisingly, all of it states ex-
plicitly that leaders are made. On the other hand if you
assume that leaders are made and a person’s inherent char-
acter does not count, then you must concede that everyone
is equally good as a leader in any situation, and we all know
otherwise.
In my view, being a leader comes from a combination of
who you are, your skills and talents, the relationship you cre-
ate with othersandyour situation. Being a leader means
working with these four core elements. The ‘and’ hides the
magic in the equation. Understanding each piece of a jigsaw