The key to understanding leadership, then, lies in understanding your own concept of the human nature of followers and bow leaders relate to them. For example, Niccolo Machiavelli's assumptions about human nature were set forth in his advice to a young man of the ruling class in the fifteenth century. Machiavelli's treatise. The Prince once was required reading for students in educational administration and is still widely admired today. It taught that the exercise of leadership by those who inherit positions of power as a privilege of membership in a dominant elite social class required the ruthless exercise of position power. the use of guile and deception when expedient to achieve the leader's personal agenda, and indifference to the concerns of others.