Contrary to common folklore and urban mythology, we are not born into leadership. Leaders are not born genetically wired and predestined for leadership. We are shaped and built into being leaders by influences too numerous to count. These include parents, teachers, coaches, peer groups, religious influences, social influencers, entertainers, sports idols, and others. Books, movies, video games, YouTube videos, and other forms of extemporaneous experience figure heavily into how we are shaped. The upshot of all these influences is that we make millions of personal decisions about what we like and prefer and what we don’t. As described in a previous article (“Help Your People Become the Difference You Seek”), Enjoyment Performance Theory from psychology converts all these choices into our behavioral tendencies, competencies, and interests.

By combining new professional training and certifications in my work with clients over the past 10 years, I have formed a point of view that leaders come in varying degrees of readiness for the role. There are well known skills, competencies, and mindsets that effective leaders tend to have and use. Experience is important in that it be relevant to the situation a new leader finds himself in. Intelligence is important but an exceptional IQ is not critical. Emotional intelligence is especially important and, sometimes, the difference between success and failure. Charisma can be useful but is not essential. Being a visionary is important when the new leader finds herself in an organization that has become directionless and needs new hope and energy. 

All these factors are important and useful. However, there are several behavioral competencies where a certain level of mastery is highly predictive of successful leadership. It turns out that these are paradoxical competencies because each one is comprised of two traits (tendencies) that exhibit paradoxical characteristics. I recently wrote an article on this. (Effective Leaders Manage Paradox). If you remember, if both traits are strong and balanced with each other they are in a state of balanced versatility. The stronger the state of balanced versatility, the higher the level of mastery and the higher the likelihood of successful leadership performance.