Are Great Leaders Born or Made? What CEOs Need to Know.

The argument has been brewing for centuries: Are great leaders born or made?

For many CEOs, the belief has been that most people simply aren’t made to be leaders.

The roots of this belief lie in “The Great Man Theory,” popularized in the 1840s by historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle. To Carlyle, leadership traits were intrinsic — great leaders were born that way and emerged when a situation to lead arose.

But there’s a problem in modern times: There’s a sense of inertia when developing great leaders. In its 2025 HR Outlook, The Brandon Hall Group found that many organizations claim to value learning and leadership training, while few truly embed it into their culture. This shows up as inadequate resources for learning and poor metrics to measure success, according to the report.

Part of this paralysis may stem from CEOs often believing leadership is innate. They wait for leaders to emerge, limiting succession options, draining the leadership pipeline, and relying too heavily on a handful of star players.

But when the stars move on, are their leaders ready to step up?

Perhaps there’s a more accurate view of leadership — that you can develop great leaders before the need arises.

Why the ‘Born Leader’ Narrative Won’t Die

If innate leadership truly is a myth, popular culture helps its spread.

Stories of greatness feel inevitable. Steve Jobs and his return to Apple, Jeff Bezos and his single-minded drive, Bill Gates and his garage-to-billions company. These stories are compelling, but they’re also misleading.

What appears to be innate leadership is often the result of experience, reflection, and deliberate practice. When observing a great leader, people see the result of thousands of hard lessons.

There’s also a psychological convenience to the “born leader” narrative, says Balaji Krishnamurthy, Chairman at Think Shift and a Vistage speaker. It is easier to label a person than to develop them, he says, and while you can’t simply “learn” to be a leader, you can develop into one.

“Are you an intentional leader or a happenstance leader?” Krishnamurthy asks. “You lead and you don’t know how you lead, but you just lead.” The difference, he says, matters enormously. An intentional leader has studied what they do and why it works. A happenstance leader simply performs, without ever understanding the mechanics behind their performance.

When companies wait for happenstance leaders to emerge rather than developing intentional ones, Krishnamurthy says that they surrender control of their own future and leadership pipeline.

What the Research Actually Says about Leadership Development

Some people are made to be leaders more than others, but research has also found that leadership traits can be developed.

Research in The Leadership Quarterly studied twins and found that while 30% of leadership traits seem to be genetic, 70% of leadership traits can be acquired through learning and development.

Additionally, researchers have found that the brain continues to form new connections well into adulthood, a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity. The human capacity to grow has no true expiration date.

And McKinsey has found success over the years with its “leadership factory” approach to on-the-job learning, sharing insights, and regular feedback.

Experience is necessary, but it needs the context of feedback. A manager who has done the same job for 15 years hasn’t necessarily had 15 years of development. They may have had one year of development repeated 15 times.

The research points to something clear: Organizations are not stuck with the talent they have, nor are they stuck poaching the best leaders from other companies. They can work to deliberately develop leaders, bolstering their pipeline of future stars.

The Difference Between a Strong Manager and a Strong Leader

A strong manager executes reliably within a defined lane — meeting KPIs, finishing projects, and meeting regularly with employees. But a strong leader redefines the lane, changing the trajectory of a company’s future.

The problem: When it comes to leadership, there are no KPIs to measure what it means to be a strong leader. There are tools, Krishnamurthy says, and intentional leaders use tools to find capabilities common among some of the world’s best leaders.

These traits include:

• Strategic Thinking, the ability to see beyond one’s functional responsibilities. Leaders connect daily decisions to long-term outcomes.
• Decision-making Under Uncertainty, the ability to act with incomplete information, balancing speed against risk.
• Emotional Intelligence, the ability to manage tension, navigate conflict, and build trust with employees. Leaders with high emotional intelligence can self-regulate, avoiding the anger trap.
• Accountability and Ownership: the commitment to take responsibility for outcomes beyond the job, drive execution, and model what the organization expects of all employees.
• Leading Through Change, times when leaders are tested. The best leaders clearly communicate direction and stabilize teams when times get tough.

None of these are personality traits; all can be learned and improved over time. And the right leaders, Krishnamurthy says, can find the tools to measure these and other components of a leadership skill set.

Why Experience Alone Doesn’t Create Leaders

A costly mistake in leadership development is assuming that promotion is preparation. Giving a top performer a management role and expecting them to grow into it is a wish, not a leadership development strategy.

Krishnamurthy developed what he calls the Deming Model, based on ideas from statistician W. Edwards Deming, to explain why. This model identifies two kinds of competent performers: the unconscious competent, who does things well but cannot explain how or why, and the conscious competent, who has analyzed and internalized what makes them effective.

The unconscious competent thrives until conditions change. When the market shifts, when the team grows, when the competitive landscape looks different, what used to work often stops working. Without understanding why they were succeeding, they have no framework for adapting. They often blame the environment rather than examining themselves, Krishnamurthy says.

The conscious competent, by contrast, encounters the same disruption and responds differently. They can identify which part of it isn’t working. They have a framework for stepping back, developing new skills, and leading through evolution. They practice self-awareness.

Nanette Miner — a Vistage speaker, owner of Succession Planning Pro, and author of The Succession Planning Playbook — often works with civil construction companies, where leaders are promoted from skilled work. Often, they receive no training before being promoted. Their technical excellence was real, but it has nothing to do with whether they can lead people, think strategically, or develop the next generation of talent.

“A person gets promoted to a leadership role, yet their company has done nothing to prepare them for the role,” Miner says. “A leadership role requires them to behave differently, and it’s too much, asking them to take on new functional responsibilities while also changing their behavior.”

Even when training is offered, it’s a challenge to fit into busy schedules. Research from the Association for Talent Development finds that 90% of organizations say that a lack of time often gets in the way of managers receiving leadership training.

