What role circumstances play in making someone a leader?

 

I have always wondered

• Is there a contributions of circumstances in making someone a leader?
• For your true qualities to come out, is there a role of situation?
• Leadership qualities, do they need a stimulus, to be demonstrated?
• People become leader because they respond to their environs, true?

I haven’t found an answer to these questions so far. This article is a reflection of some of my thinking on this topic and does not claim to provide any specific answers.

A lots of time you will find that someone in a remote isolated self created corner of your organization will be working quietly. He will keep quiet, deliver whatever is given to him and will be almost always maintain a satisfactory levels of performance. You will never have any specific complains about (or on) him but you will not have any specific impressions about him either. Sounds familiar, right?

You pick something very specific (and challenging) and ask him to work on it. The quiet guy picks it up, works hard and delivers the stuff as expected on time. Through this specific work you allocated, the guy will shine. He will do almost all the things, which you could never associate with anything you thought about him. He will reach out to people, he will rally people behind the work you allocated, he will coordinate and he will motivate people.

Very common situation, almost everyone has got one or two stories of this type in their pockets.

So, what happened here, the person who was never on your radar, the person who you could not associate with any specific leadership quality, a person who you thought is a good worker but not a leader, suddenly demonstrates high degree of competence on leadership quotient. It seems as if he came out of his shell and unfolded all the qualities he was carrying, which were not known to the world.

So, big questions are

• This happened because even leadership needs stimulus?
• He needed some specific challenge to demonstrate his abilities?
• Leadership qualities do not surface without right circumstances?

If I say a ‘Yes’ to these questions, I will be going contrary to – ‘Leadership is about self initiation’.

I have more questions than answers on this topic. This article is for thought provocation and probably will lead to a more conclusive article in future.