"Are leaders born or made" is one of the oldest debates in the leadership literature, and most of the popular answers to it are either rhetorical posturing (great leaders are made through their choices!) or under-researched assertion (charisma is genetic!). The actual research, accumulated over four decades of twin studies and behavioural genetics work, lands somewhere more interesting and more useful than either position — and the "totally new" framing in the original article title turns out to point at a real finding, though not quite the one the framing suggests.
The short version: roughly 30% of the variance in whether someone ends up in a leadership role is heritable, and the remaining 70% is environmental — experience, education, opportunity, deliberate practice, and the situational factors that put one person in a leadership position rather than another. That's the headline number from the largest twin study on the question. The more interesting findings, though, are about what specifically is heritable and what isn't, and how to think about that for your own development.
This article goes through the research, what it actually says, and what a working leader (or aspiring one) can reasonably do with it. The conclusion isn't quite "born" and isn't quite "made" — and the genuine new wrinkle is about a specific genetic marker and what it does and doesn't mean for your career.
1. What the twin studies actually show
The methodology: compare identical twins (100% shared DNA) with fraternal twins (50% shared DNA). If identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins on a given trait, the difference is attributable to genetic factors. The technique has been refined over decades and applied to almost every personality and behavioural trait researchers have measured.
For "leadership role occupancy" — defined as whether someone holds a supervisory or managerial position over the course of their career — the heritability estimate from the largest study (Arvey, Zhang, Avolio and Krueger, examining over 200 pairs of twins) is approximately 30%. That number has been replicated across multiple follow-up studies. The remaining 70% of the variance is environmental.
One important nuance: 30% is the genetic contribution to whether someone leads. It's not a measure of whether they lead well. Those are different questions, and the second has received less rigorous research.
2. The heritability of specific leadership styles is higher
The 30% number is for leadership role occupancy. When researchers examined specific leadership styles, the numbers shifted upward. Transformational leadership — the inspiring, vision-articulating style associated with figures like Mandela or Jobs — showed heritability of around 59%. Transactional leadership — the more managerial, reward-and-monitoring style — showed heritability of around 48%.
The interpretation: while the basic question of "do you end up leading" is more environmentally driven, the question of "how you lead when you do" has a stronger inherited component. The genetic contribution isn't to leadership-as-such; it's to the personality traits (extraversion, openness, emotional stability, agreeableness) that shape the style of leadership a person tends toward.
3. The specific genetic marker that does something measurable
The most surprising finding in the recent research — and the one that probably warranted the "totally new" framing in the original article — is that researchers have identified a specific single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), called rs4950, located on the CHRNB3 gene (a neuronal acetylcholine receptor gene), that is statistically associated with the likelihood of occupying supervisory positions over a career.
The effect size is modest. People with one variant of rs4950 are statistically more likely to end up in supervisory roles than people with the other variant, but the difference is meaningful only at population scale, not at individual scale. Having the "leadership variant" doesn't make you a leader; not having it doesn't disqualify you. It just shifts the base rate slightly. For an individual considering their own career trajectory, the SNP is essentially irrelevant; for a researcher studying populations, it's a real and reproducible finding.
4. What the 70% environmental component actually contains
The headline number — 70% environmental — gets quoted as if it means "anyone can learn to lead". That's an oversimplification. The environmental contribution to leadership role occupancy includes a lot of things that aren't easily changeable: socioeconomic background, parental modelling, educational opportunity, formative early-career experiences, the country and era you were born in, the industries available to you. Some of the environmental variance is "deliberate development you can do as an adult" and some is "luck of the draw that you can't retroactively change".
The portion that's actually responsive to adult intentional effort is probably 30-40% of the total variance — significant, but not unlimited. The frame "you can become a great leader if you just decide to" is closer to fiction than to research. The frame "your inherited tendencies set a starting point and your choices and circumstances determine how far from that starting point you end up" is closer to the actual finding.
5. The traits that are most heritable (and least changeable)
The personality literature has been more thorough than the leadership literature on what's inherited. The Big Five personality traits — openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism — show heritability estimates in the 40-60% range. These traits are stable across adulthood for most people, although they do shift slightly with major life events and deliberate intervention.