Instead of waiting or jamming training into tight schedules, Miner says the best leadership training is woven throughout the day. And this starts from the moment each employee is hired.

Waiting to train people until they’re at a manager’s level is akin to waiting to train your child in manners until they’re 10 years old, she says. Many executives fear the costs of training, but Miner says the cost of a workforce that was never developed is far greater.

The Hidden Cost of Waiting

When organizations wait for natural leaders to emerge, problems take their place.

The succession plan weakens. The CEO becomes the decision bottleneck; no one below them has been developed to take on the strategic load. Execution slows, growth stalls, and high-potential employees, unable to see a path forward, leave for organizations that invest in them.

Miner has spent a decade sounding an alarm on this problem, and her urgency has only increased. Baby Boomers are leaving the workforce in large numbers, and organizations that have spent decades developing specialists rather than leaders are now facing a gap that cannot be closed quickly.

“We do not have younger generations prepared to be leaders,” she says. “If you taught everybody to think more critically, how to handle conflict constructively, and how the whole organization works, you up-level everybody’s skills. People would be more productive therefore you’d be more profitable.”

In these situations, Miner says that not only would leaders with the most potential naturally rise, but the whole organization would be stronger.

Strengthening an organization begins with its current leaders. They must be willing to ensure the next generation is ready to lead.

How to Build Leaders Intentionally

Building leaders doesn’t require a large training budget or an external program, but it does require intentionality. And that intentionality starts with leaders looking in the mirror  — Miner says many leaders are missing the very capabilities that leadership training covers.

Intentional leaders are cognizant of the tools they use to lead, Krishnamurthy says, and are good at teaching others to be equally cognizant.

First, organizations can assess capability gaps. Where does your team struggle? Is strategic thinking weak? Is accountability inconsistent? Without a clear-eyed assessment, development efforts are scattershot.

Leaders must also work to broaden their employees’ perspectives. Miner is a proponent of what she calls “job vacations,” having employees spend time in other departments. This isn’t necessary to learn a new job, but to better understand how the organization works.

Many employees often don’t even understand how their organization makes money, Miner says. That’s often a failure of communication by leadership, or simply an inability for employees to see beyond their own role. Employees who understand how the business makes money, how departments are interconnected, and what different roles involve are fundamentally better positioned to lead, she says.

Often, Miner says that organizations develop leaders by sending one promising employee to an expensive external program, which is exorbitantly costly and places the onus on that individual to change the behavior of all leaders in the company.

Meanwhile, frameworks, tools, and applied learning within the daily flow of work develop leadership skills more slowly over time and affect a larger number of people.

“A rising tide lifts all boats,” Miner says. “Why wouldn’t you want everybody to be a better communicator, a more critical thinker, a better problem solver?”

For his part, Krishnamurthy has spent decades building what he calls a “tool chest” of models for thinking about leadership situations. These tools make soft skills — empowerment, delegation, decision-making, conflict resolution — as learnable as technical skills.

Peer accountability can also be a difference maker for leaders who need feedback to grow. Leaders grow faster when they can test ideas in a safe environment, receive constructive pushback, and share challenges with others facing similar situations. This is often what makes Vistage groups so effective for the executives who participate in them.

Leaders willing to shift their mindset, from hoping leaders emerge to designing conditions that allow them to emerge, often find success. Consider what Krishnamurthy says about the employees who leave his companies: He doesn’t call employees who leave “former employees,” but “graduates.”

The No. 1 job of CEOs, he says, is to develop leaders. For small companies, this often means ensuring that leaders grow beyond what a company can offer them, then letting them go.

“Once you get that reputation of the company that will grow everybody, and you move on to other things, you get a track of better talent,” Krishnamurthy says.

The Leadership Agenda

One of the best ways Krishnamurthy has found to build leaders is to have his employees develop a leadership agenda. This is a written document that allows people to articulate exactly how they lead.

He asks them to wrestle with questions like: What do they value? How do they make decisions? What can those around them expect?

The act of articulating one’s leadership style is itself a developmental exercise, one that forces the unconscious competence to become conscious. “Writing it down doesn’t make you an authentic leader,” he says. “But then following that written document will.”

Krishnamurthy requires the leaders in the organizations he works with to write this document, and he uses it as a diagnostic tool. Where there’s a mismatch between a person’s declared style and the environment they’re operating in, it becomes visible. “It becomes very evident, when they write a leadership agenda, that you are just not the person that would work well in this situation,” he says.

This is not a judgment of anyone’s worth, he says, as leaders all have their own methods. The goal isn’t to manufacture a particular type of leader, but instead to develop leaders who are intentional about how they lead, can articulate it, and can be held accountable.

Leaders Are Made — and That Changes Everything

The belief that leadership is innate feels safe. If leaders are born, then there’s nothing to be done except wait for them to appear.

But this is a false, limiting belief, one that will hurt companies. Organizations that wait pay a price in slow execution, weak succession, and avoidable attrition.

The prevailing view is that some qualities of leadership are innate, but leadership traits can be developed through deliberate practice, structured feedback, and cross-functional exposure.

If leaders were simply born, an organization’s growth would be limited to whoever happens to walk through the door with the right personality. But because leadership can be developed, organizations have the opportunity to intentionally cultivate the capabilities that great leadership requires. When companies invest in developing leaders at every level, they expand their capacity to adapt, execute, and grow.

In the end, the strength of an organization’s leadership isn’t defined by a few standout individuals. It’s defined by how consistently it develops people who can think strategically, take ownership, and lead others forward.

How Vistage Can Help

For CEOs ready to take an intentional approach to leadership development, Vistage Leadership Development Programs offer the structured learning, real-world application, and peer accountability that accelerate growth.

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