Are We Born With Leadership Traits?

I am reading a book called The Ladies Lending Library by Janice Kulyk Keefer. It is about a group of women who, along with their children spend the summer of 1963 renting cottages along a lake in Canada. They spend the week reading, gossiping and wishing they lived the lives of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. While they drink gin and swap stories on the beach, their children plan and scheme and get into harmless trouble. I haven't finished the book yet but the children in the story got me thinking about something I have often wondered. Are leadership qualities something we are born with or something to cultivate as we get older?

In this book, as in life, there are certain children who take the lead in games, sports, music, school and well...everything. They are the ones who had the ideas to build the fort or climb the tree. They were the ones who, when going for the bike ride, would lead the group. They delegated the tasks when building the sandcastle. When the sandcastle was finished, and the waves took it away, they were the ones who lifted our spirits and told us that we'd always make another one tomorrow. I always thought that in the pecking order of children's games and lives, they were the "leaders".

Looking at their lives now, many have had successful careers. Some are doctors, some teachers; some own their own businesses and some are senior leaders in organizations.

In the training classes I give, I often ask the participants if they led the group on the bike ride or if they were in the pack. The responses I receive often reaffirm the characteristics I see from their behavior in the class. Those who "led the bike pack" are often more vocal and offer more suggestions and encouragement. Those "in the pack" are a bit more quiet yet insightful once they get going.

I'm not trained to study human behavior but I've been doing learning and development a long time and think that leadership is an inherent quality. We can train leadership skills but those "in the pack" may take a little longer to pick up and apply them.

Job Competencies, Transferable Job Skills and Other Tips

The other day I met with a recent college graduate. His Mom, one of my friends asked me to look at his resume and give him the feedback that only a stranger can give. He wants to go into advertising and while his resume noted that, the rest of it needed a tune-up. We did a couple of things. I asked him questions and took notes while he spoke. I wound up with 3 pages of notes and found that none of that good, solid experience was on his resume. This is what we did:
1. Job Competencies: I gave him a worksheet listing six common job competencies and the definitions of each. They are Communication, Organization, Analytical/Problem Solving, Leadership, Interpersonal and Technical skill sets. I asked him to go though the definitions and:
· Rate himself on how accomplished he is in the competency
· Check the competencies he enjoys doing
· Provide real life examples of how he used the competencies (especially the ones he likes and those where he excels.)

2. Transferable Job Skills: This is where it always gets interesting and fun. When he looked at the Job Competencies his face dropped and he said that he may have used one of them during a job as a summer intern at a corporation during his Sophomore Year in college. He couldn’t even imagine how these competencies would fit into his other summer jobs or even his college course work.
His other summer jobs included working at an ice cream parlor and being a camp counselor. Transferable Job Skills are those life and work skills that transfer to another job. For example, when he was a camp counselor, he ran a football league for 100 children who were between the ages of 8 and 12. When I asked him what running a league involved, he went through the list of organization skills, planning, follow through, time management, writing communication brochures, speaking with parents, recruiting coaches and referees, decision making, ordering uniforms and the like. The same holds true with the ice cream parlor job. He trained workers, was responsible for the money, handled customer complaints and so much more than making sundae’s.
Once these skills were out in the open and listed on the Job Competency worksheet we could move on.
3. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook http://www.bls.gov/oco/ or the Bureau of Labor Statistics Career Information for Kids: http://www.bls.gov/k12/index.htm . I asked him to go to these websites and look up the advertising industry. These sites list industry trends, salary and the needed training and education for hundreds of jobs. The career site for children is easier to navigate. He went to both and searched for key works to describe the jobs he is interested in. Those words will be strategically placed in his resume. I also asked him which of these advertising profession words matched the Job Competencies/Transferable Job Skills that he liked and was good at. There were matches!

The three steps that I used with this recent graduate can help anyone better prepare for writing their resume. Once the Job Competencies and Transferable Job Skills are identified, half the work is done. By the way, it is helpful to ask someone close to you to review your skill set and note if there are any other Job Competencies and Transferable Job Skills that you may have forgotten.