4 Biggest Myths About Being a Great Leader

Most leadership advice is wrong about something specific. Some of it is wrong because the research has moved on; some because the original framing was always a bit fashionable; some because the people repeating it have never actually had to make the decisions involved.

Below are four of the most persistent myths about what makes a great leader — each one wrong in a particular way that costs new leaders time, credibility, or career altitude. Where research has settled the question, that's noted. Where the answer is more contested, that's noted too.

Myth 1: Great leaders are born, not made

The "born leader" framing has survived for a century, partly because it makes a good story and partly because we can all point to someone charismatic who seems to make leadership look effortless. The trouble is that it's largely false, and the research is more precise about this than popular framing suggests.

Twin studies from two independent datasets — Arvey, Zhang, Avolio & Krueger in the Journal of Applied Psychology (2007), examining male and female twin pairs separately — consistently find that genetic factors account for roughly 30% of the variance in whether someone occupies a leadership role over their career (30% for male twins, 32% for female twins). A separate large-sample twin study by De Neve, Mikhaylov, Dawes, Christakis & Fowler, published in The Leadership Quarterly (2013), found a similar estimate of approximately 24% (95% CI: 6–46%). The remaining 68–76% of variance is attributable to environment, experience, education, and opportunity. A more recent three-wave longitudinal study of Danish twin pairs (Florczak et al., The Leadership Quarterly, 2024) found that genetic influences on leadership strengthen over a career as labour market sorting occurs — the disposition matters more once people have had the chance to act on it, not as a fixed fate from birth.

The misleading shorthand is that we notice the heritable third and miss the developed two-thirds. A first-time manager who is told "you're either a natural or you aren't" often stops trying to actually develop the skill — they assume the work of leadership is performance art, not craft. It isn't. The specific habits — running a useful one-on-one, giving feedback that actually changes behaviour, making a decision and committing to it publicly, recovering from a mistake without losing the room — are all teachable and improvable. They have a learnable mechanics regardless of starting point.

What actually works: Treat leadership the way you'd treat any other professional skill. Find feedback loops. Get a coach or a mentor a level or two above you. Read deliberately — the 9 best leadership books worth reading is a solid starting point. Watch leaders you respect and reverse-engineer what they're doing in specific moments. The skill compounds when worked at.

Myth 2: A great leader always has the answer

This one is older than modern management literature — it survived from the era when "leader" largely meant "general," and the cost of admitting uncertainty in front of a battalion was real. In a modern knowledge organisation it's nearly the opposite of true. Leaders who fake certainty about things they don't understand burn credibility quickly, and the ones who can hold genuine uncertainty without panicking earn outsized trust over time.

The reason this myth dies hard is that there's a real adjacent truth: leaders do need to make decisions under uncertainty. The bad inference is "therefore the leader must look certain about the decision." The better inference is "the leader has to commit to the decision once made, while being honest about the uncertainty that surrounded it." Those are different behaviours with very different effects on how teams operate. Teams that see their leader model calibrated uncertainty — "I'm 65% on this call, but we have to move" — learn to make better decisions themselves. Teams that watch their leader perform certainty learn to perform certainty rather than think carefully.

Annie Duke's framing in Thinking in Bets is the cleanest practitioner version of this — separating the quality of the decision from the quality of the outcome, and being willing to articulate probability estimates rather than binary confident/uncertain positions.

What actually works: Build the language of probability into how you talk about decisions. "I'd put this at 70% likely to work" is more useful — and more honest — than "I think this will work." Teams calibrate to the leader's framing; if you model probabilistic thinking, they will too.

Myth 3: Leadership and management are entirely different things

This split — usually framed as "managers do things right, leaders do the right things," a phrase most attributed to Warren Bennis — is repeated so often that it sounds settled. The underlying analytical distinction (leadership is about change, management is about coping with complexity, per John Kotter's Harvard Business Review work from 1990) is genuinely useful as a lens. The problem is what happens when organisations use it as a job description.

In any organisation past the very early stage, the same person almost always has to do both, and pretending they're separable encourages two distinct dysfunctions: "leaders" who refuse to engage with the operational mechanics of how their decisions land — effectively just pundits — and "managers" who treat themselves as pure executors of someone else's vision, who never question whether the direction is right. Both are recognisable failure modes. Both produce real damage.

A more accurate framing is that management includes the act of setting direction — they're not cleanly separable. There's no clean line between deciding what your team should do and ensuring they have the systems to do it. The "leader" who hands a strategy over the wall and doesn't engage with execution is just an unhelpful executive; the "manager" who only optimises an existing process without questioning whether the process should exist is just an expensive supervisor.

What actually works: Stop ranking the two activities as though one is more senior than the other. Recognise that the same person — you — will spend some weeks setting direction, some weeks running operational mechanics, and most weeks doing both simultaneously. The skill is knowing which mode the situation requires and being able to switch, not picking a preferred mode and staying there.

Myth 4: Charisma is the through-line of great leadership

This is the one that has aged worst. The charismatic-leader model — heroic figure, magnetic vision, force of personality — was canonical for most of the 20th century and is still over-represented in business journalism because charismatic founders make better stories than quiet, reliable operators. The research has steadily downgraded charisma's role.

The critical finding: charisma is a learnable set of behaviours, not an innate personality trait. Antonakis, Fenley & Liechti, writing in the Academy of Management Learning & Education (2011), ran randomised field and laboratory experiments training middle managers and MBA students in twelve specific Charismatic Leadership Tactics (CLTs) — including metaphor use, three-part lists, rhetorical questions, expressions of moral conviction, and animated nonverbal delivery. Trained participants received leadership effectiveness ratings approximately 60% higher than untrained controls. If charisma were an innate gift, training for it wouldn't work at that magnitude. The fact that it does work suggests it's a learnable communication discipline, not a personality destiny.

Jim Collins's "Level 5 Leadership" work — the personal humility plus fierce professional resolve combination — was an early empirical indicator that the most durably successful leaders were less charismatic than popular assumptions. The pattern has held: recent analyses of CEO performance and tenure consistently find that learn-it-all operators outperform charismatic visionaries over five-plus-year horizons, even when the charismatic ones get the early press coverage.

The harder truth — which most leadership content avoids because it doesn't sell — is that the boring stuff (sustained attention to people, careful follow-through, willingness to look uncertain while learning, consistency across years) predicts long-run leadership effectiveness better than the photogenic stuff (vision speeches, conference keynotes, media profiles).

What actually works: Don't try to perform charisma — try to become more reliable, more honest, and more focused. The leaders people actually want to follow over the long run are the ones who do what they said they'd do, week after week, while staying calm when things go sideways. The communication tactics that charisma training teaches are worth learning as tools; they're worth very little if the underlying reliability and honesty aren't there.

Where this leaves you

If any of these four myths shaped your early picture of what leadership looks like — most of us absorbed at least one — the practical move is to deliberately replace it with a version that's more accurate. Notice when you're trying to look certain instead of being calibrated. Notice when you're outsourcing operational mechanics because you've decided you're a "leader" not a "manager." Notice when you're trying to perform charisma instead of building the quieter reliability that earns sustained trust.

The leaders who get sustainably better, in our reading, all share one habit: they treat their own leadership skill as something they're actively developing, not something they have or don't. For a longer reading list on that, see the 10 must-read books for entrepreneurs and the 38 motivational quotes on leadership we've collected.