Not so Great Man

Would you say that people who are great or do great things were born for greatness? Would you be able to pick out a child from a nursery and say that one will be the greatest? Or watch a family of children grow up and decide which one will be the greatest? For a long time it was thought that people were born great and that you could find these people based on the traits they were born with. Now according to Newtonian mechanics you are born with a destiny to be great but that’s a bunch of complicated mumbo jumbo that we are going to ignore for now. For now we will look at trait theory and why it doesn’t work.

People have done many tests to discover which traits, both mentally and physically, make the best leader. Although there are traits that match up well with people in other professions the traits that were discovered to make a good leader were only applicable to situations not professions. The great leaders that we look at today were people who made a huge difference in a time of great strife but even more often we are not in a time of great strife. Even though we are not in a time of great strife there are still problems to attend to. Who is going to look at these problems? Well the first answer would of course be a leader. The thing about solving the problem now is that we don’t need a leader with high achievement, low affiliation, strong persuasion, and a hierarchy power structure. For this problem we need a network structure, which requires an immense ability to affiliate. The situation has now changed entirely causing the traits of the leader to change entirely.

So could you reuse an old leader from a totally different situation to attend to this situation? Or are the traits that the leader was born with static? Now although these are questions based around Behavioral Theory, which implies that they were learned. But what if they were not learned the leader just changed naturally like a lizard changes color. Could these changes be traits that the leader was born with? Or could it be behavioral so that the leader was taught when and how to change?

Now there are many theories that people have and there are many sub-categories within these theories. Trait has multiple such as the distinction between physical and mental traits or emotional and intelligence traits. Now all of a sudden you have traits cancelling each other out making potentially good leaders bad leaders and potentially bad leaders good leaders. In the end although Trait Theory sounds like a good theory it ends as being impractical. The actions of the human population are too complex and change at such a high rate of speed that there is no way to accurately predict leaders based on traits.