believe think of the world as composed of two mutually exclusive of people, leaders and nonleaders, more how each person can make the most of leadership opportunities he or she may be easier to see the pointlessness of asking whether leaders are born or made by looking at an alternative question of far less popular in terest Are college professors born or made? Conceptually the issues are the same, and here too the answer is that every college professor is both born and made. It seems clear enough that college professors are partly"bom because(among other factors there is a genetic component to intelligence and intelligence surely plays some part in becoming a college professor made." One obvious way is that college professors must have advanced education in specialized fields: even with the right genes one could not become a college professor without certain requisite experiences. Becom- ing a college professor depends partly on what one is born with and partly on how that inheritance is shaped through experience. The same is true of leadership More specifically, research indicates that many cognitive personality traits are at least partly innate. 1 Thus natural talents or char- acteristics mayoffer certain disadvantages to a leader Con- sider physical characteristics: A man's above-average height may increase others' tendency to think of him as a leader it may also boost his own self-confidence. But it doesn't make him a leader. The same holds true for psychological characteristics that seem related toleadership. The stability reunions people seem over long example, at school to have kept the same personalities we remember them as having years earlier) may reinforce the impression that our basic natures are fixed, but different environments nonetheless may nurture or suppress different leadership qualities.