The leadership-relevant traits in this set are extraversion (correlated with leadership emergence in groups), conscientiousness (correlated with leadership effectiveness in stable environments), and emotional stability (correlated with leadership effectiveness in high-stress situations). If your inherited starting point on these is low, that doesn't preclude leadership — it just means the specific style of leadership that fits you may not be the extroverted, charismatic version that the listicles celebrate.
6. The traits that are most developable (and most leverageable)
The good news from the research: the skills that matter most for actual leadership effectiveness — clear communication, decision quality under uncertainty, ability to give honest feedback, ability to delegate, self-awareness about your own patterns — are mostly learned. They have weaker heritability components and respond strongly to deliberate practice, coaching and structured feedback.
This is why the executive-coaching industry exists and why it produces measurable results despite working with adults whose personalities are largely set. The technique-level leadership skills are the leverage point; the personality-trait substrate is the starting condition.
7. The "great person" theory hasn't survived contact with the data
For about a hundred years, the dominant theory of leadership was that leaders were a specific type of person — born with the right traits, recognisable across contexts, fundamentally different from non-leaders. The research has not been kind to this theory. The same person who is a great leader in one context (a wartime general) may be unable to function as a leader in another (a peacetime startup CEO). The same personality traits that produce a successful founder in the seed stage may actively undermine effectiveness at Series C.
The contemporary view is what researchers call the "contingency" model: leadership effectiveness is the product of person-situation fit, not pure trait. The implications for the "born or made" debate are significant. It means the question is partly malformed — "born to be a leader" isn't a coherent claim across contexts. You're born with certain dispositions that make you well-suited to leadership in certain situations and poorly suited in others.
8. What this means for your own development
The practical takeaway from the research isn't "anyone can lead anything" and isn't "leadership is genetic". It's three things, in order of leverage. First: figure out the type of situation you're well-suited to lead in — your inherited dispositions plus your accumulated experience point at certain contexts more than others. Second: invest in the technique-level skills (communication, decision-making, feedback) that are most developable. Third: stop wasting energy on the parts of the leadership stereotype that don't fit you. The introvert trying to perform extroverted charisma will lose to the introvert who builds a quiet, deliberate, written-communication-heavy leadership style that actually fits them.
9. The genuinely new wrinkle
The thing that's actually new in the last decade of research — and what makes the original article's title not entirely misleading — is the granularity. The research has moved from broad "is leadership inherited" questions to specific, mechanism-level findings about which personality components have which heritability, which neural systems are involved (the rs4950 / CHRNB3 finding), and how the environmental contribution distributes across childhood, education, early career and deliberate development.
The headline answer is still roughly "30% born, 70% made" — but the texture underneath is richer, and the texture is what's useful for thinking about your own development trajectory. The old "born vs made" binary was always too crude to be useful. The contemporary version — "your starting point is partially inherited, your trajectory is mostly chosen, and the specific situation you're in matters as much as both" — actually maps to how leadership development works in practice.
The honest conclusion
If you're someone who has assumed you "aren't a natural leader" and have used that as a reason not to develop the technique-level skills, the research is fairly clear: that assumption is leaving 70% of the variance on the table. The technique-level skills are learnable and have outsized impact on effectiveness regardless of starting personality.
If you're someone who has assumed you "are a natural leader" because you've been told it your whole life, the research is also clear: the natural disposition is necessary but not sufficient. The technique-level skills still matter, and the situations you're well-suited to are specific. The leader who coasts on inherited charisma without developing the operating disciplines tops out earlier than the technique-developed leader who didn't have the initial advantage.
For the foundational reading on the developable side of leadership, the best leadership books roundup is the canonical stack. The 38 motivational quotes on leadership distils much of the same wisdom into shorter form. For the personality-side reading on what's actually inherited versus developable, self-help books recommended by top psychologists covers the psychological-development ground. Full archive at the entrepreneurship topic page.
Comments (0)