Students in a class listen the same lecture but only a few get the best grades. Many people work hard throughout their lives and achieve something but others find success easy. It appears that those people may have some inborn talent which makes them different from others. On the other extreme, there are people who even though after learning different skills still can’t get anything out of their efforts. The third category of people are those who are not self-made but are good learners and if guided in a good direction they usually make out of their lives. Most of the people in this world lie in this category. For them “the single most powerful way to grow as a leader is to become truly self-aware”.
Among three categories, the first one is a natural leader. The second category of people learn required technical, human and conceptual skills and become effective and excel in their lives but only leaders have an inbuilt characteristic of intelligence and drive which leads others. They are empathetic. They put themselves in others’ shoes. The other key element for a leader is passion. He goes an extra mile for the thing or idea he loves and this is his drive to achieve his vision into reality. An innate leader is also humble in nature. He empowers others to lead and involve in dialogues rather than debates.
Despite certain leadership characteristics an inborn leader has, he still needs to polish his abilities by acquiring knowledge. He always keeps on improving himself. He is not stubborn and learns from past experience, not just from academic intelligence.
The numerous natural born abilities of a superior leader are suggested by House as “being dominant, having a strong desire to influence others, being self-confident and having a strong sense of one’s own moral values”. (Northouse 2004, House, 1976p. 171)
If we talk about one of the famous leaders we all are familiar with, Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, he had all the characteristics of an innate leader. He was a leader who emerged in peculiar socio-political conditions but had the personal qualities and capacity to change the political context to pursue his agenda.
Quaid-e-Azam is viewed as the guiding spirit of the movement that inspired the people, articulated and aggregated their interests and concerns into concrete demand. He guided people who had full faith in his leadership towards the goal. Circumstances and conditions prevailing at a particular point in time matter in the rise of such a leader but, as an independent variable, his role was not at the mercy of circumstances. Rather, he is viewed as having the capacity to mould circumstances for achieving his goal.
Innate leaders display “emotions, expressiveness, self-confidence, self-determination, freedom from internal conflict and a strong conviction of moral righteousness”.
ZAHRA MAHMOOD, OMAR IQBAL AND NIDA ZAINAB
Lahore
